Word: spiels
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...Radley grown old and gone wrong; and, more important, E.F. ("Sonny") Dewey. E.F. is the Texas preacher in The Apostle, a complex, cantankerous drama that Duvall wrote, directed, stars in and--after all the studios turned down the $5 million project--paid for. This renegade Pentecostalist has the spiel and showmanship to fill a tent or a temple; when E.F. talks, people listen. "I'm a genu-wine, Holy Ghost, Jesus-filled preachin' machine this mornin'!" He can woo a dying man to the Lord, but he can't heed his own gospel. He menaces his frazzled wife (Farrah Fawcett...
...auteur kudos would give giggle fits to veteran sleazemasters, who saw films as just part of the con of peddling the promise of smut to suckers. If there was an art to grindhouse movies, it was the art of the spiel. As ace exploitation entrepreneur David F. Friedman (She Freak, Trader Hornee) boasts in Eddie Muller and Daniel Faris' breezy, authoritative, gaudily illustrated Grindhouse: The Forbidden World of "Adults Only" Cinema (St. Martin's Griffin; 160 pages; $19.95), "I've got a high school education in making movies but a Ph.D. in selling them...
...newer versions of the Falcon. Industry executives and Perry aides began publicly plugging the idea of lifting the restrictions: the countries of Latin America save for Cuba were now democratic, their economies were rebounding, and the jets their air forces flew in many cases were 1950s vintage, went the spiel. "We treat the Latins like children when we say they can't have new planes," says Joel Johnson, the Aerospace Industries Association's international vice president, implying that to have fully adult relations with other countries requires supplying them with sophisticated armaments...
...retrospect, his spiel was a load of sugar-coated manure, but it sure tasted sweet. I nibbled, and he played me like the tuna...
After getting the spiel from the various boards (and a slide show from the business board that looked like something George Lucas had a hand in), I talked with the sports editors at the time, John Trainer and Tarek Farouki...