Pictures at a Revolution (44 page)

Summoning the little strength he had left, Tracy rose to the occasion, delivering one of his tenderest and most fully felt performances and letting the speech unfold with the relaxed cadence and rueful half-smile of a man who knows he's made any number of mistakes but is seeing his own life and marriage clearly for the first time in years. There were no more afternoons off; that week, he put in six- and seven-hour days, pushing through one segment of the scene after another. In the monologue's most famous moment, he talks about his love for Christina. “Old?” he says of himself. “Yes. Burned out? Certainly. But I can tell you, the memories are still there—clear, intact, indestructible, and they'll be there if I live to be a hundred and ten…. In the final analysis,” he says, “the only thing that matters is what they feel for each other. And if it's half of what we felt,” he says, turning to Hepburn, whose eyes are glistening with tears, “that's everything.”

Hepburn's tears were, for all the real emotion behind them, a measure of her remarkable control. (In the script, Rose simply wrote, “Is Christina weeping quietly? I don't know.”)
⁴¹
Kramer was stunned by her ability, in “seven, eight, nine successive takes of a scene, [to] make the teardrop drop on the same line each time…. She was just fantastic the way she could do that.”
⁴²
It takes nothing away from Tracy's thoughtfulness and timing as he worked his way through the speech to note that the sequence audiences eventually saw was a triumph of editing as well as of acting. “To keep him appearing dynamic and healthy in that scene was the greatest challenge,” says editor Robert C. Jones. “To keep him seeming vibrant meant going through a lot of film and cheating a lot of things, carefully picking lines that were usable and deleting those that weren't, using a line of dialogue from take three over a picture from take four…. Stanley gave me a lot of room to do that and permission to cut to Katharine Hepburn or one of the other actors so that we could just pick Tracy's best delivery of a line regardless of what the camera was doing. We went through it for weeks and weeks. And I think Tracy's health actually added something to the performance—a kind of vulnerability he hadn't had before.”
⁴³

Tracy finished the monologue on May 19, 1967, just five days before the end of production on
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner
.
⁴⁴
He had one more scene to shoot, but his relief was palpable. “I've been looking over the script,” he told his director. “You really don't need me after tomorrow. If I die on the way home, you and Kate are in the clear. You'll get your money.” The next day, he returned, visibly haggard, for his final scene—a process shot in which he and Hepburn take a drive to get some ice cream. It was a simple sequence that demanded little more from him than his physical presence and a bit of easy dialogue. When his work was complete, assistant director Ray Gosnell turned to the crew and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, this was Spencer Tracy's last shot.” “When he said that,” says Karen Kramer, “Stanley cried. It was the first and last time I ever saw him cry.” As the crew burst into applause, Tracy didn't say anything. He just stepped out of the prop car, smiled broadly, waved, and walked slowly off the soundstage. Kramer watched him go and then said softly, “That is the last time you will see Spencer Tracy on camera.”
⁴⁵

Tracy went home and returned to the same chair in which he had been sitting a year earlier when Kramer had talked him into making the movie. The wrap party was three days later. Hepburn attended and made a speech in which she described herself as “everlastingly grateful,” telling the crew, “Your help…made a hell of a lot of difference…to Spence.”
⁴⁶
Tracy didn't feel up to a party; instead, he picked up the telephone and called his friends. “I did it!” he said. “I've finished the picture! And I was betting against myself all the way.”
⁴⁷

D
ustin Hoffman paced the lobby of the Ambassador Hotel in downtown Los Angeles, about to relive the worst nightmares of his early adolescence. Mike Nichols was getting ready to shoot a scene in which Benjamin, with growing panic, attempts to book a room for his first tryst with Mrs. Robinson and tries desperately to improvise a lie he can tell to an inscrutable desk clerk. The concierge was to have been played by William Daniels, but when Daniels lobbied Nichols to give him something more to do in the movie, the director bumped him up to the role of Benjamin's father, and Buck Henry stepped behind the reservations desk instead.
¹

“Have you ever done anything like this?” Nichols said to Hoffman while they rehearsed the scene.

“I don't think so,” Hoffman said, feeling himself start to freeze up.

“Let's think,” Nichols said, persisting. “Did you ever go anywhere that unnerved you?”

Hoffman reached into his memory. “When I was a kid, I could never buy rubbers if it was a female behind the counter,” he told Nichols. “I would go into a drugstore, and if it was a man, I could ask him very quietly, could I have some prophylactics? But many times, just as I got to the counter, the man would move away and a woman would be there. And in midsentence, I'd have to think of something else.”

“Okay,” said Nichols. “When you're going to get the room, you're walking in to get rubbers. And Buck is a female pharmacist.”
²

Hoffman didn't need much help to access his anxieties. Weeks into shooting
The Graduate
, he was so nervous that he even worried about his ability to manufacture nervousness on camera. And his relationship with Nichols was a complicated one; the more he opened up to Nichols, the more ammunition he gave his director to get under his skin and toy with his blackest fears. “I get to you sometimes, don't I?” Nichols asked him. “You just kind of clam up when I do.”

“In New York I blow my top when things aren't going right,” said Hoffman. “But here I go to the other extreme.”

“That's no good. Just tell me to go to hell,” said Nichols.

“I can't do that,” said Hoffman. “You're the director.”
³

The shoot at the Ambassador that day was turning out to be particularly hard for Hoffman. “I had been having a difficult time with my parents,” he says, “but they wanted to come watch, and I finally acquiesced. I figured it would be okay—there would be a lot of people there, and they could stand behind a rope.” Hoffman's father, Harry, was a movie fan; in the early 1930s, before his son was born, he had worked at Columbia Pictures as a prop master and set decorator. “I never heard about any of that stuff growing up,” says Hoffman. “But later I found out that he had really wanted to direct after watching Frank Capra work.”

Before the scene started, Hoffman excused himself to go to the bathroom. At least once a day, before the cameras rolled, Nichols would give him the same humiliating reminder: “Don't forget to clean the inside of your nose.” Hoffman stared at himself in the mirror, wondering, probably for the hundredth time, why Nichols had cast him. When he came out of the restroom, he saw his father standing next to Nichols, chatting with him. “It was the nightmare thing that every kid experiences,” says Hoffman. “He had gone under the rope! I went over to them and he was saying, ‘Mike, you know, you're not shooting this right….'”

Hoffman went through the epic production of
The Graduate
, which shot for almost one hundred days, on a razor's edge between elation and terror. He was thrilled when he came up with something that made Nichols laugh. “He ruined more than a few takes by cracking up,” says the actor. “But I guess he wasn't laughing enough, because once we started shooting, I never thought I was doing a good job. I've heard and read since then that he wanted to keep me in a constant state of tension, but I think he had really bitten off more than he could chew. He knew he shouldn't have cast me, and I think that's what was plaguing him.”

In the course of a single day, Nichols could both reinforce the confidence of his hypersensitive star and demolish it. “I never had the feeling he was happy with what I was doing,” said the actor. “He'd throw out a cookie occasionally, but I always felt like a disappointment. He'd walk around the entire time saying, ‘Well, we'll never work together again, that's for sure.'”
⁴
Sometimes his direction to Hoffman was as simple as, “Act less. What you think is nothing will, on a big screen, be something.” At other moments he was brutal, using the ear for perfect delivery he had honed in his years onstage to withering effect. “One time, I tried something in a scene and he said to me, ‘What were you
doing
?'” says Hoffman. “And I said, ‘Well, I made a choice….' And he said, slowly, ‘I see. Well, the next time you get a thought, do the opposite.'” But Nichols also knew when his star needed a boost: “I remember sitting with Katharine Ross in a car and Nichols letting me hear him say to the DP [Robert Surtees], ‘He reminds me of Montgomery Clift.' He could relax me in an instant…or not. That was Mike.”
⁵

“To me, it seemed easy, all of it,” says Nichols. “It all sort of fell into place. Maybe that's the rosy glow of memory talking, but I don't think so.” If Nichols felt relaxed as production began, the reason was probably that, as he puts it, “I saw the whole thing—I knew what the movie was.”
⁶
In that, he was a minority of one. “There were a lot of temperamental people,” says Buck Henry, “a lot of actors who weren't coming from quite the same place.”
⁷
And some of the director's crew felt at a loss as well. “When we were given the script,” says Joel Schiller, who worked as an assistant production designer under Dick Sylbert, “I read it and said to Dick, ‘What
is
this?' It didn't seem to be anything. Dick just shrugged and said, ‘Mike'll probably play it for comedy.'”
⁸

But the studiously blasé Sylbert knew Nichols was up to something more ambiguous. Long before he started to scout locations and design sets, he had had a number of conversations with Nichols about giving
The Graduate
a hard, gleaming modernist look—the new-money sheen of California wealth. “California is like America in italics,” Nichols said at the time, “a parody of everything that's most dangerous to us.”
⁹
In the mid-1960s, most American sex comedies were shot quickly, cheaply, and with as little sex as possible: films like
Divorce American Style
and
A Guide for the Married Man
drew their color-filled art direction, their camera blocking, and their punch-line-driven sense of pace from TV sitcoms. For
The Graduate
, Sylbert wanted a colder, more muted palette, something that would represent Nichols's and Buck Henry's desire to refract Los Angeles through a prism of East Coast amusement and light contempt. Henry's script even specified that the costumes were to embody “California Contemporary Sport Style: the adults in styles infinitely too young for them, the children in styles infinitely too old for them.”
¹⁰
And Nichols decided to omit the opening scene of Benjamin's graduation in part so that he could begin with him on an airplane, allowing the first line of the film to be the pilot's voice-over: “Ladies and gentlemen, we're about to begin our descent into Los Angeles.” “It's a statement of theme that you don't really hear, even though it's perfectly loud and clear,” says Nichols. “It's my thesis, but it's invisible, which is just the way I want it.”
¹¹

Sylbert started by thinking about the Robinson and Braddock homes while driving around Beverly Hills with Schiller, who photographed every ostentatious new faux-whatever mansion with a swimming pool that he could spot. Since Benjamin's and Elaine's fathers were partners in the same company, Sylbert told Schiller that “they'd probably buy the exact same everything and charge it against the business. We've got to see how much we can make the houses look alike.”
¹²
But in Sylbert's final design, the relationship between the two homes became dialectical: The Braddock home was largely in white and full of right angles—an environment for bright, sunny, square people. The Robinsons' house, by contrast, was full of shiny black surfaces and sensual curves, a nighttime lair for predatory animals, with a glassed-in, overgrown garden off the living room. Sylbert decided to literalize the idea of Mrs. Robinson as a wild beast, luring Benjamin toward his moral doom, in the appearance of Bancroft herself, down to the suggestion of a wild stripe in her hair. “In those days, you had a long time to plan these things,” says Nichols. “And Sylbert, who was a complicated man but a great art director, had so much fun with the beast in the jungle, as we used to call Mrs. Robinson, and her leopard underwear and her zebra-striped thing and her jungle plants. At one point, I was actually going to have an ape go through that garden, and then I thought, no, better just leave it lay. He even came up with the idea of seeing the bra strap marks—her tan—which they elaborately and carefully made up.”
¹³

Nichols and Henry both knew that
The Graduate
, if it worked, would convey, in its very texture, what Henry called “the disaffection of young people for an environment that they don't seem to be in synch with, the idea that Benjamin doesn't fit with ocean boys, with people his age, with his parents, with his girlfriend. Nobody had made a film specifically about that.”
¹⁴
Accordingly, Nichols sought to have Benjamin constantly cut off from the movie's other characters either by water or by glass. From the opening scenes, in which Benjamin sits gloomily in front of an aquarium, to the final sequence, in which he is trapped behind a huge glass panel in a church as he tries to stop Elaine's wedding, Nichols and Sylbert wanted Benjamin to be shot through or against clear but impenetrable surfaces as often as possible, as if he were trapped in a fishbowl. It was an aesthetic that caused no end of difficulty for Robert Surtees. “Cinematographers absolutely didn't want to shoot with glass back then because it would catch too many reflections,” says Schiller. “Usually, when we built a window or a glass door, we'd just put an inch and a half of glass around the sash to fake a full window reflection, but Dick wouldn't go for that. He said to Surtees, you're gonna have glass in the windows and glass in the doors and you're gonna figure out how to do it and you're gonna get an Academy Award nomination.”
¹⁵

Surtees had begun his career as an assistant cameraman on the 1931 RKO film
Devotion;
he had shot epics and melodramas and musicals and westerns, but little besides Wyler's
The Collector
that would have been described as visually innovative. What Nichols wanted from him sounded preposterous; “I asked for such peculiar things,” he recalls. In the scene in which Elaine confronts Benjamin in the tiny apartment he has rented in Berkeley, Nichols wanted to use a long lens. “Surtees didn't say to me, ‘But that has no meaning.' He would figure out a way to do it. He took out the entire wall of the apartment and we shot the scene from all the way across the stage.”
¹⁶

Surtees later said, “I needed everything I learned in the past thirty years to shoot
The Graduate
.”
¹⁷
He had no choice. Though he may have grumbled privately, the cinematographer knew that, at sixty, he was the newcomer on the set, the stranger facing the tight-knit troika of Nichols, Sylbert, and editor Sam O'Steen, and that if he resisted their approach, he would find himself isolated and written off as a fogy from another generation. So he made it work. “Not only did he fall all over himself to do things he hadn't done, but he would show me things that I didn't know I was allowed to do,” says Nichols. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Surtees was especially interested in the subtleties of lighting. “Look at the sequence in which Benjamin and Mrs. Robinson are at the bar in her house, and then she says, ‘Would you like to see Elaine's portrait?'” says Nichols. “They go upstairs, and we have, ‘Mrs. Robinson, you're trying to seduce me,' and then Benjamin hears Mr. Robinson come home and he runs back downstairs. When we come downstairs, back to the bar, the lighting is entirely different from the first time we were there—it's a dark and scary place because Mr. Robinson is scary and drunk, and she's
really
scary when she comes in. I said, ‘How can we do this? How can we change the light in this room when nothing has changed?' and Surtees told me, ‘It's all right that it's different. You're allowed to do that in movies. How the lights were when they left the room is beside the point—it's a new scene now.' He knew all those things, and he taught them to me beautifully.”
¹⁸

“Whatever Mike said, he got his way,” says Hoffman. “They built the Robinsons' house on the set, the whole house, so you could open doors into rooms—there was a full bathroom even though it wasn't in the script, because you didn't know what Mike might want. I remember walking out of that hallway, and for some reason, he couldn't get the camera through. And he said, ‘How long will it take to get these walls down?' On a regular set, it would be nothing, but it was a fully built
house
. ‘Well, it might take a couple of days,' they said. And he said, ‘All right, then we'll wait.'”
¹⁹