Word: darkness
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...with Director Bob Mulligan, two other scriptwriters had fumbled the job. After 48 hours packed with pencil work, pep pills and black coffee, Pogostin and Mulligan had built a play that pleased both Olivier and Producer David Susskind. In the process, they lost some of the novel's dark energy; they never adequately explained how a respectable British stockbroker named Charles Strickland (modeled on famed Painter Paul Gauguin) could abandon wife and family for a new career as an artist-or why, after he seduced Blanche Stroeve (Jessica Tandy), wife of his best friend (Hume Cronyn), Blanche later turned...
...considering the fantastic difficulty of getting them at all. To laymen, the moon's far side, long populated by storytellers with strange beasts and weird civilizations, looks disappointingly like its visible side. But astronomers find it surprisingly different. They point to the comparative lack of the big, roundish, dark "seas" that are so common on its known face. The area newly pictured shows only one really big sea, which the Russians named the Sea of Dreams. A smaller sea they named the Sea of Moscow, and to several craters they gave the names of Communist or Russian scientist heroes...
...craters pit their surfaces. Astronomer Gerard Kuiper of the University of Chicago thinks that the seas were made by the impact of asteroids up to 90 miles in diameter, which blasted great holes in the crust at a time when the moon's interior was hot and plastic. Dark lava welled up in the holes, and is visible there today. Kuiper thinks that the shock of the last big asteroid, which dug the sea called Mare Imbrium (Sea of Rains), may have caused pressures inside the moon that made lava flow out in other places, forming other seas...
...television reporter-critics have precious little influence. The quiz shows themselves are a case in point. For years, the nation's TV critics flayed the quiz programs as phony, valueless, and taste-degrading entertainment ("Immoral!" cried Jack Gould of the New York Times). But aside from an occasional dark hint, the television newsmen notably failed to expose the rash of fixing that had been taking place under their uplifted noses. They were thus left with the meager consolation that their abstract judgment had been correct-even though nobody seemed to be listening when they tendered...
...Then Menelaus, whose wife Helen set off the strife by running away with Paris, grudgingly accepts the challenge-but quickly lets himself be talked out of it. When at last Ajax is chosen by lot, he and Hector spar for a minute and then agree it is really too dark to fight...