单选题 《复合题被拆开情况》PASSAGE TWO(1) I’d been living in Los Angeles just under a year when, in the spring of 1983, I answered an ad in the Hollywood Reporter for a receptionist and got the job. The pay wasn’t much, but the work was in "the Business"—an apt Los Angeles euphemism for the entertainment industry. The location was within bicycling distance of my home, and they only wanted someone to work mornings. I’d get off by 1 p.m. , which I thought would leave me plenty of time to do my own writing. I was wrong about that. The place was so frantic I’d come out wired and need the rest of the day to simply calm down. When, after about two weeks, I realized my afternoons were being spent in activities equivalent to running around the block twenty or thirty times, I asked to be put on full-time. Since I wasn’t getting anything else, why not, I figured, jump in for the total experience.(2) The (still thriving) company I found myself a part of possessed the unlikely name of Breakdown Services, Ltd. During the six months I worked there, I learned to savor all of that phrase’s more cynical reverberations, but in terms of the job it dealt with the dismantling or breakdown of television and film scripts. Scripts gathered from producers or studios would be regurgitated (回流) by Breakdown in the form of plot summaries, character descriptions, number of scenes per character, and the number of dialogue lines each speaks. These compilations were then xeroxed and distributed to hundreds of subscribing actors’ agents who proceeded to submit their clients for likely parts. It was a process, as I was to discover by way of angry phone calls when "breakdowns" arrived late or not at all, that the agents regarded with a reverence others might reserve for morning prayer.(3) Breakdown Services, Ltd. was the brainchild of a young man named Gary Marsh. Gary was twenty-eight when I met him, but he’d founded Breakdown when he was eighteen and was considered something of an entrepreneurial prodigy. His mother was an agent and he’d observed the piles of scripts she and her agent pals had to plow through in order to match a given role with the talent they represented. He’d also observed how much they hated the reading part of their jobs and had cleverly devised breakdowns as a way of extracting the material they needed.(4) By the time I arrived, five full-time breakdown writers worked in a desk-lined back room overlooking a parking lot. I’ve heard the current crew has now advanced to computers, but when I was there typewriters were the norm. When they weren’t typing, the writers would curl up on the office’s worn stuffed couch and, with a script propped against one arm, fill legal-sized yellow pads with dialogue line numbers and comments which they’d then type up. It could be a complex job. For example, the breakdown for a film originally called Teenage. Gambler lists over forty characters, ranging from the teenaged gambling leader to five waiters who sing " Happy Birthday" at a surprise party.(5) Perhaps because of the patience involved in this sort of extraction, women seemed to dominate the ranks of the break-downers (during my tenure the ratio was four to one). Although Gary knew I’d done a bit of writing, I was relegated to the front office and never received an invitation to try my hand at breakdowns. It wasn’t something I really wanted to do. For one thing, the writers were a youthful bunch. The back room senior was in her early thirties, but none of the others had hit twenty-five. And I think Gary rightly surmised I’d be too openly cynical for the job or try to embellish too much. Breakdowns were produced anonymously and offered no artistic evaluations of the scripts. The writers might talk among themselves about a piece they felt was particularly good or bad, but such editorializing was not allowed to make its way into the final product. That this restriction was frustrating is indicated by the fact that two of the writers began venting opinions as moonlighting theater critics for small local papers.(6) For Gary, the most problematical aspect of the breakdown business was its limited market. This had nothing to do with his operating methodology; he did what he could to exploit the possibilities. Each weekday a hardy crew made predawn deliveries of breakdowns to agents’ homes or offices, while a post-dawn quartet of pager-equipped Breakdown field workers haunted the big studios ready to pounce on an available script. For these studio prowlers speed was of the essence, not only because Hollywood tends to be crisis-prone and wants everything done quickly, but because a rival, spawned by the success of Breakdown Services, Ltd. and infuriatingly named BreakThrough Productions, Ltd. , was also on the hunt.(7) Breakdown Services unquestionably dominated the field, but the field itself had immutable perimeters. Breakdown’s subscribers had to be accredited agents, though there were some exceptions to this rule. For instance, specialized media organizations, such as the competitive, vulture-like companies that insured movie productions, could keep tabs on the industry by subscribing to the weekly Breakdown summaries. But the whole Breakdown operation was hard to monitor. When I was there, a Breakdown subscription was expensive, something like $ 500 a year. And though breakdowns were copyrighted and unauthorized reproduction was clearly prohibited, xerox machines are notoriously bad at picking up such distinctions and among the larger agencies breakdowns were undoubtedly duplicated and passed around.(8) Gary’s response to these built-in economic dilemmas was to diversify. A separate department for commercials, for example, appeared as part of the Breakdown menu. Although Breakdown staffers were supposed to refrain from giving tips to potential talent, I did once tell a friend—who hoped to finance the college educations of her five-year-old identical twins by getting them on a commercial—that a juice company had put out a call for identical twin girls. Their agent submitted them, but they didn’t get the job. The nightly Breakdown delivery system expanded to an all-day messenger service. Gary also made available an assortment of directories and mailing labels listing casting directors, talent agents, and literary agents in Los Angeles and New York. The current Breakdown brochure adds yet another Breakdown amenity; for fifteen dollars you can receive an "actors’ relaxation" cassette tape "designed to maximize your abilities and stimulate your creative senses".《问题》:What problem does the author mainly talk about in Para. 7?
【正确答案】 B
【答案解析】主旨大意题。根据题干定位至第七段。该段第一句指出,“分解服务”在该领域占据主导地位,但该领域本身具有不可变的边界;随后通过举例来解释“边界”。作者提到“分解服务”的订阅者是经纪人,还有一些密切关注电影行业的保险公司,尽管订购费用昂贵,分解剧本也受版权保护,但还是难以避免被复制和传播,而第八段第一句提到加里对这些问题能够灵活应对,可知本段第一句的“边界”是指“限制”,本段的主要内容是介绍“分解”行业面临的限制和困难,故答案为B。本段并未涉及行业竞争的内容,故排除A;C只涉及本段结尾部分,概括不全面,故排除;作者在本段并未提及分解服务订购者的数量,故排除D。