Pictures at a Revolution (39 page)

Jewison spent the Christmas holidays in Sun Valley, Idaho, skiing with his wife and kids, only to wind up in a local emergency room when one of his sons broke a leg on the slopes. The concerned father sitting across from him in the hospital waiting room, waiting to hear about his own son's broken leg, was New York's junior senator, Robert F. Kennedy. The two families began chatting, and Kennedy offered Jewison some encouraging words about his movie, telling him he thought the moment was right for a film about a black detective in the South and promising to mail him research from his Senate office about southern race relations, which he did. “Timing is everything,” Jewison says Kennedy told him, “in politics, art, and life.”
²¹

Other studios now had the same idea: Just before Jewison's ski trip, producer Samuel Goldwyn Jr. announced that he had acquired the rights to seven of Chester Himes's detective novels featuring the Harlem cops Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson, and Jewison knew that feelers had gone out to Poitier and Harry Belafonte to play the leads.
²²
But without a director or a script, he also knew there was no possibility the project would reach screens before his own film. With little to worry about, Jewison was ready to spend some time with Hal Ashby in the editing room and to start planning his next film for the Mirisch Company, a light-spirited, sexy comedy-drama about a master thief called
The Crown Caper
(later retitled
The Thomas Crown Affair
). He had wanted Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton to star,
²³
but after the huge success of
Virginia Woolf
, they were freer than they had ever been to choose the films that struck their fancy and embarked on what would turn out to be an ill-fated year of conspicuous consumption and bloated international productions, beginning with Franco Zeffirelli's leaden adaptation of
The Taming of the Shrew
.

As 1967 began, Nichols was considerably less cheerful than Jewison; he was beginning to wonder if
The Graduate
had taken so long to come to fruition that it was in danger of being rendered irrelevant by movies that were already beating it to the finish line. In Los Angeles, he and Buck Henry went to see a movie about a young man who rejects the oppressively bourgeois lifestyle of his parents to take his first timid and neurotic steps into a new world of free-spirited sexuality. The film, an $800,000 comedy called
You're a Big Boy Now
, was the MFA thesis project of Francis Coppola, a twenty-seven-year-old UCLA graduate student who had been getting steady work as a screenwriter for Seven Arts (he had written drafts of
This Property Is Condemned, Is Paris Burning?
, and
Reflections in a Golden Eye
).
²⁴
The movie and its brash director were now being hailed as the first piece of evidence that the widespread emergence of film school programs might have something to offer Hollywood.
You're a Big Boy Now
also suggested a glimmer of a new business model for cheap color movies; thanks to a lucrative presale to network TV, the film was already guaranteed to make a profit. Coppola, wrote critic Hollis Alpert, is “new generation, new breed, possessed of talent, boldness, drive; and…now has the chance to prove his genius,” adding, “Chances that might otherwise not have been taken, because of their commercial risk, are now quite feasible, especially if the film can be in color.”
²⁵
Henry and Nichols left the theater glumly convinced that the movie they had just seen “had clearly and totally pre-empted
The Graduate
,”
²⁶
wrote Turman. Even Nichols's usually droll press interviews started to betray his depression as he temporarily lost his perfect pitch. “I'm doing it better than anyone, and I can't do it at all,” he complained. “I'm a fraud.”
²⁷

Nichols and Turman weren't getting much encouragement from Joseph E. Levine, the Embassy Pictures czar who had agreed to finance the movie but now, in a temporary cash crunch, was threatening to pull the plug. The large and youthful audience that was turning
Blow-Up
into a hit did not impress the indefatigably lowbrow producer. “Some of these films are liked by the critics and no one else,” he told a group of college students while getting an honorary degree. “Antonioni, Truffaut, Resnais, Fellini are known to maybe only 1 percent of filmgoers. Antonioni is getting to be better known because of
Blow-Up
, but before that, mention the name Antonioni and most filmgoers would think it was some kind of Italian cheese.”
²⁸

Levine told Turman not to count on him for
The Graduate
's budget, sending the producer on a frantic series of return visits to all of the studios that had rejected the project in the first place. “He said he couldn't do it—he doesn't have the money,” says Turman. “And there are no secrets in Hollywood. So, ‘secretly,' ‘surreptitiously,' I sent it back out to
everyone
. For a second time. And they all turned it down again. The problem was, nobody got the book. Nobody liked it. I don't even think Joe Levine got it, but he saw it as a chance to rub shoulders with class, to do something that would contradict his image as the king of trash.”
²⁹

One problem for the studios may have been Nichols's persistent inability to find the actors he wanted, a dilemma that bewildered the director himself. “It's the hardest thing I've ever tried to cast,” he told a reporter at the beginning of 1967. “These people are so far removed from stock characters.”
³⁰
In early January, Turman announced a “nationwide talent search” for a twenty-two-year-old actor to play Benjamin, a halfhearted attempt at a Scarlett O'Hara–style publicity spin for what was essentially a bicoastal open call for résumés and head shots.
³¹
At the same time, they finally nailed down one of the principals. “I was walking on the Paramount lot,” says agent Leonard Hirshan, “and on the first floor, an office window opened and Larry Turman stuck his head out and said, ‘Can you come in here for a minute? I want you to meet Mike Nichols.' I go in and they say, ‘We're very interested in Anne Bancroft for a role in this picture
The Graduate.
'…So I said, ‘Give me a script,' and the rest is history. I got her $200,000, which was a nice salary at that time.”
³²

“I had dated Annie a little bit, long before this,” says Nichols. “She was certainly a beautiful, exciting, wonderful, angry young woman. Which I happened to like. But it took us a long time to think of her. Now, one of the reasons I didn't think of Annie is the famous thing that she was too young [Bancroft was thirty-five when she was cast]. But then we decided it didn't matter.”
³³
Nichols, having just aged the thirty-three-year-old Taylor into a hardbitten middle-aged drunk, knew he could do the same for Bancroft, and besides, says Turman, “she was a name. Not a blockbuster name, but a name Hollywood knew, and a name I could get for a price.”
³⁴

Turman and Nichols seemed to be inching closer to signing a Benjamin, especially after the director started to realize a built-in problem with his casting strategy: “I discovered that boys who really were that age couldn't get the distance to get rid of the self-pity and…have an
attitude
toward that point in one's life,”
³⁵
Nichols said. Once they started looking at older actors, Charles Grodin, a thirty-one-year-old TV and theater performer with a growing list of credits, impressed them both with a very sharp reading. “Grodin got very close,” says Nichols. “His reading was hilarious, he's brilliantly talented, and he understood the jokes. But he didn't look like Benjamin to me.”
³⁶

“Chuck Grodin gave the best reading,” says Henry. “And maybe one of the best readings I've ever heard in my career, so funny and interesting. He thinks we offered him the part—I don't think we did. But I don't remember his screen test, whereas Dustin's was really memorable.”
³⁷

It was Nichols who first asked to see Hoffman, remembering his performance a couple of years earlier in
Harry Noon and Night
off Broadway. In mid-1966, Nichols had auditioned him for the musical
The Apple Tree
. Hoffman lost the part to Alan Alda, but shortly after that, he had a true breakthrough success as a New York stage actor for the first time in his career. The vehicle was a comedy by Henry Livings called
Eh?
, a British import in which Hoffman was playing a distractible teenage night watchman. “The play went through two directors, neither of whom wanted me,” says Hoffman. “The first one wanted me to ‘do' David Warner, who had done the play in London.” He told Hoffman to go see Warner in the Vanessa Redgrave movie
Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment
and simply duplicate the performance. “Of course, I reacted negatively to that,” says Hoffman. To the actor's amazement, Theodore Mann, the artistic director of New York's Circle in the Square Downtown, where
Eh?
was being staged, kept Hoffman and fired the director. “The second director wanted a kind of camp performance,” says Hoffman, “and I don't do camp very well. I don't think it's funny. I do farce, but I don't do camp. So he fired that director, too.” The third director Mann chose was Alan Arkin, who hit it off with Hoffman immediately but, says Hoffman, “was so afraid that this play wasn't going to be a hit that he didn't use his real name” in the program or on the posters.
³⁸

When
Eh?
, with staging credited to the pseudonymous “Roger Short,” opened in October 1966—two nights before Nichols's
The Apple Tree
—it was an instant sellout hit, and Hoffman, whom
The New York Times'
Eliot Fremont-Smith called “one of the most agile and subtly controlled comedians around,”
³⁹
was suddenly a local sensation. A follow-up rave by Walter Kerr comparing the twenty-nine-year-old actor to a young Buster Keaton cemented his success.
⁴⁰
Now, Hoffman was also turning up on television with regularity, and not just in one-line roles. He starred in adaptations of
The Journey of the Fifth Horse
and Maxwell Anderson's
The Star Wagon
that aired within a week of each other on public television and in a couple of ABC specials as well. “It's funny—I don't think Mike ever saw me in
Eh?
,” says Hoffman. “He was
the
hot director, so if he had come, I would have remembered.”

Hoffman was sent the script for
The Graduate
and a copy of Charles Webb's novel and sat in his apartment on West 11th Street reading both. On his coffee table was
Time
magazine's recent “Man of the Year” issue: at the end of 1966, the editors had selected “The 25 and Under Generation.” The drawing on the cover focused on a blondish, square-jawed young white man with the determined, clear-eyed mien of a future Apollo astronaut. Hoffman looked at the illustration and tossed aside the screenplay. “I thought,
that's
your guy. I reacted against all of it. I didn't want to read for it. I was right. Nichols was wrong. I was not in any way right for that part,” Hoffman says. “I thought, are these people having a breakdown? The guy's name is Benjamin
Braddock
, he's like six feet tall, he's a track runner.”

After eight years of trying, Hoffman, at twenty-nine, finally had the career he thought he wanted. “I had this kind of chutzpah, this New York coffeehouse-and-Kerouac-and-Ginsberg thing: You weren't there to ‘make it,' you were there to be an artist,” he says. “That conceit kind of propelled me. I thought, I'll work off Broadway for the rest of my life and I'll be very happy and I'll have a nice apartment, and I'm not going to screw it up by making a Hollywood movie and being miscast, even though I respected the director.”

Hoffman got a call from Nichols, who was still in Los Angeles doing screen tests. “Nichols said to me, ‘Did you like the script? Did you think it was funny?”' says Hoffman. “And I said, ‘Yeah, very much.'”
⁴¹
Taking a couple of days off from
Eh?
, the actor flew to Los Angeles in mid-January to test with Katharine Ross, a dark-eyed, strong-jawed twenty-six-year-old contract player at Universal who reminded Nichols of his first wife (Barbara Hershey and Kim Darby were among the other actresses who had read for Elaine).
⁴²
Although potential Benjamins and Elaines had read for Nichols and his team separately, Nichols preferred to screen-test them in pairs. Hoffman was whisked through a quick meeting with Bancroft—“It was all ‘How do you do?' ‘How do you do?'—a blur to me,” he says—and then into the makeup room. “It was awful. I had only two or three days to memorize ten pages, and I'm a slow memorizer—I tried to do it on the plane. And then my memory jumps to the makeup chair, and, you know, feeling ‘What am I doing here?' while they tried to turn my face into an Aryan. I remember Nichols saying,
kind of
kiddingly, ‘What can we do about his nose? What can we do about his eyebrows?' I think they plucked me. It was his sly kind of humor, but it wasn't helping me.”