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There are several explanations for France's movie mania. The simplest is the deplorable state of French television, which is vastly inferior to that in neighboring countries. "People are fleeing their homes in search of entertainment," says Daniel Toscan du Plantier, president of Gaumont, the country's biggest film conglomerate. "Everyone knows that our television is the most boring in the world. The Socialist government has programmed intellectual talk shows for Saturday night at 8:30. Even Socialist countries in Eastern Europe wouldn't dream of doing that. There would be riots in the streets...
That is something that the Paris moguls would like to change, and they believe that they have found the way to do it "With cable TV, there's a whole new and very large American market out there for French films," says Toscan du Plantier. "The cable audience wants movies that are made for legitimate theater release and that are made with a quality that can't be found in the usual made-for-TV product. The cable networks need 1,000 movies a year. U.S. studios don't have the talent to satisfy such a vast...
...stimulate a mass taste for the Gallic product, Toscan du Plantier's company is planning a February release of one of its biggest hits, La Boum, which can be compared to the Gidget movies that appealed to American teen-agers in the '60s. Similar films will follow, all dubbed into English, and by the end of 1983, there will be, inevitably, something called La Boum II. By 1984, presumably, Toscan du Plantier will know whether he has a La Boum III or Le Bust...
Martins fondly recalls the mornings when Balanchine arrived at the theater at 8 a.m. to help him with the fine points of lighting. But Mr. B. was not always so accommodating. A scant three hours before the premiere of Martins' setting of Stravinsky's Suite from Histoire du Soldat, Balanchine examined the costumes, pronounced them "awful" and threw them out. The dancers went on clothed in bits and pieces from the costume bins and shod in boots that Martins himself had spray-painted black an hour earlier. "He was right," Martins now says. "The costumes I had picked...
...earnestness, Walter Cronkite used to plead that his half-hour script would not fill three-quarters of a single newspaper page and that distortion was "the inevitable result of trying to get ten pounds of news into the one-pound sack we are given each night." Speaking at a du Pont Awards ceremony at Columbia University in February, NBC's Tom Brokaw said that unfortunately many Americans "have come to rely on us as their primary and only source of information" and "we are inadequate to that task." It just may be the anchormen should relax a little...