Word: sellers
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Touch (by Charles Raddock & Charles Sherman; produced by John Morris Chanin) is the new season's first-and may well be its worst-play. It is a farce about a young couple struggling to get by on $28.50 a week, and a plunging publisher who sniffs a best-seller in their story. Hitting a hundred wrong notes, all fortissimo, The Magic Touch is just about as nitwitted as it is nerve-racking...
...three singers who had just taken their bows had to carry part of the Hansel and Gretel scenery offstage with them when the curtain went down. A carrot-haired electrician in costume flipped a few switches, then hurried onstage again. The ticket-seller looked like-and was-the girl who had sung Zerlina in Don Giovanni. It was homemade "Lemonade Opera," and though the singing and acting were occasionally weak and sugary, Manhattan was gulping it down...
...picked up a beauty-supply business for $5,000. In 1941, when cold waves began to attract attention in beauty shops, Harris began wholesaling them. Two years later, some of his pioneering competitors began experimenting with home-wave kits. The first one, which sold for 59?, was a big seller, but it nearly ruined the market because it was unsatisfactory. Harris kept trying, finally came up with Toni...
...novels with a great deal in common perched last week at the top of the best-seller list: Laura Z. Hobson's Gentleman's Agreement and Sinclair Lewis' Kingsblood Royal. Both were earnest, pamphleteering tracts on the U.S. race problem. As novels, they were not very good. Below them, the fictional bestseller list was studded with historical novels of a type which has become so standardized that even their book jackets look alike: an open-bosomed beauty in the foreground, a frigate in the distance...
...other question provoked such strong feeling among the authors. Dos Passos declared he wanted no part of Hollywood, bluntly accused it of "trashifying literature." Along with Hollywood he lumped "the best-seller system and the book clubs which tend to standardize reading tastes on a mediocre level. Writers go to Hollywood thinking they can improve the medium. They can't. The medium destroys them. The compromise always works to their detriment. This is particularly bad for talented young writers who can't resist Hollywood gold at a time when they would normally be struggling along on a shoestring...