Word: howard
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...part of the legendary "Monday Night Football" team brought a smile to my face. Don Ohlmeyer, who revolutionized televised sports with MNF in the 1970s, was looking for a new personality, someone who would make the broadcasts interesting and hopefully controversial. In other words, he was looking for another Howard Cosell. Cosell, the biggest catch of Ohlmeyer's life, was so polarizing that "people would buy television sets just to throw bricks at him when he came on screen...
...last hours of Pop.com were laced with irony worthy of a movie by Steven Spielberg and Ron Howard--who, as it happens, were co-founders of the ill-fated website. Every Friday afternoon for the past few months, Pop's 85 employees had gathered in their Glendale, Calif., warehouse to sip beers and slap backs for the films they already had in the can: shorts starring Rene Russo, Steve Martin, Claudia Schiffer. Last Friday, just two weeks before the planned launch, they were chugging beers to drown their sorrows and being eyed by security guards to make sure they didn...
Conspicuously absent from the bitter end were Pop's architects: Spielberg, Howard, DreamWorks pals Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen and Howard's partner Brian Grazer. Pulling the plug and skipping the farewell party were among the few things in Pop's short and troubled history that found all five in agreement. "Thank God I've got another occupation," says Grazer. "I love going from foxhole to foxhole in movies and television, but the Internet space is Vietnam...
...anyone was going to be the Richard Hatch of this cyber-movie island, you'd expect it to be the DreamWorks-Howard ticket. But Pop fizzled as if it didn't have the will to live: the site issued only three press releases in its brief life and delayed the launch so often it became an industry joke. Out of the $50 million purse promised them by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, it spent a paltry $7 million--barely a long liquid lunch by Silicon Valley standards...
Spielberg, it seems, gave up much earlier than Howard. Even his suggestions were halfhearted: one was an animated short called From Hair to Eternity about a man who seeks an unblocked view of a movie (Jurassic Park it ain't); the other was to place a webcam on the set of his film A.I. and broadcast live images of the crew on lunch breaks. None of the principals could decide on Pop's overall style, or even which ideas to pursue, "We'd go through the slate of projects and Steven would like this, Ron would like this, Jeffrey liked...