Arthur Daniel Murphy, better known as Art Murphy or "Murf," worked at "Daily Variety" from 1964 to 1993 as a film critic, columnist, and contributor. He served as a special correspondent for the "Hollywood Reporter" from 1993 to 1996. In Hollywood in the mid-1960s, he drew on his math degree from College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts to develop a formula for determining box office grosses. Between 1984 and 1995 he produced "Art Murphy's Boxoffice Register," an annual mail-order book of North American box office revenues. Murphy taught a graduate seminar in the economics of the motion picture business at the University of Southern California between 1974 and 1998.