Word: scripted
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Boston and Washington, but Director Gower Champion was still dissatisfied with the show and detoured his company to Cincinnati for repairs. Variety's reviewer found the musical "transparent" and "flimsy," decided that it was more a concert performance than a show. So far, 30 pages of script have been doctored, four songs have been added and two dumped, but listeners have yet to spot a genuine hit tune. What they have surely spotted, though, are some sorry lyrics: "There's a strange new world that you enter when you say 'I do, I do' Such...
...Doctored Script. But, as Merrick says, "Disaster always lurks around the corner in this business." And right off, disaster struck. Cass closed after 20 performances and lost $75,000. Castle crumbled after nine performances and dropped $80,000. Don't Drink almost drowned during out-of-town tryouts, required a change of directors and numerous cast switches. A fortnight late, it opened last week in Manhattan to reviews that were less than rhapsodic (see THEATER...
...that's a catchy opening scene for a thriller. Unfortunately, Penelope is not a thriller. The studio releases hopefully describe it as a comedy, and in a picture of this quality the point is hardly worth arguing. The script, based on Howard Fast's pseudonymous potboiler about a light-fingered socialite, soon degenerates into a droll call of ancient wheezes that add up to a 97-minute heh. The actors (Natalie Wood, Dick Shawn, Ian Bannen, Peter Falk, Lila Kedrova) try hard to laugh it up, but most of the time they look the way the audience feels...
...film before (The Petrified Forest, He Ran All the Way, Desperate Hours), but Polanski tells it in a manner cannily calculated to propagate tension. Tension is set up between Romanesque stones that soothe the eye and electronic jazz that grates the ear. Tension is set up in the script, which systematically intersperses-interfuses episodes of horror and hilarity. Tension is set up by the camera, which in frame after frame lets the danger lurk just out of sight until the onlooker feels like a man cooped up with a cobra he cannot...
...22nd picture, at any rate, he plays what the script describes as "the perfect American male": a hot-rock singer who, as somebody remarks with a suggestive smirk, "does things." About all he does on the screen is waggle an aggressive guitar and, in an electronically reconstituted baritone, belt out a series of steamy lyrics ("I'll take the dish I please/ And please the dish I take...