Word: budd
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Four years ago, the BBC found it no easy job getting Benjamin Britten to accept a commission for a TV opera. He was still unhappy about the 1952 NBC Opera production of his Billy Budd, and remained skeptical about the compatibility of TV and opera. But accept Britten did, and began looking for a story that would show individuals reacting to each other and events of a "personal, private kind, rather than big and public, which a big stage obviously needs...
...here we get, in all the bloody detail, much of the exciting poop about the years when Fitzgerald was a struggling and forgotten artist: his fight with Hollywood director-writer-producer Joe Mankiewicz, his failed screen test, his drunken weekend with the young Budd Schulberg at Dartmouth while working on a picture called Winter Carnical . The hard-core gossip is laced with memory portraits provided by such Fitzgerald comrades as screenwriters Nunnally Johnson, Frances and Albert Hackett, and Anita Loos, and friends like actress Helen Hayes and director George Cukor...
Herman Melville is best known for his fiction and mostly for two works, Billy Budd and Moby Dick. He was one of those artists who never find popular approval during their lifetime, and he died relatively anonymous. (The New York Time, in its short obituary, called him Henry Melville.) Like Hardy, he turned to poetry seriously after he had produced a sizeable amount of fiction, and alternated between the two for the rest of his life. His poetry bears the stamp of the novelist-his vocabulary is heavy, almost unreadable, slowed down by a nearly Vergilian concentration...
...deep an affection, obscuring his ability to see its limitations. But the introductory essay, which is actually a book in itself, is a remarkably complete analysis of Melville, both as a person and as a poet. Warren explains, for instance, the factual details which inspired the creation of Billy Budd, and goes deeply into Melville's personal life, and his character. Unfortunately, when he is criticizing Melville's poetry, he tends to become bogged down, and also to lose his critical perspective...
...Mules for Sister Sara. A Don Siegel piece (with a screenplay by Albert Maltz from a story by Budd Boetticher) about a would-be nun (Shirley MacLaine) and a would-be pragmatist (Clint Eastwood) in a warring Mexico...