How does a director build a career?
While watching, I thought at first of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Antitheatre group, where the director built a performance on the actors' physical presence rather than on the characters' psychology.
The director built up the tension as the MP's wife destroys his career with a campaign of leaks and misinformation in the three-part series, which won both Bafta and International Emmy Awards as best drama.
As with the writing of the script, I had the feeling that Mr. Cohen, who is the company's artistic director, built the production on perhaps a shorter timetable than he might have wished.
Mr. Helpern, the chief executive of the business, and his wife, the designer and creative director, built their company into a retail preserve of high-quality, moderately priced stylishness beginning in 1967, when Mrs. Helpern designed her first pair of Oxford flats in classic navy blue and white.
Photo: President Bush bestowed the Presidential Medal of Freedom yesterday on three central figures of the Iraq war: from left, Gen. Tommy R. Franks, who led the invasion; L. Paul Bremer III, who led the occupation; and George J. Tenet, who as intelligence director built a case for war.
McDowell shares his memories of working with Anderson, and of the tight little community the director built around him, in which moneyed superstars of stage and screen existed on an enforced equal footing with whatever misfits, unemployed actors, mad writers and other broken-winged birds were nesting in Anderson's spare room.
Earlier in the film, the director built his own private Old Town Vegas, complete with Fremont Street and gigantic signs and presumably working slot machines.
In a striking example of how stage directors build on (or copy) each other's work, it is now almost de rigueur to treat benignly the poor creature, who is not only beaten up physically but, even worse, condemned artistically by the entire populace after his disastrous performance in a song competition.
