Movie Magic Makes Little Headway

It’s an old advertising trick of movie studios to showcase blurbs from reviews that are adulatory only because they’ve been taken out of context.

Gary Schwartz noticed an extreme case involving the Paramount movie “Sleepy Hollow.” A seemingly gushy Newsweek blurb was actually missing a sardonic reference to movies “about multiple decapitations” (see exhibit at right).

Newsweek’s Jeff Giles, who wrote the clever review, phoned a Paramount representative to protest. And the headless blurb has since disappeared from the ads.

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100 DAYS HAS SEPTEMBER . . .: With the 1990s coming to a close, reader Bob Rogers thinks it’s time for the world to switch to . . . the metric calendar! He ticks off these advantages:

* Every week will be 10 days long: “You can work seven days a week and still have a three-day weekend!”

* Every month will be 10 weeks long, meaning a month is 100 days: “You only pay your rent every 100 days instead of every 30!”

* A year will be 10 months long instead of 12: “Goodbye November and December. No More Thanksgiving. No more Christmas. Speaking strictly as an employer, in the best traditions of Scrooge, I sure won’t miss all those paid holidays and expensive, unproductive office parties.”

* A year will be 1,000 days long: “I used to be 49 years old but with the metric calendar I’m officially 18 again!”

Alas, he’d be too young to drink at an Oct. 100th New Year’s Eve party.

Steve Harvey can be reached at (800) LATIMES, Ext. 77083, by fax at (213) 237-4712, by mail at Metro, L.A. Times, Times Mirror Square, L.A. 90053 and by e-mail at steve.harvey@latimes.com.