Pictures at a Revolution (50 page)

As
Dolittle
's opening approached, 20th Century-Fox was hit with another unpleasant surprise—a $4.5 million lawsuit brought by Helen Winston, the would-be producer whom Arthur Jacobs had aced out of the rights to the Dolittle books four years earlier.
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Winston had seen the movie and taken note of a scene in which the animals around the doctor threaten to go on strike, a plot element that her screenwriter, Larry Watkin, had included in the draft of the movie she had tried to sell to studios back in 1962.
²⁰
When news of the suit broke, “Arthur Jacobs called,” remembers Hugh Lofting's son, Christopher, “and said, ‘Helen is threatening us over this scene. We know it's bullshit, but can you tell us what book it's from?' I said, ‘Arthur, I have bad news for you. She's right! It was never in the books.' We were all surprised because it had seemed like such a natural idea—Leslie had seen the script [that Winston commissioned], assumed it had come from one of the books, and put it in.”
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Fox eventually settled with Winston. There wasn't time for the distraction of a lawsuit. Whatever trepidation Zanuck and his colleagues were feeling, they had a gigantically expensive movie to open and promote, records to sell, and premieres to stage around the world in as many cities as possible. At one point, they even wondered if they could get Harrison to attend the movie's opening in Lima if the Peruvian government agreed to bestow some honor on him (“I think I can get him, I don't know, the Condor of the Andes or something like that,” suggested Fox's head of Latin American publicity).
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As for Jacobs, his aspirations for the film had no ceiling—among his publicity talking points were “Vatican screening” and “Local Boards of Education to declare Doctor Dolittle Day and release children from school.”
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The veteran publicist-turned-producer was back in his element and, blithely disregarding the ominous mood around him, started planning
Doctor Dolittle
's Academy Awards campaign.

 

While Mike Nichols
was filming
The Graduate
, staying in a rented house that had once belonged to Cole Porter, and cutting himself off from everything that didn't lie within the universe of Benjamin Braddock, he fell into a morning ritual: He would get up very early, listen to
Sounds of Silence
or
Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme
, the Simon and Garfunkel LPs that his brother had sent him—the music he had fallen in love with during rehearsals for the movie—and then go to the Paramount lot to shoot for the day. He'd come home late at night, go to bed, get up, and play the same music the next morning. Only a few weeks into the shoot, he decided to follow the instinct he had had during rehearsals and approach Simon and Garfunkel. “This is your score!” he thought. “Listen to it! How could it have taken so long to figure it out?” Nichols got in touch with them, showed them footage of a few scenes he had put together, and asked them if they'd be interested in writing a new set of songs for the movie.
²⁴

The two singer-songwriters, both twenty-five and already highly successful, didn't jump at the chance—with credibility to protect, they sniffed at anything that might smack of a Hollywood sellout. “Paul and Artie were, as they were about everything back then, unenthusiastic,” says Nichols. “But they consented—Paul consented—to write a few songs.”
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Leonard Hirshan, the agent who represented Simon as well as Anne Bancroft, struck a deal in which Simon would be paid $25,000 to submit three new songs to Nichols and Larry Turman, any two of which they would have the right to use in the movie.
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Long before production was over, Nichols was cutting sequences in his head to “The Sound of Silence” and “Scarborough Fair.” A few weeks later, Simon turned in two new pieces. One, “Punky's Dilemma,” was a comically acid-trippy daydream of a song that contained a nod to the alienation of living in Southern California; the other, “Overs,” was a melancholy tune about the disintegration of a romance, a ballad that was intended to be, says Nichols, “for, or about, Mrs. Robinson.” Nichols didn't think either song worked. “Have you got anything else?” he said.

“Paul and Artie went off for a few minutes and muttered to each other,” says Nichols, “and then came back and sang ‘Mrs. Robinson.' And I said, ‘Well,
that
's great!' Paul had been working on a song called ‘Mrs. Roosevelt.' That's why Joe DiMaggio was in there—it was about icons of a certain generation. But he just dumped that and made her Mrs. Robinson.”
²⁷
(“There was no name in it,” insisted Garfunkel in 1968. “We'd just fill in with any three-syllable name…and then Mike froze it.”)
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Nichols wove it into the movie in three repetitive fragments, each about a minute long, one containing only the metronomic beat of the song and the others using “dee di-di-di dee dee dee” in place of actual verses, since Simon hadn't written any yet and there wasn't time to do more.
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Only two lines of the song are actually heard in the movie, and only one—“And here's to you, Mrs. Robinson, / Jesus loves you more than you will know”—made it into the finished single a year later.

“Mrs. Robinson,” even in piecemeal form, solved one problem, giving Nichols the jaunty, accelerating sound track he needed to glue together a seven-minute series of scenes near the end of the movie in which Benjamin finds out about Elaine's wedding and tries to stop it. After production was over, he worked and reworked the sequence with Sam O'Steen in his editing room overlooking Times Square. “We had real trouble with that montage. We had sweated over that scene for a week or ten days—in the script it was just a page,” says Buck Henry. “There was a part we just couldn't get connected until that song. The fact that the song stops and then starts again still really irritates me, but it's a great sequence of filmmaking.”
²⁹
However, Nichols still had no music to pull together a five-minute, wordless montage earlier in
The Graduate
, an impressionistic sequence that suggests both Benjamin's moral drift and his liberation from the constriction of being an A student and a good son. As we watch him, he floats lazily through the summer, drifting from bedroom to backyard, continuing his affair with Mrs. Robinson, and lolling on an inflatable raft in his parents' swimming pool, letting time glide by. The montage ends with a dazzling seamless cut that had been written and storyboarded early on in which Benjamin appears to simultaneously lift himself onto the raft and onto Mrs. Robinson. In the editing room, Nichols and Sam O'Steen had cut it to “The Sound of Silence,” playing the song until it ended and then moving directly into “April Come She Will,” another track from the
Sounds of Silence
album. The deeper they got into the obsessive, sixteen-hour-a-day rhythm of life in front of a Moviola, the less able they felt to let go of the songs they had chosen. “‘Hello, darkness, my old friend…' was what was happening in Benjamin's head,” says Nichols. “O'Steen and I were beside ourselves, because we knew nothing else would work. We felt that the song expressed the deep depression he'd been in since he got home, an emotional suicide that he commits by starting to fuck Mrs. Robinson. At a certain point, movies just decide what they need. So I finally just said, ‘Can I buy it?'”
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The decision didn't seem brilliant, just strange. Movies in the 1960s didn't recycle pop hits, and “The Sound of Silence” was, by the time Nichols got to it, used up; it had already reached number one on
Billboard
's charts in January 1966, and Joe Levine thought it was perverse to play it twice in forty minutes—first over the opening credits as Benjamin and his luggage, parallel objects on parallel conveyer belts, move through the airport, and then in the montage. But Levine relented once Nichols showed him the footage. “I ran it, and he said, ‘I smell money!'” says Nichols, “thereby endearing himself to Paul Simon for all time.”
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When he saw the completed film, however, Levine lost the scent of profitability as quickly as he had found it. Nichols had trimmed
The Graduate
to a very lean 106 minutes, remaking several scenes in the editing room; he had dropped 6 minutes from Hoffman and Bancroft's long, problematic bedroom conversation by cutting large passages of dialogue every time one of them turned the lights on or off. But Levine didn't see the movie he expected to see: Where was all the sex? By late 1967,
The Graduate
could have gotten away with far more than it was showing. The new Production Code was already collapsing, along with the authority of the National Catholic Office for Motion Pictures, which had condemned five studio movies during the year, from
Hurry Sundown
to
Reflections in a Golden Eye
, without hurting their box office a bit.
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Over the summer,
Variety
had reported that it could no longer find a single major theater chain in the country that refused to play condemned films. Joseph Strick's adaptation of James Joyce's
Ulysses
had become the first widely reviewed release to use the word
fuck
, and both
Ulysses
and Peter Brook's
Marat/Sade
had shown a man nude from behind, something the Code and the Catholics had let pass because, as
The New York Times'
Vincent Canby explained, the National Catholic Office “believes that females and ‘normal' males are not sexually stimulated by rear-view male nudity.”
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The MPAA was no longer drawing any lines in the sand; Jack Valenti was just months away from scrapping the Code entirely and replacing it with a ratings system.

The Graduate
did have a millisecond of skin: a blink-and-you-miss-it nipple that belonged to Anne Bancroft's body double, used by Nichols as a shock cut from Benjamin's terrified face in the scene in which Mrs. Robinson traps him in Elaine's bedroom. (Bancroft, Hirshan, and her lawyer, Norma Zarky, had contractual veto power over not only whose nipple would be used, but how long it would appear on screen. They watched the footage together in a Los Angeles screening room and were then given copies so that if anything changed, said Hirshan, “what Anne had in the vault would be the evidence required to take appropriate legal action.”)
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But aside from that moment, the movie didn't look much like either a sex film or a comedy to Levine. How was he supposed to sell something so uncategorizable?

“There was a brouhaha,” says Dustin Hoffman. “He wanted me and Anne to be naked in the poster. She was supposed to be sitting on the bed, and I would have my back to the camera so you can see my ass, and she's looking up at me. And the reason he wanted that is that he was thinking, ‘All this movie's ever going to be is an art-house release, and if people think there's nudity, maybe they'll come.' Anne wouldn't do it, but the one who
really
wouldn't do it was Nichols.”
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Levine set an opening date of December 21 for
The Graduate
, but he seemed more interested in talking to the press about
The Tiger and the Pussycat
, an Italian sex comedy Embassy had imported that starred Ann-Margret and Vittorio Gassman.
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Nichols spent the fall directing Bancroft on Broadway in a revival of
The Little Foxes
that also featured George C. Scott, E. G. Marshall, and Beah Richards. Out of the editing room at last, he felt calm about his final cut—“I knew what I was attacking,” he says, “and I felt the movie was just the way I wanted it.”
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But the mood of his colleagues in the months preceding the opening was tense. Buck Henry was angry that Calder Willingham, whose draft of the screenplay had been discarded years earlier, had reappeared out of nowhere and demanded a Writers Guild arbitration for co-credit on the movie. Once he heard that Willingham was arbitrating, Peter Nelson, who had done a draft for Larry Turman years earlier, lobbied for credit as well. (William Hanley, who had also written a version, opted not to ask for a credit.) Since all three arbitrating writers had drafted screenplays that relied heavily on Charles Webb's original novel, the Writers Guild decided to credit the script to Willingham and Henry, in that order, even though Henry had started from scratch and says he “didn't know Calder Willingham existed until I had finished my work. Nobody told me there had been three previous writers. There's nothing of Willingham's in the film. I thought, what is this!? I can't believe it! Was I pissed off? Yeah, I was pissed off that I wasn't warned, although I should have asked—I just hadn't had enough experience. Willingham was a really good writer, so I have to believe he thought he wrote it in some way. But he got a bad reputation for that.” Turman, who felt that he had “inadvertently helped Calder Willingham get a credit by telling him to put more stuff in from the book,” was upset as well. “But,” he says, “everyone knew Buck wrote the script.”
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Levine started to screen the movie for his friends and people in the industry. The first showings didn't go well. “I particularly remember a screening at the Directors Guild,” says Nichols. “I was sitting behind Elia Kazan, who may have been with Budd Schulberg. Kazan was the reason I was in theater—I saw
Streetcar
when I was in high school, and I never got over it. And I sat behind them, and there was a lot of rolling of eyes. He was obviously not liking it. I was so sad.” Even some cast members were indifferent. “I was very annoyed because they had cut some things that Elizabeth Wilson and I had done together that I liked, only small things, but I probably had a chip on my shoulder,” says William Daniels. “I certainly didn't sense that it was going to become a classic—I don't think anyone did until it opened.” Wilson was working with Nichols on
The Little Foxes
as a standby for Bancroft when he invited her to a small screening of the film. “I'll be honest—it just didn't hit me the way I thought it was going to,” she says. “
Now
, of course, I love it, but that day…It was so stupid of me, but I went back to rehearsal and just couldn't cover my disappointment and said something to Mike. He got pretty angry.”
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