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Theater critic and financier William Becker died on September 12 at his home in Southampton. He was 88 and died of complications of kidney failure.
Most notably, Mr. Becker acquired Janus Films with a partner in 1965 and he expanded its catalogue of films and widened distribution to university audiences and home viewers on DVD.
By the time Mr. Becker had acquired Janus Films with a partner, Saul J. Turell, a documentary producer, it was on shaky financial ground. He transformed it into a prosperous company, which continues today, by expanding the distribution of its films through streaming.
During the 1960s and 1970s, Mr. Becker and Mr. Turell expanded Janus’s library of 30 films, forging relationships with foreign distributors and acquiring rights to experimental works, as well as classics, taking advantage of a new generation that viewed film as an art form.
Arthur William John Becker III was born in St. Louis in 1927. He enrolled at Washington University in St. Louis at 15 and began corresponding with author Henry Miller. He spent some time studying at Duke but graduated from Harvard in 1948 and, as a Rhodes scholar, earned a doctorate at Wadham College, Oxford; his thesis was on the poet William Butler Yeats.
After a stint in the Navy, he became a drama critic for literary journal The Hudson Review in the early 1950s and a partner of Broadway producer and real estate powerhouse Roger L. Stevens, who helped Mr. Becker buy the theater magazine Playbill.
Mr. Becker had a close circle of friends composed mostly of writers, many from The Paris Review, including his Harvard classmate George Plimpton. He and his wife lived in a Greenwich Village loft formerly occupied by the poet Allen Ginsberg, whom Mr. Becker met through a childhood friend, Lucien Carr, a member of Mr. Ginsberg’s Beat Generation circle.
He is survived by his wife, Patricia Birch; sons, Peter and Jonathan; a daughter, Alison Price Becker; six grandchildren, and a sister, Jane Daniel.
on Sep 21, 2015