Word: formulaic
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Perot has put up $30 million and taken control of at least 80% of the shares in the brokerage company. The previous owners, including several members of the Du Pont chemical family, will retain a 10% to 20% interest, the exact amount to be determined by a complex formula based on how well the firm performs over the next two years. As the firm's new president, Perot has installed one of the Texas-born vice presidents of his computer firm, 32-year-old Morton Meyerson...
...architect. "Because chairs are in fixed locations, they limit your options as to where to sit." In most rooms that Luckey and his colleagues design, conventional furniture is replaced by lumps, bumps and other more or less organized protrusions that serve as chairs, couches, tables and shelves. "The basic formula," says Charles Moore, former dean of Yale's School of Architecture and now a practicing architect in New Haven, "is to design an environment that is relatively cheap, comfortable and useful." After that, he says, "almost anything goes." Some of the more remarkable examples...
HOLLYWOOD has recently discovered that politics can be used to spice up perversity (and vice versa) in catering to mass consumer cravings: pushing old commodities in new packaging. Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion works out quite skillfully this newly elaborate and sophisticated formula. Directed by Italian Elio Petri-if not for exclusively American capital (Euro International), at least with U. S. distribution (Columbia) ever in mind-the production won an Academy Award last week for the Best Foreign ( sic ) Film of 1971. Which is a pretty good tip-off that no matter how "controversial" its politics, this pictures poses...
Women's romance was rediscovered as a really rich commercial prospect in the late '50s when sales of straight historical novels and detective stories sagged and publishers needed a new kind of formula entertainment to promote. Today the field is dominated by Victoria Holt, the most prolific writer, and Mary Stewart, the most accomplished. Right behind come such veterans of genteel fiction as Norah Lofts, Catherine Gaskin and Phyllis Whitney, the only American in this group who has a major reputation. Elizabeth Goudge tends toward "atmosphere" and romantic biography. There are newcomers coming along-Jill Tattersall, Jane Aiken...
...ladies clearly prefer working to spending. Indeed, one of the real mysteries that surrounds the genre is what the authors do with incomes that can run well into six figures annually. They all feel their writing matters, and few are willing to admit they write formula fiction, let alone "women's novels." Says Mary Stewart: "I cannot read what you would call a woman writer." Speaking of critical neglect, Norah Lofts says, "I feel neglected, I feel infuriated, I feel resigned-sometimes all at once. I just think it's very wrong because it may deprive some people...