Word: formula
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...would be very difficult to say in what respect an American musical play is better than a musical play which is not American. Also it would be useless; Mr. Cohan and the formula have made each other famous and it will require more than death to part them. It is true that the indigenous qualities of Billie happen often to be its most appealing ones; there is a scene in which two idiotic rogues confer together, making monkeys of themselves and many others. Songs and dances are in Billie also; of the former not the least engaging is one which...
...necessary to recognize in the [Kellogg] pact lack of any obligations for disarmament, which are the only genuine guarantee of peace; the insufficiency and indefiniteness of the formula itself for the prohibition of war; and the existence of several reservations having the object to suspend in advance even appearance of obligations toward the cause of peace...
...details of producing plays with a strange, irritable, creative fervor, so that you might think he had written them. Because he has picked four enormous hits out of the mass of plays that go the rounds of the producers' offices, people sometimes ask him for a formula, a hint of how to know. Jed Harris, like every truly successful producer, has no system. Three of his four most famed productions are full of fast action, two are full of profanity, which proves nothing, except that he knows that people like such things in plays...
...dilettante, Carroll knows a beautiful female body when he sees one, knows, too, how not to drape it, is well aware that W. C. Fields is a good box-office name, that Joe Frisco, Ray Dooley, Gordon Dooley, Dorothy Knapp, in one theatre, insure against empty seats. The Carroll formula is simple, the execution elaborate: sign stars, hire lovely female bodies to undulate across stage, buy a few "hot" sketches. Music is nonessential (there is but one worthy song, "Vaniteaser," in the show...
...Patron Saint of England, St. Andrew of Scotland and everyone knows about St. Patrick. When a flag for the United Kingdom was desired the three crosses peculiar to the three saints were ingeniously superimposed, forming the famed British "Union Jack." Last week this same tried and tested formula of superimposition was carried to its ultimate conclusion with the unfurling of a new flag for that British Dominion called the Union of South Africa...