Word: scripting
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Burt Shevelove and Larry Gelbart called their script "a scenario for vaudevillians." Zaks' triumph is to pay homage to the days of Yiddish slapstick while using actors too young to have played the Catskills. Luckily, he has Nathan Lane as Pseudolus, the role created by Zero Mostel. Though only 40 and only Irish, Lane is the mystic repository of the ancients' physical gag bag. A double take is concrete poetry when he does it, and a pratfall a plie. He also elevates some of his more plebeian colleagues. Mark Linn-Baker, no natural farceur, is at first uneasy...
...read it and so can only admire it, more or less ignorantly, as abstract brush drawing. And yet its range of expressive power comes through marvelously in this show. At one extreme we see the almost chiseled formality of the 12th century Emperor Hui Tsung's script, with its flicking exactness of stroke; at the other, the blithely spontaneous notation of the 8th century Zen Buddhist monk Huai-su, who liked to work when drunk on rice wine. And somewhere in between is the long-arm forehand and backhand of the 16th century scholar-artist Chu Yun-ming, whose fierce...
...this year. Producers of the shows and network officials insist that these trips were not related to the merger or to one another, pointing out that such on-location episodes usually do well in the ratings. Of course, they're not bad for company image either (Disney World has script approval of all programs shot there; among the verboten scenes are any that reveal human beings inside those Mickey and Goofy costumes...
...movie mixes grunge and glitter in the way of a Steven Bochco TV show, which is understandable, since director Gregory Hoblit has won a bunch of Emmys for his work on Hill Street Blues and L.A. Law. The script, by Steve Shagan and Ann Biderman, also partakes of Bochco's strengths and limitations--good dialogue, firmly etched secondary characters (nicely played by John Mahoney and Frances McDormand, among others) but not much suspense. The only potentially scary guy--Edward Norton's weirdo defendant--is safely behind bars most of the time. Diverting without being fully absorbing, this is a film...
There is delicacy and restraint in all these performances as they ease a far-fetched premise toward believability under Richard Pearce's clear, cool direction. The script by Billy Bob Thornton and Tom Epperson is obviously a fairy-tale, but the unsentimental realism of its telling, combined with our profound need to believe in it just now, turns A Family Thing into a curiously affecting little movie...