Word: backgrounder
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...intellectual leader of the young economists is Harvard's Feldstein, a soft-spoken family man from The Bronx, whose looks and middle-class background and mannerisms call to mind a benign dentist. While most of his peers remain academically cloistered, concentrating on the higher mathematics and econometric concepts of modern research, Feldstein is at home in both academe and Government. He is equally comfortable pondering a regression equation for a computer program or testifying to a congressional committee, which he often does. Both political parties eagerly seek his counsel. He was an adviser to Jimmy Carter's '76 campaign, turned...
...seven-member Corporation-- also known as the President and Fellows of Harvard College--are the legal owners of all of the University, its land, buildings, and investments. The Fellows stay in the background most of the time, and follow Bok's lead. Dissent at this level is a rarity, controversy almost unheard of. The only Corporation member to make a name for himself among students recently is Hugh Calkins '45, chairman of the Advisory Committee on Shareholder Responsibility (ACSR), the Corporation front man for the South AFrica controversy...
...Jaffe has no axe to grind with Harvard. She's not wailing about the decay of institutions of College Life, like Lansing Lamont in Campus Shock. Her stories read more smoothly than The Mem Hall Murders. In the end Harvard fares pretty well, because she uses it only for background: dropping names of buildings and alumni, reminiscing about sneaking a feel in an Eliot House room or necking on the steps of Briggs Hall. The Harvard name may sell a lot of books, but it won't save the story...
...obviously knows that horror movies are only fun when they run the risk of being silly. So his camera tracks all over the place, with insects and spider webs and skeletons in the foreground, and massive, Gothic, bat-like sets or magical, panoramic English cliffs and countrysides in the background. The bulk of the action occurs inbetween, and Badham reaches it by cutting rapidly or tracking or literally walking up to it, camera jiggling subjectively. Very little happens outside the frame, so we rarely worry about what we can't see, only about how vivid and nauseating what...
After sneak showings of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Steven Spielberg cut only the background song, When You Wish Upon a Star, from the final spacecraft scene, but that small snip changed the mood of the story. "I felt the song was going to be perceived as wistful thinking," says the director today. "The audience perceived the film as a current event." Spielberg may return the song to the soundtrack in what must surely be the most extraordinary case of film tinkering ever: he is readying a revised version of Close Encounters, one of the top ten grossers...