Word: raconteur
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Baker -- no Cooper, but a classic Yank with a long, friendly, shovel-shaped face -- begins his new assignment on Sunday with Selected Exits, a biographical tribute to Welsh author and raconteur Gwyn Thomas, starring Anthony Hopkins. Already Baker has found that the job is like sailing a ship in a very small bottle. "Most of the time you have two or 2 1/2 minutes," he says. "That's one page, double-spaced. My columns are three pages. On TV, that would be like being Hubert Humphrey -- Will this guy ever shut...
Uncle Buddy, a lively (and off-color) raconteur, regaled the young Clinton with tales of hunting dogs, life's ironies and the maxims people should live * by. Asked about his own family tragedies, he told his nephew, "Yes, life's tough, but I signed on for the whole trip." To this day Clinton calls his Uncle Buddy "the wisest man I ever met." (Clinton talks Southern hyperbole, which raises a language barrier for some Northerners.) He describes his uncle and his mother in the same terms: they have weathered many trials with unfailing equilibrium and good humor. There...
...scenes from the novel to elements of the writer's life: his accidental shooting of his wife Joan; his friendships with Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Paul and Jane Bowles; his own sepulchral charisma. With his cracked voice and deadpan insolence, Burroughs was the Beat Generation's W.C. Fields -- a raconteur of depravity, a cracker-barrel coroner. Weller gets the haunted look right, but he can't get inside the junkie's pocked skin. Burroughs lived and nearly died there; Cronenberg and the actors are only visiting. The movie is way too colorful -- cute, in a repulsive way, with its crawly...
Hughes similarly brings out the ironies of the script, often without speaking. With active eyebrows and lips pursed to suppress laughter, he successfully reminds the audience of the world outside Tilghman County. His character's growth from introvert to boisterous raconteur is believable in spite of its rapidity...
...sudden death of raunchy raconteur Redd Foxx during a rehearsal for his new TV series, The Royal Family, deprived America of one of its most popular comedians -- and may have cheated CBS of a hit. Foxx's much-anticipated return to TV, opposite co-star Della Reese, was producing respectable ratings for the network in a long-lagging Wednesday-night time slot. CBS has only three more episodes featuring Foxx. While replacing him will be difficult, since the show was tailor-made for Foxx, the network hopes to keep the series alive. One possibility: a new male lead, perhaps...