FIVE

In May 1964, almost a year after they had started to talk about Bonnie and Clyde, Robert Benton and David Newman became, for the first time, paid screenwriters. Elinor Jones and Norton Wright gave them $1,700, formalizing their own role as producers and buying themselves an eighteen-month window—until November 27, 1965—during which they had the right to try to secure a production deal for the movie.¹ Benton and Newman took some time off from their jobs at Esquire and used their payday for a trip to East Texas, where, guided by Benton, who knew some of the turf, they spent time visiting the sites of Parker and Barrow’s crimes and getting a feel for the dusty, remarkably unaltered landscape. “Heighdy! See how I’m picking up the local jargon?” Newman wrote to Jones on a postcard. “Things going extremely well for us. Found the graves of Clyde and [Buck Barrow, his brother] in abandoned cemetery overgrown with weeds. One of the strangest sensations we ever had—standing six feet over Clyde. On Monday we’ll see Bonnie’s…. Bob is taking a lot of pictures. Perfect Bonnie and Clyde locations! Quite uncanny to see cities and towns that look like 1932 this year. So we are spending your money wisely and well.”²

Benton and Newman often talked about the trip as a turning point—a journey during which they fell deeper into the world of Bonnie and Clyde and became fully committed to screenwriting. They kept their ears open for speech patterns and dust bowl slang.³ Newman immersed himself in an idiom and an environment that he had never encountered. And it was in Texas that some of their ideas for the film’s jolting changes in mood began to sharpen. “Bob and David had in their viscera some themes that they wanted to address,” says Wright. “Bob in particular was always drawn to the thought that what is rollicking good fun one minute can, in the blink of an eye, turn into something violent and scary—it was in his blood.”⁴

Jones and Wright became more excited with every new dispatch from Texas. Still convinced that the movie could be made for between $350,000 and $500,000, a budget range that had been confirmed by their conversations with François Truffaut, they were now trying hard to turn themselves into real producers. Wright, who had gotten a job as a production assistant on TV’s Captain Kangaroo (“I was pickling my brains, but at least I had some income”), was taking a Directors Guild of America–sponsored class in production management,⁵ and Jones was doing what she could to move Truffaut, their strongest link to legitimacy, closer to making a deal.

Truffaut, however, could raise her hopes with one sentence and dash them with the next. Before leaving New York, he met with Jones in the lobby of the Algonquin Hotel.⁶ They talked about a due date for the script, settling on July 1, and Truffaut told her, “You have a very good thing here, you know—an excellent script for a director.” When Jones told him he was the only director they wanted, Truffaut remarked casually that any good director, foreign or American, could make Bonnie and Clyde and that he would return to the United States sometime in July, when he would make a final decision about whether to direct the movie.

Knowing of Benton and Newman’s trip, Truffaut asked Jones to have them send him as many photographs and postcards as possible from Texas. (They did, and he replied by sending them the gangster comic strips from France Soir that had helped spark his initial curiosity about Bonnie and Clyde.) Are “the boys” still following the ideas they had discussed during their hotel room marathons? he asked Jones. When she assured him that they were, he cautioned, “But not too faithfully. [I] don’t want to…restrict them at this point.”

During their meeting, Truffaut also suggested Mickey One’s Harrison Starr (whom neither Wright nor Jones knew) as a possible associate producer who might be able to help them secure financing. For his part, Starr wasn’t happy to learn that the Bonnie and Clyde treatment already had producers attached; he had clearly had separate conversations with Godard and Truffaut about producing Bonnie and Clyde himself and, eager to prove his suitability for the job, had taken the initiative to meet with Mike Frankovich at Columbia to see if he would be willing to fund the film as part of a new program of low-cost European-style ventures the studio was setting up.⁷

After Benton and Newman returned to New York, they began work in earnest on turning their treatment of Bonnie and Clyde into a screenplay that incorporated everything they had learned from Truffaut and from Texas, reshaping their descriptive passages into scenes with dialogue. They also went back to Esquire (where Benton was no longer art director but had become the magazine’s special projects editor) to oversee the completion of their grand statement of pop principle, “The New Sentimentality,” the magazine’s cover story in July 1964. Lofty and exuberant, hilariously arrogant, and irresistibly presented as an infallible index of taste, the article was a cultural call to arms—out with the old (except for those elements of the old approved by the young), in with the new. The “Old Sentimentality,” exemplified by the Eisenhower era and values like “Patriotism, Love, Religion, Mom, The Girl,” had given way, Benton and Newman argued, to a “New Sentimentality” about “you, really just you, not what you were told or taught, but what goes on in your head, really, and in your heart, really.”⁸

“The New Sentimentality” was really about what was going on in Benton’s and Newman’s heads and hearts, which wasn’t hard to decode. Breathless’s Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo were a “Key Couple of the New Sentimentality,” and their description of them (“He was destroyed because he let love carry him away…she was fragile, but hard”) could have come straight from their Bonnie and Clyde treatment. Other favored representations of the New Sentimentality included L’Avventura, Malcolm X, Alfred Hitchcock, and, of course, Truffaut, who was shamelessly referenced four times. “He is Style over Content,” they wrote, meaning it as high praise. Consigned to the ash heap as relics of the Old Sentimentality were The Sound of Music, Gene Kelly, and John Wayne. “What we were talking about,” Newman wrote later, “was what is now known as ‘the Sixties.’ But as we were in the midst of living through them at the time, we didn’t have a chronological name for what was happening.”⁹

“The New Sentimentality” slowed Benton and Newman’s work on Bonnie and Clyde, but not significantly: By August 1964, they had completed their first draft of the screenplay. Wright and Jones read what they had done and “flipped over it,” says Wright. “It was just marvelous.” The young producers were ready to spring into action, even though they weren’t entirely sure what they were supposed to do next. “We really didn’t have any idea other than that, if we got a budget together and then told [attorney] Bob Montgomery about it, we’d go to the major studios and tell them about François Truffaut and they’d come rushing to us,” says Wright.¹⁰

Their first shock came when Wright, using the skills he had acquired in his production management class, went through Benton and Newman’s script page by page, only to realize that the $350,000 they had tossed around as a budget was a fantasy. “I broke it down, added it up, and to my horror, it came to the catastrophically high figure of a million three,” he says. “I kept checking my addition, thinking, ‘This is terrible!’”¹¹ Wright’s math was correct: He and Jones hadn’t taken into account the fact that Bonnie and Clyde would require period automobiles, doubled and tripled costumes to account for all the blood and bullets the script now contained, and multiple locations. The film was no longer viable as the on-the-fly independent production they had envisioned.

The second, far worse piece of news came in a letter from Truffaut to Elinor Jones on September 7, 1964. “I have had the new script…read to me in French,” he wrote of Bonnie and Clyde. “I thought all the modifications are excellent. I am, unfortunately, obliged to reply to you in the negative.” Three weeks earlier, Truffaut had warned Helen Scott in a letter “that I want to curb the enthusiasm of Elinor Jones.” Now, he was offering Jones a variety of reasons for turning down the film: He had decided that La Marié Était en Noir (The Bride Wore Black), a French-language adaptation of an American suspense novel, would be his next film; moreover, he wrote, Lewis Allen was insisting to him that his first American film would have to be Fahrenheit 451, which was now scheduled for production in the summer of 1965.¹²

“I would like you to know that, of all the scripts I have turned down in the last five years, Bonnie and Clyde is the best, but I hope that you will fully understand my reasons and that David Newman and Robert Benton will also understand them,” Truffaut wrote. In fact his explanation was slightly slippery; it’s not clear why he would suddenly have accepted a dictum from Lewis Allen, with whom he had now had a long and testy relationship, about the start date of Fahrenheit 451. Truffaut was, at the time of his letter, going through some problems he didn’t share with Jones: He was in the middle of a divorce, and his latest film, La Peau Douce (The Soft Skin), had opened to poor reviews and mediocre business in France.¹³ In the letter, he sounded self-conscious, formal, and somewhat overinsistent about his lack of remorse. “I do not think that I have caused you to waste too much time, nor have I broken my word,” he wrote, “since I had always made it clear I would make my final decision when the second version of the script was finished.”

But Truffaut seemed to know how crushing his abrupt about-face would be, because he had taken the time to arrange an extraordinary second chance for the movie. He had given Benton and Newman’s script, he said, to Jean-Luc Godard, who “greatly liked” it, was “a very fast worker,” “speaks English fluently,” and “might well give you an American Breathless.” Truffaut didn’t say whether he had ever talked with Godard about the possibility of taking over Bonnie and Clyde when both men were in New York. But he was telling the truth about Godard’s reaction: Before he broke the news to Jones, he had sent the script to Italy, where Godard was showing his newest movie at the Venice Film Festival, and Godard had promptly cabled him back: “Am in love with Bonnie and also with Clyde. Stop. Would be happy to speak with authors in New York.”¹⁴

Benton and Newman didn’t have the time or the inclination to be devastated. They were now exchanging one leader of the French New Wave for the other, and hesitation was a luxury they couldn’t afford: Two of Godard’s newest movies were showing at the New York Film Festival the following week, and the director wanted to meet them during his visit to New York and make a decision about Bonnie and Clyde on the spot.

The festival, sponsored by the Film Society of Lincoln Center, was only a year old in 1964, but under the guidance of its respected and influential program director, Richard Roud, it was already starting to assert itself as an annual summit meeting for the world’s leading filmmakers. Besides Godard, who was showing A Woman Is a Woman and Band of Outsiders, that fall’s invited directors included Bernardo Bertolucci, Abel Gance, Luis Buñuel, and Satyajit Ray. An invitation extended to an American director signified approval by the auteurist critical community—thus the inclusion of Sidney Lumet’s Fail-Safe and Robert Rossen’s Lilith (the latter making its long-delayed and poorly received debut).¹⁵

As Truffaut had said, Godard worked fast: In the four years since Breathless, he had directed seven features as well as shorts in three different multidirector omnibus films, a format that enjoyed brief popularity in Europe in the early 1960s. “That was very much a Nouvelle Vague thing—get in there and do it quickly,” says Elinor Jones. “Even Truffaut thought that way. But with Godard, it went to extremes.”¹⁶

When he arrived in New York, Godard began his flirtation with Bonnie and Clyde by meeting with the two producers for lunch at the Algonquin. “Godard was somewhat cool, somewhat distant, but he said he was interested in the script,” says Wright.¹⁷ There was a bit of polite, detached discussion in which Godard advanced some of his ideas for the film and Jones and Wright discussed their own. Harrison Starr, whom Godard brought along to the meeting, says it didn’t go well. “I literally saw the gate close in Jean-Luc’s eyes, and that was it. I knew that he wasn’t going to work with them.”¹⁸

At lunch, the conversation turned to Arthur Penn’s 1958 film, The Left Handed Gun. “We were all interested in how a western could be made a different way,” says Wright. “And Godard turned to me and said, ‘Could you arrange a screening for me by tomorrow?’ I thought, this is a challenge—Godard is saying, I wonder if this kid has enough clout to set up a screening on short notice.” Wright managed to book a showing of Penn’s film, after which he says Godard warmed toward them a bit.¹⁹ For their part, Benton and Newman had quickly transferred their enthusiasm to the director—whom, after all, they had already labeled a pillar of the New Sentimentality. “I think they were just so enamored of his work and of the possibility of getting another one of their film heroes,” says Jones.²⁰

“Bob and David just wanted to get it made!” says Leslie Newman. “To have people like Truffaut and Godard coming in—oh, my God, these were their idols, the people whose movies they worshipped.”²¹

But the producers had as many doubts about what Godard would bring to Benton and Newman’s script as Godard had about them. “The truth is that Norton and I didn’t want Godard—we didn’t like him for Bonnie and Clyde,” says Jones. “I think that particularly upset David.”²²

It was in this context—one of growing tension, unarticulated concerns, and intense time pressure—that the key players in Bonnie and Clyde gathered at Elinor and Tom Jones’s apartment on September 19 for a meeting that has since become one of the great gallows-humor moments in the film’s history, although decades of embellishment and retelling have blurred some of the precise details.²³ Assembled in the living room were Godard, Jones, and Wright; Benton and Newman; and Helen Scott, who was continuing to act as a liaison on the project.^*

After some pleasantries, they got down to business. “Everybody remembers that meeting differently,” says Benton. But it began to go wrong almost from the start, when Godard, with little preamble, announced that he wanted to begin preproduction on Bonnie and Clyde in December—just three months away—and that he intended to shoot the movie in New Jersey in January, on a four-week shooting schedule. He also said he wanted to give the script to Columbia right away, information that took everyone by surprise.

Nobody in the living room had very much to say as Godard talked, but after a few minutes, Norton Wright’s reservations boiled over into panic. “I said to him, you know, that’s really not the way to do it. This is a period piece, it’s an expensive piece, we should shoot it on location in the places where Bob and David had done their research. The spring would be good, or maybe the fall—but it’s snowy and cold and wet in New Jersey.”

Whatever Wright’s exact words were—he had apparently referred to meteorological reports—they caused the temperature in the room to plunge dramatically. According to Benton, Godard stood up, said, “I’m talking cinema and you’re talking meteorology,” and walked out of the apartment.

Others at the meeting don’t recall Godard’s departure as being quite so dramatic; he may have excused himself to use the restroom and said his good-byes and left soon after that. Norton Wright says Godard’s comment about “matters météorologiques” was made not at the meeting, but to Benton and Newman the next day; over drinks, just before Godard left for Paris, he told the two writers, “Call me when the script reverts to your ownership.” But nobody disputes the astonishing swiftness with which the meeting and Godard’s involvement in Bonnie and Clyde were terminated.

Elinor Jones and her brother were ashen. Jones tried, the next day, to reconstruct what had gone wrong in a conversation with Helen Scott, who filled in a key piece of information that Godard hadn’t shared with them: He had been trying to get out of a contract to shoot the film Alphaville for Columbia, and in order to have a chance of getting the studio to agree to a switch in projects, he needed Bonnie and Clyde to replace it in the exact same spot on his schedule. Harrison Starr, who was still hoping that he might be able to produce the film if Jones and Wright fell out of the picture, felt it could have worked on Godard’s terms. “Mike Frankovich had worked in Europe, so he heard the beat of the drum—he could pick it up, that way of making movies,” he says. “We could have done the picture very well for $350,000, and that’s what Columbia was looking for.”²⁴

Godard, though nobody involved in Bonnie and Clyde knew it at the time, had been so serious about shooting the movie that, while in New York, he had met with Elliott Gould—then known only as the man who had recently married Barbra Streisand—and Buck Henry, who had both flown from Los Angeles to discuss making the film with him over dinner at the Algonquin. “I go into the restaurant, and there’s Jean-Luc Godard, sitting cross-legged on a banquette,” says Henry. “And we sit down and have a meal. It made no sense at all. Apparently, Elliott had talked to Godard about doing Bonnie and Clyde, and he was going to get him a writer to do it, and we had this strange conversation where I guess I told Godard how much I liked his films, and he said a lot of things to me that I didn’t understand at all, culminating in, ‘I will write things on legal pads and send them to you!’ I said, ‘Great.’ I went off, spent the night in Barbra and Elliott’s apartment, and I don’t think I ever heard about it again.”²⁵

Godard was a “strange, mad guy,” Helen Scott told Jones. But, she added, her and her brother’s inexperience was what had really caused the problem. Producers more schooled in handling directors with volatile temperaments would have read the situation correctly and just rolled with whatever Godard was suggesting; they would have understood that all decisions made now could be altered later. Had Harrison Starr been present at the meeting, Scott told her, he would have known how to handle Godard. The director “wanted simple enthusiasm from us,” Jones wrote in the notes she had begun to keep after important meetings. “But our cool response to giving the script to Columbia really turned him off, and the word ‘meteorologically’ really threw him…. He felt we were formal, slow, reserved [and behaved as if we were] ‘not sure we really wanted Godard.’”²⁶

When Truffaut heard what had happened, he called it “unfortunate.” Wright and Jones, he said, shouldn’t have shown their distress; “they should have known that Columbia would have decided when it could have been done.”²⁷

More than forty years later, Wright says, “I take great pride that I was the fella that prevented the movie being made by Godard, because he would not have made a good movie out of a marvelous, exceptional, groundbreaking script. We had just equated Truffaut and Godard with the New Wave in our minds, but the difference was immense—Truffaut had a huge humanitarian heart, and Godard was doing almost self-reflexive movies after that.” But at the time, Wright was mortified by the cave-in his innocuous comment had caused and, like Jones, wondering what their next move could possibly be.²⁸

Helen Scott encouraged Jones to shrug off the meeting, calling it “terribly funny.” “Don’t feel desolate!” she said. “You’ve had an experience with Godard.”²⁹ But Jones and her brother were devastated; in the space of two weeks, Bonnie and Clyde had lost two directors. And Benton and Newman were no less glum. “After that, all the air seemed to go out of it,” says Leslie Newman.³⁰ “It was really nobody’s fault,” says Benton, “but we thought, ‘That’s it. It’s over.’”³¹

 

As the fall of 1964 began, The Graduate was no closer to finding a home at a studio than Bonnie and Clyde was. Larry Turman had pitched his movie to every studio executive on both coasts, assuring them that the film could be made for just $1 million, but he had overestimated the degree to which Mike Nichols’s involvement would be a selling point. “I couldn’t get to first base at the studios with Nichols,” he says. “They didn’t care about Barefoot in the Park—he had never directed a movie before.”³² The fact that Turman was trying to make a deal without having a script to show anyone may have made his task even more difficult. Paramount’s production chief, Jack Karp, turned him down flat; so did Mike Frankovich, who, focused on Europe, had never heard of Nichols. Even when Turman went to United Artists to talk to David Picker, who at thirty-three was one of the youngest and most forward-looking studio executives in the business (he had been the first to recognize the potential value of the James Bond franchise), he got a flat no: Picker looked at the novel’s sparse descriptions and uninflected dialogue and said, “What’s funny about it?”³³

While Turman was making the rounds, Nichols was in the middle of his own misadventure in Los Angeles, getting a taste of the difference between New York theater culture and the priorities of a Hollywood studio. He and Peter Shaffer had made good progress on the script for The Public Eye, working together in Nichols’s New York apartment at the Beresford every morning—or, given Nichols’s night-owl lifestyle, every afternoon. “He was so sweet,” says Nichols. “We had a great time. He used to get very pissed off at me for oversleeping—he’d be there waiting, and I’d be late to a meeting in my own apartment!”

Nichols had not yet met the man who was to produce The Public Eye for Universal, Ross Hunter, the discreetly gay, indiscreetly extravagant, luxury-obsessed creator of what had become a house style for the studio’s “women’s pictures.” The prolific Hunter was probably Universal’s most important in-house producer at a time when the studio didn’t have much to show for itself: He would deliver several films a year, usually a mix of very lucrative Doris Day pictures, Tammy movies, and melodramas like the remake of Imitation of Life, most of which shared a deep passion for interior decoration, hair, costume design, makeup, and scores drenched in Mantovaniesque strings. Nobody, including Hunter, made great claims for the film’s scripts or performances, but his ability to deliver moneymaking movies had won him a measure of respect and power at the studio. “I have nothing against art,” Hunter once said. “Hiroshima Mon Amour is great, but I wouldn’t have produced it if I’d had the chance.”³⁴ At Universal, there was no danger of that.

Hunter was an odd match for a project that came from a British playwright and a New York director, but Shaffer, says Nichols, “was very funny and nice about it. I’d say, ‘What will we do about this guy Ross Hunter?’ And Peter would say, ‘Well, I’ll take care of him.’ And he started doing things like writing, ‘She appears at the top of the stairs’ in the script, and then he would say, in parentheses, ‘beautifully gowned.’ He’d put in a lot of that shit to keep Ross Hunter happy.”

When Shaffer finished the screenplay, Nichols was invited to Los Angeles to meet Hunter face-to-face. The two men had absolutely nothing to say to each other, but, determined to make the best of it, they spent the evening watching Norman Jewison’s Send Me No Flowers, one of the rare Doris Day movies that Universal had made without Hunter’s supervision, which was to open in October. When the screening ended, Nichols, feeling awkward, said to Hunter, “Did you enjoy the movie?”

“Well, it offended me as a producer,” said Hunter.

“I said, ‘How do you mean?’” Nichols recalls. “And he said, ‘Well, as a producer, I was very offended by it.’ I said, ‘I don’t understand, completely.’ And he said, ‘Well, as a producer, I wanted to rush up to the screen and just rip every bow off her dress.’ And I said, ‘Okay.’ And I went back to my hotel and called my agent and said, ‘I can’t do this—I can’t make this movie.’ I mean, it would be hopeless. I knew I would kill him.”³⁵

Nichols got out of his commitment to make The Public Eye; there was a vague announcement in the press that the film would be postponed “for a while.”³⁶ “I think there was something unpleasant, a deal in which I owed Universal a movie, and I think it cost me money, too. But anyway, it was over,” he says.³⁷The Graduate was now slated to be Nichols’s first movie after all, if Turman could find anyone willing to make it—and just as The Public Eye was falling apart, he did: Joseph E. Levine, the founder of Embassy Pictures.

Embassy wasn’t a Hollywood studio; it was, wrote Turman later, “the last stop on the line.”³⁸ But the company was also a rarity in 1964: a well-financed American producer and distributor of movies that operated at the whim of one man independently of the studios (though he would sometimes produce movies for them). Levine had founded Embassy in the 1950s, using it as a pipeline through which he brought Italian movies to the United States—cheap, redubbed sword-and-sandals action films and Hercules pictures. “He was a great character, Levine,” says Buck Henry. “For the Hercules movies, he hired me to be the voice of young Ulysses, the putz who trails after Hercules and keeps saying, ‘No, Hercules! Don’t go there! That’s where the sirens live!’”³⁹

Levine loved publicity; he’d call press conferences to announce nothing in particular and take out twenty-page ads in trade publications touting his upcoming films if he felt he was being ignored. No matter how often someone would call him crass or a philistine or even make fun of his enormous belly, he’d keep coming back for more; in 1963, he had allowed himself to be the subject of a documentary by Albert and David Maysles called Showman that depicted him in all of his overblown, hyperbolic glory. Levine didn’t even seem to mind it when remarks like “You can fool all of the people all of the time if the advertising is right” were attributed to him, as long as the headlines kept coming.

“I never quite knew that Larry had been to every other outfit,” says Nichols, “either because he didn’t tell me or because I was still so naive. I certainly knew, though, that in every possible sense, Joseph E. Levine was scraping the bottom of the barrel.”⁴⁰

But like so many men in the movie business accused of being coarse or tasteless before and since, Levine also wanted to be thought of as a Medici. Every so often, Embassy would depart from its dub-’em-and-dump-’em distribution model; in the last couple of years, it had brought Fellini’s 8 1/2 and Pietro Germi’s Divorce Italian Style to U.S. screens, and Levine’s knack for promoting the films with ads that played up their “forbidden” European sexuality, as blunt a tactic as it may have been, was also responsible for helping those films reach a much larger audience than they otherwise would have found. Levine himself had put up the money for Sidney Lumet’s highly praised 1962 adaptation of Long Day’s Journey into Night and was about to release Godard’s Contempt, exploiting its star, Brigitte Bardot, for every millimeter of exposable skin he could get away with showing. “Levine was a vulgar vulgarian, but he wrote a check for the entire cost of Long Day’s Journey without blinking,” says Sidney Lumet. “He had Katharine Hepburn in a Eugene O’Neill play—it was just what he wanted, which was class with a capital K! We went out for the Academy Awards—I had never met him until then—and I remember him sitting in the Polo Lounge, so happy, a hooker on each arm, each hand on a different tit. But I ended up having a real affection for him—he really stuck by the film when it was doing no business. He didn’t have taste, but he knew it when he saw it.”⁴¹

“Joe was the king of the schlockmeisters,”⁴² says Turman, “crude and crass, but not dumb.”⁴³ Though publicly all Levine had to say about Fellini and Truffaut was that “some of these films are liked by the critics and nobody else,”⁴⁴ he enjoyed the Oscar nominations and the temporary luster that being connected with their work brought to Embassy. Levine, who was based in New York, knew Nichols’s work and his reputation and was eager for the chance to associate himself with the director. He and Turman had a brief, tense standoff when Levine demanded executive producer credit. Turman refused, and Levine blinked first. On October 7, 1964, Embassy announced that it would finance The Graduate and that the film would begin production in the summer of 1965.⁴⁵

Nichols was now back in New York, happy to know that The Graduate had a backer and happier still to be working in the theater again. That summer, he had directed his first off-Broadway play, Ann Jellicoe’s The Knack, a British comedy that marked an early venture into the “swinging London” genre; his direction received rave reviews, and the play went on to run for more than eighteen months. In the fall, he returned to Broadway with another comedy, Murray Schisgal’s Luv, an extended three-character sketch about neurotic New Yorkers in which Nichols had a cast that was up to his level—Alan Arkin, Eli Wallach, and Anne Jackson—and material that allowed him to exploit every possibility for a laugh. The play was a smash, running for more than two years and sending Nichols on his way to a second consecutive Tony Award for Best Director. With three hits now running in New York simultaneously, his reputation as a director started to outstrip his fame as a performer. “Things have reached such a monkey-see monkey-do situation that it is now incumbent upon anyone who has written a funny play or novel…to send the work to Nichols with a note exhorting him to direct it,”⁴⁶ said The New York Times. The same week, Time magazine called Nichols “one of the more gifted and promising new directors to take his place in the American theater since Elia Kazan left Constantinople.”⁴⁷

If studios hadn’t known who Nichols was when Turman was trying to sell his movie, they did now, and one of them was about to make him an offer that would set The Graduate back more than a year. In March, Jack Warner had spent $500,000 to acquire the movie rights to Edward Albee’s 1962 play, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?⁴⁸ Warner thought the play—if its raw language could ever be sanitized enough to meet the stringent requirements of Production Code chief Geoffrey Shurlock—would make a great vehicle for Bette Davis and James Mason,⁴⁹ and he hired Ernest Lehman, who had adapted West Side Story, to write the script.

Though he had never overseen a movie before, Lehman somehow convinced Warner to let him produce Virginia Woolf as well and also won the right to cast and director approval. The studio thought briefly of Henry Fonda, who had admired the play (and who had lost a chance to originate the role of George on Broadway when his new agent preemptively turned down the “no-balls character”).⁵⁰ Jack Lemmon and Patricia Neal were also considered.⁵¹ But when Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton expressed interest, all casting questions came to an end, and what had been a chancy purchase of a controversial property suddenly became a gamble on which the potential risks and rewards were much higher. Fred Zinnemann⁵² and John Frankenheimer⁵³ had both been mentioned as possible directors, but no deal had been made. Nichols had gotten to know Burton in 1961, when he was on Broadway with Elaine May and Burton was just down Shubert Alley playing Arthur in Camelot; he had spent time with Burton and Taylor in Italy during the filming of Cleopatra,⁵⁴ and the couple had talked about starring for Nichols in The Public Eye.⁵⁵ “Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton were pushing, really pushing, for Mike,” says Larry Turman. “And I thought, let Mike do all his learning on Virginia Woolf and then he can do my movie second. I thought I was being smart.”⁵⁶

Once Taylor wanted him for Virginia Woolf, Lehman and Jack Warner wanted him, too. Nichols, who loved the play, jumped at the opportunity. In December, he signed on as director for $250,000.⁵⁷ Production was due to start in March. The Graduate would have to be postponed. ⁵⁸ In early 1965, he headed for Los Angeles to begin preproduction. He had less than three months to learn how to make a movie, outmaneuver a notoriously combative studio head and a cautious, passive producer, and figure out how to direct the world’s most famous couple. And, he says, “I wasn’t entirely sure how a camera worked.”⁵⁹