Benjamin Svetkey
Veteran entertainment journalist Benjamin Svetkey shoots the breeze, raises a brow and sometimes wags a finger in his ruminations on the latest Hollywood news and controversies.
Sometimes life really does imitate art. And sometimes that art is a 66-year-old Elia Kazan movie that hardly anyone remembers anymore.
I’m talking about 1957’s “A Face in the Crowd,” Kazan’s darkly brilliant mid-century media satire about an unscrupulous, guitar-strumming Arkansas drifter named Larry “Lonesome” Rhodes — played by Andy Griffith, in an early, pre-Mayberry starring role — who becomes a populist radio and television sensation by bamboozling his millions of adoring fans.