Word: hack
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Dates: during 1950-1950
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...should be permissible to cut those great works down to the purely melodic passages") and expertly inflated popular selections. Working on the brisk premise that the lengthy development of themes found in the classics "is intended for musicians and confuses a lot of other people," Kostelanetz was able to hack Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet Overture from its usual running time of 16 minutes to less than five...
Giovanni Antonio Bazzi (1477-1549) has been called both a great artist and a hack imitator. Pope Leo X made him a Cavalier of the Order of Christ; Art Historian Vasari, also a contemporary, described him simply as "a beast." He was also known as "The Sodomite," which pleased him; Bazzi signed his letters "Il Sodoma"-the name he is known by today...
...young hack scripter (William Holden), broke, desperate, and pursued by his creditors, ducks his car up a Sunset Boulevard driveway and blunders into an eerie survival of an extinct world. In the moldering, overgrown grounds he finds a mausoleum-like Hollywood mansion, circa 1921, intact to the last monstrous detail. It is inhabited by two living relics: Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson), a great star of the silent movies, still wealthy, with an arrogant grandeur once rooted in fame and now propped by delusion; Max von Mayerling (Erich von Stroheim), once a great director (which Von Stroheim was), now her devoted...
...find nothing but a dull collection of odes and occasional pieces. Browning did discover, however, that poor Poet Smart had been confined in an asylum just before A Song to David was first published - which prompted Browning to the romantic conclusion that Smart had been no better than a hack while, he had his wits; that when he lost them his dormant genius had burst into bloom...
That cruel prophecy soon came true. Smart found a job with a bookseller who waxed rich on the profits he made from concoctions such as "Dr. Hooper's Female Pills." Smart became his hack, churning out for him a flow of trite but salable verse and prose. Then Smart's high-strung system collapsed. He took to interpreting literally Christ's "injunction to pray without ceasing"-and pray Smart did, whenever he was moved to do so, whether in public places or in the small hours of the morning, summoning those near him to do likewise...