Pictures at a Revolution (51 page)

For the first time, Nichols's calmness and composure began to fail him a little, as the single biggest gamble he had taken in casting the movie seemed to have fallen flat. “The first of the people who saw the movie would go up to him,” says Henry, “and say, ‘Oh, it's wonderful, Mike, so, uh, beautiful to look at—it's just a shame about the boy.' They had only derogatory things to say about Hoffman.”
⁴⁰

Hoffman hadn't been invited to any of the early private screenings of
The Graduate
. After the movie wrapped on August 25, he had returned to New York City and the cocoon of his former anonymous life. He survived for a few months on the $4,000 he had saved while working on the picture and then registered for unemployment, lining up on East 13th Street every week to pick up a $55 check while he looked for acting jobs.
⁴¹
When he ran into Sam O'Steen on the street and asked him how the movie was going, O'Steen said to him, “I hope it's not too fast! Mike cuts really fast!” and hurried on. Turman, Nichols, and Henry had shielded him from the early bad buzz about his performance, so Hoffman had little idea what to expect when he heard the movie had been booked into a theater on East 86th Street for its first sneak preview before a paying New York audience. He and his wife-to-be, Anne Byrne, went in just before the film started and sat in the back of the balcony: “I remember being in this excruciating, claustrophobic state, and the picture starts, and the first shot is a close-up of me. I literally shook through the entire movie.”

The house wasn't sold out, but it was pretty full. “I had no sense of whether it was working or not,” says Hoffman. “I think there are laughs, but mainly I'm looking at scenes and thinking, ‘I should have done that better.' And then it gets to the church, and what got me out of my self-flagellation is that I looked down, over the edge of the balcony, and these kids were on their feet, cheering for me to get away. They had gone wild.”

The movie ended. Hoffman and Byrne hung back until they were sure that everyone had left. Then they got up and pulled on their coats. Hoffman turned up his collar, and they started walking down the stairs. The only audience member left was a small woman in her mid-sixties, holding the railing and making her way toward the exit door with a cane. It was Radie Harris, who had written the “Broadway Ballyhoo” column for
The Hollywood Reporter
since the 1940s. She turned to Hoffman, peered at him, and pointed her cane at his chest. “You're the man who played that part,” she said.

“Yeah.” Hoffman nodded.

“Your life is never going to be the same,” she said, and walked out of the theater.

“It was her way of complimenting me, but it felt like a death sentence,” says Hoffman. “We go outside to get a cab, and it starts to snow. And I was in such denial about what life was doling out that I looked up at the snowflakes and said to Anne, ‘See that?
That's
real. That's the only thing.' I just wanted to wipe it all away.”
⁴²

But whatever confidence the reaction at the sneak preview might have instilled in Hoffman was erased by the movie's premiere, an invitation-only event that Levine staged on both coasts a few weeks before
The Graduate
opened. In Los Angeles, Gregory Peck, Julie Andrews, Norman Jewison, Natalie Wood, and Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate were among those who turned out;
⁴³
the list of New York celebrities who attended the movie and dinner dance at the Hilton was a testament to the breadth of Nichols's universe and included Diane Arbus, Myrna Loy, Sidney Lumet, Saul Steinberg, Burt Bacharach, Irene Selznick, Bobby Darin, Neil Simon, Peter Shaffer, and George Plimpton. Nichols came with Penelope Gilliatt; Hoffman brought Byrne.
⁴⁴
“That night, the suits, the tuxedos, I can't remember a single laugh,” says Hoffman. “It was disastrous. I saw a lot of Levine's friends there, and they all looked like, what is he doing on the screen? It should be Redford!”
⁴⁵

W
arren Beatty knew he was terrible at promotion but terrific at personal persuasion. In the early 1960s, when he made his first movies and was just entering the public eye, being a difficult interview subject still had a kind of cachet for a young movie star: Mumbling, murmuring, squirming, and answering questions with questions signified a reputation-enhancing unwillingness to play the publicity game, a Brandoesque attitude that implied one was up to something more substantial than behaving like the latest compliant product of the Hollywood studio machine. But slouching and surliness didn't come any more naturally to Beatty than opening up, so generally he wouldn't say very much at all. The interminable pause followed by the distracted nonanswer became his signatures, and he took them to maddening extremes: Just before going down to Texas to shoot
Bonnie and Clyde
in 1966, he reluctantly agreed to sit down with Barbara Walters for a
Today
show appearance promoting
Kaleidoscope
. Not only did Beatty neglect to mention the movie, he slid away from Walters's questioning with answers so devoid of content that she told him, on the air, that she had never had a worse interview.
¹

But by the time
Bonnie and Clyde
opened, evasion was becoming passé; these days, top-tier celebrities were proving their seriousness by submitting to long, confessional, let-it-all-hang-out Q&As in
Playboy
. They were expected to unload about sex, revolution, and politics, to free-associate and rant, to spin out anecdotes about losing their virginity or dropping acid. Beatty couldn't do that; although there was no mistaking his interest in sex and politics, talking about them was another matter. So when
Bonnie and Clyde
began to fail, he decided to try to save the movie not by embarking on a round of interviews, but by working the system from the inside, alternately deploying charm and a strong arm, using each tactic one-on-one wherever he saw a chance.

Beatty traveled from city to city and theater to theater, checking projector bulbs to see how
Bonnie and Clyde
looked, making sure that, per his specifications, projectionists turned the volume two calibrations higher than the standard wherever the film played,
²
talking to exhibitors and telling them how well it was doing in New York, how young audiences were excited about the movie and urging their friends to go, how if movie houses just kept the picture booked for one or two more weeks, they'd see the needle start to move in the right direction and have a long-running hit on their hands. He would show theater owners week-by-week revenue charts from neighborhoods where the film's business had improved during the course of its run. Beatty found this door-to-door salesmanship “demeaning,”
³
but he didn't let up. Before the London opening, he went to England and hosted a week of private midnight screenings for the city's tastemakers, the people he had gotten to know when he was living there with Leslie Caron. He drafted Benton and Newman to work on the ad campaign with Dick Lederer, who had written the great slogan “They're Young. They're in Love. And They Kill People.” Finally, he worked Warner Brothers' executive suites on both coasts, determined not to let a change in management sink his movie.
⁴

In some ways, Seven Arts' takeover of the studio benefited Beatty. Jack Warner no longer had a say in
Bonnie and Clyde
's future, and Ben Kalmenson, who had never had much faith in Beatty as a star, found himself in a drastically reduced role in the new company and was soon to be bought out.
⁵
Meanwhile, Lederer, a Beatty ally, was given more authority over advertising and publicity.
⁶
While those involved in the film have often said that it was washed up by the end of October, two and a half months into its run, the numbers suggest that the movie was still performing strongly.
Bonnie and Clyde
had been a hit in Manhattan from the beginning, and in mid-October, Warner Brothers expanded it onto dozens of screens in the New York area, where it drew impressive crowds. For the month of October, it was the number three film in the country, a remarkable performance given its limited release.
⁷
“The movie found, even at the very beginning, an audience of moviegoers, and word was getting out,” says Penn. “Lines began to appear at the box office [in New York], all these wonderful-looking kids of what was beginning to be the 1960s, probably smoking dope while they were waiting to get in.”
⁸

In November,
Bonnie and Clyde
faltered, but not because its potential audience had been exhausted: Warner Brothers simply stopped booking the picture into theaters. Despite its high grosses in New York, the studio took the disappointing results of its Kansas City test run as justification for a decision not to give the movie a wide release anywhere outside of New York. Even though
Variety
reported
Bonnie and Clyde
's weekly take as “big” in Washington, D.C., “boff” in Chicago, and “robust” in Los Angeles, the picture had only one print in each city; Warners was essentially treating it as an art-house release everywhere but New York. In Los Angeles,
Bonnie and Clyde
played to steady business at a single theater, the Vogue, for eighteen weeks without ever going wider.

Beatty was furious about the way the new Warner regime was handling the movie, particularly because he believed it was being shoved off screens in favor of
Reflections in a Golden Eye
, a movie Seven Arts had produced before it acquired Warner Brothers and which Beatty now believed that company chief Eliot Hyman was treating preferentially. In November,
Reflections
was on 250 screens, far more than
Bonnie and Clyde
, despite the fact that audiences had demonstrated little interest in seeing Marlon Brando play a half-mad repressed homosexual army colonel married to Elizabeth Taylor. Even the way
Reflections
looked was being widely rejected; moviegoers responded so poorly to director John Huston's decision to desaturate the color and tint the entire picture brownish gold that in many cities they complained to theater managers and demanded their money back. After
Reflections
opened outside of New York, Warner Brothers spent a considerable sum of money recalling every print and having the picture reprocessed in normal, untinted Technicolor.
⁹

If that kind of expense was being lavished on a film that had virtually no critical backing or popular word of mouth, Beatty wanted to know why
Bonnie and Clyde
wasn't getting more attention, especially since the press was now almost completely on the side of his movie. Faye Dunaway was appearing in
Harper's Bazaar, Town & Country, Life, Vogue, Cosmopolitan, Paris Match
, and
Esquire;
¹⁰
in November, a
New York Times
Style section reporter followed her as she previewed the spring 1968 collections, which were full of berets and knit pullovers clearly inspired by Theadora Van Runkle's costumes; Dunaway's “portrayal of Bonnie,” the reporter wrote, “is causing a resurgence of interest in nineteen-thirties fashions.”
¹¹
Arthur Penn found himself becoming a go-to talking head on the subject of violence in the movies throughout the fall, as critics found themselves weighing
Bonnie and Clyde
and
The Dirty Dozen
against John Boorman's brutal, nihilistic
Point Blank
, Stuart Rosenberg's
Cool Hand Luke
, and Richard Brooks's
In Cold Blood
. Even publications like the
National Catholic Reporter
were issuing strong defenses of Beatty's picture, writing, “There is a grim irony in hearing critics scream bloody murder when finally presented with an approximation of the genuine article (where were their outcries when a whole society was being marinated in violence?).”
¹²

In early December, sixteen weeks after
Bonnie and Clyde
opened, the movie made the cover of
Time
magazine. Robert Rauschenberg created a collage of images of Beatty and Dunaway, adorned with the headline
THE NEW CINEMA: VIOLENCE…SEX…ART…
Inside was a five-thousand-word story in which the magazine admitted that its own original, dismissive review was a “mistake,” then went on to call the film “not only the sleeper of the decade but also, to a growing consensus of audiences and critics, the best movie of the year…a watershed picture, the kind that signals a new style, a new trend…. In the wake of
Bonnie and Clyde
, there is an almost euphoric sense in Hollywood that more such movies can and will be made.”

In a national media universe then dominated by three networks and three weekly newsmagazines (
Life
and
Newsweek
were the others), the impact of the
Time
cover can scarcely be overstated; it marked the public birth of the idea of a New Hollywood—and to believe in it was, by definition, to view the rest of the movie business as an archaic and doomed enterprise. Although the magazine cited films as disparate as
In the Heat of the Night, Two For The Road, Blow-Up
, and the still-to-open
The Graduate
as examples of fresh, forward-looking filmmaking, the piece left little doubt about what was igniting all the excitement. To understand
Bonnie and Clyde
as “a commentary on the mindless daily violence of the American '60s” (something that didn't exist when Benton and Newman started writing the film) and to realize that movies were now allowed to “[cast] a coolly neutral eye on life and death and on humanity's most perverse moods and modes” was to ally oneself with the future of film; to carp about realism, historical verisimilitude, or the moral effect on an audience “torn between horror and glee”
¹³
was to be consigned to the past.
Bonnie and Clyde
was now not just a movie, but a movement—and sides were being chosen.

That gave Beatty all the ammunition he needed. It was clear that Seven Arts' Eliot Hyman had little stake in promoting a movie he had inherited from the Jack Warner era, and he may have been uncommitted to
Bonnie and Clyde
in part because Beatty's production company, Tatira, had been promised such a big share of the movie's profits (should there be any) that the upside for the studio was limited. Whatever the reason, Beatty wasn't having it—he confronted Hyman behind closed doors in an angry conversation during which he says he threatened to sue the new studio head. “I got tougher than I had been before,” he says. “I said, ‘I want you to put this movie back in theaters,' but beyond that, I felt I had a hand to play with Hyman, and I played it well.” The cards Beatty was holding were apparently less important than the cards Hyman feared he was holding; Beatty never made it clear exactly what he was going to sue him for—it's likely that it had something to do with a potential financial conflict of interest regarding
Reflections in a Golden Eye
—but the brinkmanship worked. Hyman dispatched his new second in command, Joseph Sugar, to New York to meet with Dick Lederer. “Is this movie as great as you say it is?” Sugar asked.

“Yes,” said Lederer, “and we almost destroyed it.” Together, they began mapping out plans for a rerelease.
¹⁴

At
The New York Times
, Bosley Crowther was still throwing as many punches at the movie as he could: When
Cool Hand Luke
opened, he called it “much more effective, for my taste, than the glossy pseudo-realism of
Bonnie and Clyde
.”
¹⁵
But his battle was lost. In November, the paper's executive editor Turner Catledge called him into his office and told him, as gently as possible, that it was time for a new assignment. Crowther would remain the chief movie critic of the
Times
through the end of December, in order to allow him to compile his final “ten best” list and, one last time, to preside over the New York Film Critics Circle awards. After that, he would be asked to serve as a roving reporter filing stories from film festivals around the world, but his days as a reviewer would be over. Renata Adler, who had never worked as a film critic, was to replace him. “I was very fond of Bosley Crowther, but it had to be done,” says Arthur Gelb, then the paper's culture editor. “We had to have someone who could look at movies from a fresh perspective. At the
Times
, they never fire you—they feel too guilty. They just put you on a different path and give you more money to soothe their guilt. But I know he felt humiliated.”
¹⁶
After thirty-nine years on the paper's culture desk, Crowther had no choice but to accept the reassignment. His farewell piece was to be a column on
The Graduate
.

 

As Columbia Pictures
planned its publicity campaign for
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner
, Sidney Poitier was largely unavailable, immersed in the filming of
For Love of Ivy
. That was just as well for the cautious studio, which decided to capitalize on the sentiment surrounding Spencer Tracy's death by centering its promotional efforts on Katharine Hepburn, who agreed to “introduce” her niece to the press in a series of carefully managed interviews. Then the movie got an unexpected boost from some front-page news. In September 1967, eighteen-year-old Margaret Rusk married twenty-two-year-old Guy Smith at Stanford University. Rusk was white; Smith was black; and Rusk's father was the secretary of state. When Dean Rusk learned of his daughter's engagement, he went to President Johnson and offered to resign rather than embarrass the administration, but he also made it clear that he intended to walk her down the aisle either way. Johnson didn't let him go; his presidency was so intertwined with Rusk's policy making that
The New York Review of Books
ran a front-page David Levine caricature of Rusk and the president depicting them as, respectively, Bonnie and Clyde.
¹⁷
The Rusk-Smith wedding was covered extensively by most newspapers and made the cover of
Time
, which could have been reading outtakes from the final speech William Rose had given Spencer Tracy when it proclaimed, “In a year when blackwhite animosity has reached a violent crescendo in the land, two young people and their parents showed that separateness is far from the sum total of race relations in the U.S.—that to the marriage of two minds, color should be no impediment.” But the article also noted that the State Department had received hundreds of angry calls and letters, that many members of Rusk's family did not attend the wedding, and that Democrats were worried about possible political fallout for Johnson in the 1968 presidential election. The magazine quoted one woman as saying of Rusk, “It will serve the old goat right to have nigger grandbabies,”
¹⁸
and followed up with a letter column in which two correspondents approved of the wedding and two did not—one of whom argued that “the mongrelizing of races…would be more properly ignored.”
¹⁹