Word: beckerman
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Director Edward Stone has set a frenetic pace that jams to a halt, like traffic in a rush-hour gridlock, whenever the entire eight-actor ensemble crowds onto the stage. The performances, though a bit broad for so intimate a space, are clever: Mara Beckerman is just irksome enough as the naive heroine, Alan Brasington swishily grand as her abductor, and Merle Louise, Polly Pen and especially Emcee Michael McCormick polished and persuasive as show-must-go-on troupers. The music hall genre may be dead, but Charlotte Sweet is an amiable, spirited resurrection...
...that Mazursky did not buy the movie rights to McFadden's book. Instead, they went to Sidney Beckerman, a producer whose credits include the legendary film desecration of Portnoy's Complaint. Next to Serial, Portnoy seems like an earnest failure. Not only is McFadden's cool point of view lost, but so are her satirical targets. Though Serial is set in the present-day San Francisco suburbs, it might as well unfold in '50s Dubuque. Most of the characters are whining, repressed squares who, at heart, disapprove of free sex, drugs, divorce and teenagers. For some...
Comparing the growth of 13 major industrialized countries over 20 years, Beckerman factored in changes in leisure time and income distribution - two variables not included in the calculation of G.N.P.- and found they made no difference in the countries' relative growth rates. Beckerman's overall conclusion: the standard G.N.P. measure is still "a jolly good indication of changes in economic welfare...
...Beckerman, 52, a tailor's son who managed to get to Cambridge after the war on an ex-serviceman's scholarship, enjoys the jousting with the doomsayers. The most ardent conservationists, he scoffs, are elitists with a "trendy" argument that rarely gets more sophisticated than "stopping the earth at once before it's too late." This aristocratic posture, he says, allows the well-heeled to display "exquisite sensibilities, moral virtue and subtle perceptions." What upper-class conservationists are really concerned about, he insists, is saving their "salmon streams and grouse moors." Little fuss is ever made...
...father of three, Beckerman is indulgent toward youthful ecofreaks. "Poor old radical youth; it's hard not to sympathize with them," he sighs. But "pollution hysteria" generated by such studies as The Limits to Growth, he adds sternly, is another example of the odd doom consciousness that has persisted in industrial countries since Thomas Malthus, an early 19th century English clergyman who warned that population would soon outstrip available food supplies. Beckerman does admit to a certain pessimism about the next ten years. He fears unnecessarily slow growth, and blames politicians who deal with inflation by strangling economic expansion...