Pictures at a Revolution (15 page)

Truffaut's reply was swift and stinging. He told Jones some of the details of his meeting with Beatty and Caron in Paris and said that he had recommended
Bonnie and Clyde
to them before he heard about Picker's interest in the movie. However, he added, “truly, I have much admiration for Leslie Caron, but none for Warren Beatty, who increasingly seems to me an extremely unpleasant person. He belongs for me, with Marlon Brando and several others, on a small list which I classify in my head under the heading, ‘Better not to make a film at all than to make it with men like this.'” Truffaut went on to say that he had since spoken to Caron, who he felt was “too old to play Bonnie,” and that he had been “obliged to be very frank with her and to explain to her that actually, this project had been offered to me again, but that it was out of the question that I would make it with Warren Beatty.”
⁴⁰

Beatty may have picked up on Truffaut's distaste for him at their lunch. When Benton and Newman told him in their first conversation of their passion for Truffaut and Godard, he instantly replied, “You've written a French film—you need an American director.”
⁴¹

T
he man who wrote the battle scenes for
Spartacus
did not, judging by his credits, appear to be the ideal choice to try his hand at a new screenplay for
The Graduate.
Calder Willingham was Stanley Kubrick's poker buddy and go-to screenwriter, a southerner in his early forties who, aside from the patchwork he did on
Spartacus
, had written one screenplay that the director filmed (
Paths of Glory
), one that he rejected (for
Lolita
), and one, for Marlon Brando's western cult oddity
One-Eyed Jacks
,
¹
that Brando disliked so much, he ended up having both Willingham and Kubrick fired. Willingham was a guy's guy with enough inherent swagger to be able to look Brando in the eye and tell him, “You've gotta have faith in my God-given gifts as a writer.”
²
Larry Turman, looking for someone to take on
The Graduate
, liked the fact that he was a published novelist and that he lived with his family in New England, a proximity that would make a potential collaboration with Mike Nichols easier.

But Nichols, at the moment, had his hands full. When he wasn't busy preparing for
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
, he was working with Neil Simon, directing the author's first Broadway play since
Barefoot in the Park. The Odd Couple
, with Walter Matthau as Oscar Madison and Art Carney as Felix Ungar, opened in March and extended Nichols's winning streak; he now had four hit shows running simultaneously in New York, and that spring, he won, for the third straight year, the Tony Award for Best Director of a Play. Almost as soon as Willingham signed on and
The Odd Couple
opened, Nichols was back in Los Angeles to supervise rewrites and preproduction on
Virginia Woolf
, and
The Graduate
's new screenwriter was on his own. Willingham had already adapted one of his own novels,
End as a Man
, into the 1957 military drama
The Strange One
, a film about repressed homosexuality that, thanks to the Production Code, ended up becoming an example of it. He told Turman that the experience had taught him that “doing an adaptation of your own novel is like performing an appendectomy on yourself.”
³
But Willingham felt no compunction about doing surgery on someone else's novel; he took the sexual triangle at the center of
The Graduate
and coarsened it, turning in a draft that both Nichols and Turman felt was “vulgar.”
⁴
“It was in every way unacceptable,” says Nichols. “And when I asked him if he'd like to work with me on it, he said no. So that was the end of his screenplay.”
⁵

Knowing Nichols was displeased with the progress the script was making, Turman took two paths at the same time: He held on to Willingham, urging him back toward Charles Webb's novel, its scenes and its dialogue, in the hope that his screenplay could be rescued.
⁶
And when that began to appear less likely, he hired another screenwriter for
The Graduate
, a newcomer named Peter Nelson. Turman had represented Nelson before quitting his job as an agent to become a producer, and Nichols, while he was directing
Barefoot in the Park
, had read and enjoyed a spec script by the novice writer called
The Surprise Party Complex.
“Mike Nichols said, ‘I read your script and I think it's funny and touching. Call Sam Cohn,'” says Nelson. “It was one of those wonderful calls that you hope to get as a writer. I never got Sam on the phone. But I think [Nichols] liking my script impressed Larry enough to use me.”
⁷

Nelson remembers taking the job, for which he was paid $5,000, with the understanding that it was urgent work. “When Mike was going to do
The Public Eye
, and then when that fell through but he took
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
, Larry was scared shitless that he was going to lose him, as any producer would be,” says Nelson. “When somebody takes a movie before your movie, you have no idea what that movie is going to lead to. He knew it was important to have a script ready when Mike came back.”

Soon after he got the assignment, Nelson was temporarily derailed by the illness of his young son, and it took him longer than he expected to turn in a draft. Turman never showed him Willingham's script, only Webb's novel. “I just went right to the book,” he says. “My script was faithful, and sort of kicky and long.” But Turman was no happier with this version than he had been with Willingham's. Nelson was off the project before he even had a chance to meet with Nichols. “I don't think my script was even considered,” he says.
⁸

Although Nichols would eventually play a strong role in the shaping of the screenplay for
The Graduate
, that spring he had to face an even larger and more pressing crisis involving Ernest Lehman's script for
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
The decision to retain Albee's scabrous dialogue was already an issue. Phrases like “screw you,” “goddamn,” “hump the hostess,” “monkey nipples,” and the like had never been heard in a motion picture that received the Production Code's seal before, and in 1963, before the Code's powerful chief administrator, Geoffrey Shurlock, had even seen a draft of the script, he had warned Warner Brothers that all the profanity would have to come out. Lehman, terribly nervous about running afoul of either the studio or Shurlock, had written several early versions with no profanity, but Nichols told him to go for close to broke, eliminating just a few words and pushing as hard as they could to keep the rest. “Ernie, for example, changed ‘you son of a bitch' to ‘you dirty lousy dot dot dot,'” he said. “[But] disguising profanity with clean but suggestive phrases is really dirtier.”
⁹

Lehman had taken it upon himself to identify another “problem”: the death of the imaginary baby over which George and Martha quarrel throughout the play. On Broadway, the nonexistence of the baby had generated reams of what-does-it-all-mean discussion; many critics embraced the then voguish notion that
Virginia Woolf
was really an encoded play about a homosexual couple with only an imaginary child to show for their “false” marriage—an idea that Albee himself repeatedly dismissed but that Lehman believed
¹⁰
—and others expressed honest uncertainty about the viability of introducing a metaphor or symbol and then turning it into a concrete plot point. Lehman decided that what
Woolf
needed was a third-act rewrite: In the screenplay he first presented to Nichols, George and Martha's child had become real, a son who had hanged himself on his eighteenth birthday in the family's living room closet, in which George says “the whole rotten truth of our lives is hidden.”
¹¹
His grieving parents had then sealed it forever.
¹²

If Lehman had imagined that his dual role as writer and producer would give him the upper hand with an inexperienced movie director in creative disagreements, he was soon disabused of that notion. Nichols, feeling the new twist was closer to
What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
than to
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
, immediately vetoed his alterations and, over the course of two months in early 1965, supervised a rewrite that, step by step, took the screenplay back toward Albee's original dialogue and vision.
Virginia Woolf
still needed to be cut—even at 131 minutes, it omits large sections of Albee's three-act play. But in the course of making those trims, Nichols got to know the text intimately; it started to belong to him. Lehman, he said later, “wasn't suited to the Albee stuff, and he wasn't used to being a producer. And I didn't have the patience. I would get pissed off and probably be rougher than I needed to be.”
¹³

Nichols had spent his time in Los Angeles well, screening European movies (Fellini's
8 1/2
was a favorite) to help him find a look for the film and learning everything he could about camera movement and technique, an area in which he was self-conscious about his lack of knowledge. His reputation as a New York theater hit maker alone would have made him something of a visiting eminence in Los Angeles, even at the age of thirty-four, but coupled with the enthusiastic endorsement of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, he landed at the top of everybody's invitation list. He got to know his way around a Hollywood party, and, never lacking confidence, he discovered with remarkable alacrity that once he stepped onto the Warner lot, he had some weight to throw around.

Nichols insisted on three weeks of rehearsal time with his stars, an almost unheard-of luxury in the movie business then and now, and he got it. He also won a major showdown with Warner Brothers over the way the picture would be shot. In 1965, some of the rules of the old studio system were still firmly entrenched, and one of them was that first-time directors didn't select their own crews. On
Virginia Woolf
, Warner simply assigned Nichols a cinematographer, Harry Stradling. Stradling was sixty-four; he had shot over 120 movies, the first of them in 1920, and had received a dozen Academy Award nominations. Though he had photographed the black-and-white
A Streetcar Named Desire
for Kazan fifteen years earlier, most of Stradling's notable work since then had been in color—brightly lit amusements like
Guys and Dolls, The Pajama Game, Gypsy
, and
My Fair Lady.
In Hollywood, black-and-white films and color movies had coexisted for twenty-five years in an increasingly uneasy aesthetic détente (complete with separate but equal Oscar categories for Art Direction, Cinematography, and Costume Design). Although the decision about which way to shoot a movie was sometimes monetary, it was just as often based on a set of shaky artistic principles in which color was reserved for musicals, westerns, scenic spectacles, and fantasy, and black and white, which was considered more “realistic,” was used for anything serious, adult, or controversial.

This unwritten rule, a division often forced on filmmakers by the fact that the inconsistencies of color-processing labs were still yielding sloppy, overbright, unrealistic hues, was followed by directors until 1966, when the conversion of network television to color (and the refinement of processing techniques) led studios to abandon black and white entirely within a matter of months. But given that most color films in 1965 still looked more like
That Darn Cat!
than
Lawrence of Arabia
, Nichols had no interest in breaking with tradition. Fellini's films were in black and white; so were Truffaut's and Godard's; so were the social-issue dramas of Stanley Kramer, and theatrical adaptations like Arthur Penn's
The Miracle Worker
, and Production Code envelope pushers like Sidney Lumet's
The Pawnbroker.
Nichols wasn't about to shoot
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
in color—aside from everything else, he felt that the heavy makeup that would be used to turn the thirty-three-year-old Taylor into a harridan in her late forties would be too evident in color. But Stradling, an old-fashioned guy who had little use for European films and thought
8 1/2
looked like “crap,”
¹⁴
was insistent, and Nichols suddenly found himself at loggerheads with Jack Warner, fighting him one-on-one as his producer sat by silently.

“Warner said to me and Lehman—who never spoke—‘I'm sorry, boys, but New York says it has to be in color.' There was no ‘New York.' He owned the whole studio! I said, ‘I'm sorry, Mr. Warner, it's not possible, it's way too late, the sets are built, everything is designed for black and white.' We went back and forth forever with all that shit, and he finally said, all right, black and white.'”
¹⁵
A week after that, however, Stradling came back to Nichols with a final proposal to shoot the film in color but print it in black and white; Nichols, with no particular animosity, fired him and replaced him with his own choice: Haskell Wexler, who was twenty-five years younger than Stradling and had recently shot striking black-and-white films for Kazan (
America America
), Franklin J. Schaffner (
The Best Man
), and Tony Richardson (
The Loved One
).
¹⁶

The day he started production on
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
, Nichols finished one of his first shots, and a first assistant director sauntered by him, muttering, “Oh, well—it's just another picture.” Nichols fired him on the spot. “I had to prove I was going to be strong,” he said later.
¹⁷
That may have been the case, but Nichols also had to prove that the first AD wasn't right. If
Virginia Woolf
turned out to be “just another picture,” his career as a movie director would begin with a failure on a massive scale, and he knew it.

“You would think that as a director, slowly, as you got to be a geezer, you would become more and more irascible,” says Nichols, “until you ended up like George Cukor, screaming at Candice Bergen and Jacqueline Bisset for an entire movie [
Rich and Famous
]. But with me, it was the other way around. I started out as a prick on the set. Not to the actors so much, but by and large to everybody. I don't know who I was then or what was happening. And I got nicer as time went by. But I was a prick.”
¹⁸