Pictures at a Revolution (18 page)

 

That summer,
Mike Nichols was ready to get out of Los Angeles. For weeks he had been on the Warner Brothers lot, filming interiors for
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?;
now, he was, at least physically, taking the movie away from the studio, returning to the East Coast to film part of
Virginia Woolf
on the campus of Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. Nichols welcomed the time on location, out from under what felt like Warner's watchful and suspicious eye, and his two stars were proving to be game and reasonably focused. Richard Burton found himself looking at rushes for the first time since the beginning of his career, while Taylor would throw herself into each day of work and then enjoy whatever local entertainment she could find, pursuing it in her characteristic not-quite-incognito style. When a reporter came to visit the production in New England in search of Taylor, Burton informed him dryly, “Elizabeth's gone to see
What's New, Pussycat?
with ten policemen.”
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Nichols was no longer the new guy; he was the boss, successful lion tamer to two of the world's least controllable celebrities and fearsome taskmaster to everyone else. On the set, he would push Taylor and Burton until she would break down in tears and he would be too shaken to come out of his dressing room,
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and they would still return the next day eager for more. Burton wrote in his diary that Nichols was one of only two men he had met (the other was Noël Coward) who had “the capacity to change the world when they walk into a room. They are both as bland as butter and as brilliant as diamonds.” And he was delighted that a director who had never stepped behind a camera and was still learning how to use lenses wasn't even a little afraid of the biggest star in movies. “I have actually seen people shiver as they cross the room to meet Elizabeth. What the hell is it?” he wrote. “…I know that we are both dangerous people, but we are fundamentally very nice. I mean we only hurt each other.”
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Nichols had just as loyal an ally in Taylor, who was never one to overpraise her own movies or performances and who knew that
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
was the best role she had ever had; she was determined not to hold back, no matter how painful the process or unflattering the results. “I think many people probably will be shocked,” she said at the time, “but they'll stay, not run out of the theater the way they're doing at
The Sandpiper,”
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her most recent, and at that time most dreadful, on-screen romantic pairing with Burton.

The shoot at Smith unfolded in an atmosphere of mild urgency, politely expressed by the college's administrators, who requested that the production be packed up and gone by the time Smith's young ladies arrived for the fall 1965 term. That was the least of the pressures Nichols faced. Though he was delighted to be away from Hollywood, the exigencies of working for a studio, and handling movie stars, and spending a great deal of money (Taylor received $1.1 million and Burton $750,000),
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caused constant tension. And Ernest Lehman, whom he had started to think of as “the so-called writer-producer who was neither producer nor writer,” had become an adversary. Nichols had discarded one embellishment in his script after another, beginning with “a title sequence [that] included [Burton's character] George going for a walk and coming upon two dogs fucking. And it said in parentheses, ‘This must be beautifully shot.' Anthea Sylbert, who later became my costume designer, said, ‘I know just how to do that! Afghans and lots of fans!'”
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When Nichols and Lehman crossed swords, Nichols almost always got his way, but his victories had a price: Feeling excluded from the bond Nichols had formed with his actors, Lehman simply stepped away from any conflict that arose. “This bunch would not only shoot it, they would edit it, cut it, premiere it, distribute it, and sell it to television without telling me,” he grumbled to a reporter on the set.
²⁶

With Lehman declining to run interference with the studio, Nichols had to defend every decision and delay himself. There were plenty of the latter: Taylor and Burton, as cooperative as they were, had a propensity for non-negotiably long, boozy lunches, and although Nichols had handpicked Haskell Wexler (who would win an Oscar for his work on the film) to replace Harry Stradling as his cinematographer, their relationship was less than congenial; Nichols couldn't believe the amount of time Wexler and his crew spent lighting each shot. Unsurprisingly, the film ended up going thirty days over schedule. “Mike was going crazy,” said Sam O'Steen,
Virginia Woolf
's editor, later. “He'd walk around saying, ‘Cocksuckers, I hate their fuckin' guts….'”
²⁷
At the same time, Nichols backed Wexler consistently when the studio complained about the shadowy, unglamorous look of the rushes, and Wexler, though he would butt heads with Nichols, was impressed by his ability to draw strong work from his cast.

Nichols himself wouldn't be hurried, and he occasionally felt the brunt of his crew's impatience. As the shoot wore on, Meta Rebner, the script supervisor and a formidable southern belle who was intimidated by no one, warned Nichols that he was losing the confidence of some of the union guys on the set.
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If he cared, he didn't let Rebner know it. In fact, he may have taken a little longer than necessary with the next setup
²⁸
just to remind everyone involved that there was only one person in charge of this movie and to drive home the point that if he wouldn't let Jack Warner push him around, then anyone else who went up against him would surely be fighting a losing battle.

It was during the shooting of
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
that Buck Henry started to get to know Nichols better. Henry was a good friend of George Segal, who was playing Nick, and he visited the set often. As he spent more time with Nichols, a friendship sparked between them, and they began to talk about
The Graduate.
“I remember Mike saying, ‘Read this book and see what you think of it,'” says Henry. “As soon as I read it, I got the point. It didn't take more than ten pages to know that this was something really interesting and to see where all of our lives were intersecting. I think that Larry Turman and Mike and I
all
thought that we were the protagonist of the book. We were all roughly the same age, we'd all gone to the same kinds of schools, we all sort of liked the same movies, and we all got the same jokes. But hiring me was a leap of faith on Mike's part. He was really just going on personality and
Get Smart
, which I wouldn't have thought would be a direct line to
The Graduate.”
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Henry became the movie's fourth screenwriter and started from scratch with a new draft that retained much of the book's dialogue but transformed the character of Benjamin Braddock in some crucial ways. Charles Webb had been Benjamin's age when he wrote the novel, and with perhaps too little authorial distance, he had allowed Benjamin to personify the confusion, arrogance, and uncertainty of a pampered twenty-two-year-old who hadn't yet figured out a direction for his life but knew he wanted it to point away from his parents. On the page, Benjamin's ungainly sense of moral severity can become smug; the first time he tries to break off his affair with Mrs. Robinson, he writes her a note in which he says to her, “I don't know if you were ever taught the difference between right and wrong or not, but since I was, I feel a certain obligation to it.”
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Early in the novel, Webb's grasp of Benjamin's sexual inexperience seems to falter and give way to a bluster that feels inorganic; questioned by his father after he takes a hitchhiking trip to northern California, Benjamin tells him that most of the people who gave him rides were “queers…I averaged about five queers a day” and makes a point of adding, “One queer I had to slug in the face and jump out of the car.”
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And despite Webb's skillful use of dialogue to portray Benjamin's anxiety, the character is, in moments of physical action, a cipher—a hostage to the novel's spare descriptive style who is rarely described as doing more than frowning, blinking, waving his arms, or nodding his head. After a fight with Elaine, Webb writes, “Benjamin stared at her until she was finished screaming and then continued to stare at her for a long time afterwards while she lifted her hands up from her side and put them over her face to cover it and then finally brought them slowly back down and held them in front of her.”
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Henry did his writing alone, although he discussed the story and characters with Nichols constantly, and with Turman as well. Some choices were easy: Benjamin's apparent homosexual panic, his brief adventure fighting forest fires, and his dalliances with prostitutes, which all came early in the novel and seemed poorly connected to the rest of the narrative, would be omitted. (“I think I tried writing [the hitchhiking],” said Henry, “and over a period of time, we dropped it.”)
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But Henry and Nichols also altered the novel's tone. “I had a feeling that in real life, Benjamin Braddock was not a person you'd want to know now,” says Henry. “He's a bit of a prick—he doesn't give anybody much of a chance.”
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As the story of Benjamin, Elaine, and Mrs. Robinson passed from the hands of a novelist in his early twenties into the custody of a writer and director who were both in their mid-thirties, it became both more detached and more sympathetic. Henry's screenplay took Benjamin's earnest, surly struggle to be better than the people around him less seriously than the novel does, and it emphasized the richly funny tension between his human appetites and his stern self-condemnation as a “filthy degenerate.”
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“Even though I felt I was Benjamin Braddock, Benjamin Braddock is a pain in the ass in the book,” says Turman. “What we excised was the stuff that made him a pain in the ass.”
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Henry found Benjamin most engaging in his moments of deepest befuddlement or awkwardness—the initial seduction scene, the mortifying birthday party at which he is forced to parade for his parents' friends in a deep-sea-diving suit, the episode in which he can barely bring himself to secure a hotel room for his first assignation with Mrs. Robinson. “I knew the book could make an interesting film, because it not only had scenes, it had places for the camera to go, which a lot of books don't have,” he says. With that in mind, Henry shaped Benjamin's terrified journeys into the unknown—the bedroom, the bottom of the swimming pool, the hotel cocktail bar—into comic set pieces, and deemphasized his somewhat exhausting tendency to tell off everyone around him. He cut long passages of dialogue in which Benjamin, strangely irritated, tries to talk Elaine into marrying him, and he also dropped a groaner of a moment in which he tells his parents that he wants to spend his life with “simple honest people that can't even read or write their own name.”
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A scene in which Benjamin humiliates Elaine on their first date by taking her to a strip club and then explains his behavior by saying, “Ever since I've been out of school I've had this overwhelming urge to be rude all the time,” remained in the movie and stood in effectively for many moments in Webb's novel in which Benjamin succumbed to that urge.

By favoring Benjamin's bumbling attempts at moral rigor over his cold, sour narcissism, Henry and Nichols located
The Graduate
's comic center in his complete failure to live up to his own standards, and, unlike Webb, they came up with an ending in which it's not clear if Benjamin triumphs by meeting those standards or by discarding them. In one of the screenplay's few actual alterations of the novel's plot, Henry and Nichols agreed that Benjamin would now interrupt Elaine's wedding seconds
after
their vows were exchanged, not before. Webb hated the revision because he felt that breaking up a marriage stained Benjamin's good character,
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but the futility of his quest for goodness was exactly what Henry and Nichols wanted—and getting to the church in the nick of time was the kind of cliché they were striving to avoid.

Nichols and Henry also knew that
The Graduate
offered a great comic opportunity to dissect a certain stratum of vulgar new-money West Coast culture that movies had not yet exploited for laughs, probably because so many of the people who made them were too close to that culture to recognize anything funny about it. Their version of Benjamin's story would be a poisoned arrow aimed from New York toward the heart of Los Angeles.
“The Graduate
is filled with all the stuff you can wring out of the upper middle class,” says Henry. “That hadn't been very evident in American films for a long time. There were so many movies where you didn't know what people did for a living, but they lived so well. I had an idea to do a shot of an airplane coming in over L.A., and we would see all the swimming pools, and they would merge into one big pool.” Henry “knew L.A. as well as I knew New York. My mother came from L.A.—we went out almost every year, and we lived there from 1941 to 1945, while my father was overseas.” And Nichols, though a relative newcomer to Los Angeles, “got stuff awfully fast,” says Henry. “It doesn't take him more than a few moments to understand the behavior of whatever society he's in.”
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Together, they started thinking of Benjamin as a product of WASPy overprivilege in a society devoted to it.