Word: quinn
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...anything but terrific. She stumbled over words in news reports, tossed off weak and embarrassing ad libs, and did lackluster interviews. At her best she seemed bored; at her worst, confused and even desperate. After one of the biggest promotional campaigns in television history, Quinn's TV career lasted barely twelve weeks, a fiasco that no doubt still troubles the sleep of CBS executives. Especially since Quinn has just written a book recounting her experience...
...Going to Make You a Star is a witty, rapid-fire narrative of how Quinn became, in her words, "the laughing-stock of television." Long on punch lines and short on analysis, the book is little more than a loosely arranged collection of anecdotes, most of them amusing and some of them startling in their implications about the incompetence of CBS management. It lapses occasionally into self-pity, and more often into triviality (like her straight-faced remark that "I have never been happy in a place where I didn't like the smell"). But Quinn generally keeps a perspective...
...Quinn describes in her book how CBS sent her on a nationwide promotional tour, bringing her back to prepare her for the show only a week before it went on the air. The coaching was wholly inadequate. By that time. New York Magazine had published its cover story on Quinn, which in her words described her as a "tough, mean, bitchy woman, who had no women friends, who had slept her way to the top to get the interviews and jobs, who had used her father's position to wield power, who considered herself a sex symbol and played...
...Quinn now says she had resigned herself to the show being a disaster at least a week before it began. "Knowing that we didn't have a show, that nobody knew what they were doing, that the producer had never produced, that Gordon wasn't going to do anything, that I didn't know what I was doing--I gave up. Before I ever went on. I came so close to calling up about two nights beforehand and just saying, 'Forget...
...Quinn's book provoked a predictable flurry of criticism, most of it conceding CBS's mistakes but wondering at Quinn's failure to much to help herself. Time Magazine, for example, commenting on Quinn's contention that no one told her about the red light on the camera that indicates it is aimed at the performer and running, asked why she hadn't asked anyone what the light was for. Quinn laughs in disbelief, shaking her head. "If you don't know there's a red light there, how can you ask somebody about the red light? There are hundreds...