David Luhrssen
I Hate Hollywood
With his mellifluous, instantly recognizable voice, Garrison Keillor has become the avatar of everyday America through his popular program, “A Prairie Home Companion.” Always wanting to be a writer, Keillor entered the profession through the side door o
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David Luhrssen
I Hate Hollywood
Blame it on Ian Flemming, who led the world to believe that spying, especially for British intelligence, was glamorous business. After all, James Bond wore sharp clothes, drove flash cars and drank in the swankiest lounges on earth. The British televisi
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David Luhrssen
I Hate Hollywood
Forty years ago this July the world was focused on one thing: the first footsteps of humans on another world. On July 16, 1969, the Apollo 11 lifted off from Cape Kennedy for a mission to the moon. Anyone conscious at the time will never forget those an
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David Luhrssen
I Hate Hollywood
For most Americans, the drumbeat of bad financial news that began in spring 2008 and rose to a crescendo a month before the fall election was largely incomprehensible—a catastrophe conducted in Etruscan or some other unknown language. And then, out of t
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David Luhrssen
I Hate Hollywood
Everyone remembers Lucille Ball from her 1950s TV show, I Love Lucy, but her career began years earlier in movies and continued on television for two more decades. A pair of her 1970s TV specials, Lucy Gets Lucky and Thre
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David Luhrssen
I Hate Hollywood
From the outside it doesn’t look like much. Number 10 Downing Street isn’t Buckingham Palace, or the Winter Palace, or the White House, but a modest-looking townhouse on a street of townhouses. But this relatively anonymous dwelling has been the seat fo
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David Luhrssen
I Hate Hollywood
Away We Go, a droll comedy-cum-drama by director Sam Mendes (American Beauty), perceptively explores the lives of more-or-less ordinary 30somethings lost in a world without much meaning. Verona (Maya Rudolph) and Burt (John Krasinski) are about to becom
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David Luhrssen
I Hate Hollywood
During the era known as the Belle Époque, the Beautiful Age, the corsets of Victorianism loosened. A caste of courtesans, elevated above the more proletarian prostitutes, traded sexual companionship with aristocrats and magnets for lives of bejeweled gl
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David Luhrssen
I Hate Hollywood
Recently, a Hollywood executive stated, “Anything that can’t be sold as a genre film or wasn’t conceived as a franchise is dead.” From the standpoint of an industry driven entirely by unrealistic projections of profit, with no concern about art, little
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David Luhrssen
I Hate Hollywood
The icecap is melting under the polar bears’ feet. The bees that pollinate the plants are disappearing and the bats that eat the bugs are dwindling. Enormous hurricanes have wreaked havoc on seacoasts and brush fires threaten cities. War and rumor of wa
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