I hope to God I don’t win,” said Dustin Hoffman. “It would depress me if I did. Every actor thinks about winning an Oscar. But I don’t honestly believe I’ve earned it for The Graduate.” Hoffman didn’t have a vote—he wasn’t a member of the Academy—but if he had, it would have gone to Rod Steiger. “Without any question,” he said. “He gave a performance that had many colors and facets to it. That’s what acting is all about.”
In 1968, Oscar campaigning was relatively subdued even for the old guard, and newcomers found it downright unseemly. A young actor like Hoffman felt free to say publicly that he expected Bonnie and Clyde to win Best Picture but that he didn’t feel Warren Beatty’s role had “prizewinning dimensions”1 without sounding like a bad sport. Caring too much was undignified, not to mention emblematic of shallowness and false values; in fact, Gregory Peck, the Academy’s president, was working overtime just to convince the acting nominees to show up for the ceremony after years of fashionable and conspicuous absenteeism. Aside from the generational contest that seemed to define the Oscars that spring, it was also the first time since 1962 that all five Best Picture nominees were homegrown and marked the strongest showing for American actors in a decade. As a member of the Hollywood establishment whose liberal political credentials made him appealing to the new, engaged generation of stars as well, Peck was in an ideal position to make sure that attendance was high at the fortieth awards ceremony; his campaign of telephone calls and personal appeals got eighteen of the nineteen living acting nominees to promise they would show up. The lone holdout was Katharine Hepburn, who had dived back into work following Tracy’s death and was in Europe shooting The Lion in Winter and The Madwoman of Chaillot. Hepburn had won a Best Actress Academy Award back in March 1934 and had stayed away; she had received eight nominations since then and lost every time, and she had no intention of making what she believed would be a pointless trip back to Los Angeles, but she did agree to host a filmed segment celebrating the Academy’s first decade. By this time, journalists were all but referring to her as Tracy’s widow: She “doesn’t want to return to Hollywood and memories so soon,” wrote Sidney Skolsky. “She is working and living out her life until it becomes a life again.”2
Columnist Sheilah Graham mulled over the chances of all five women in the Best Actress race and dismissed Hepburn’s shot at the prize with the remark “If we are giving awards for Kate’s devotion to Spencer Tracy, then she will have been the winner.”3 But that kind of guesswork about the awards was the exception, not the rule. Academy Awards handicapping was confined largely to the Los Angeles Times and the gossip magazines and trade papers, where a consensus seemed to be emerging, though with less conviction than usual. “It used to be very straightforward,” says Mike Nichols, only half-jokingly. “If you had been sick, or you were a shiksa playing a whore, you won—everybody knew the rules. And then it started to change a little.”4
Rod Steiger was considered a runaway favorite for Best Actor; Hoffman and Beatty were too young to take the prize; and there was considerable sentiment that giving Spencer Tracy an award would be touching but pointless. Although one Hollywood broadsheet argued that Steiger “is looked upon here as just a ‘commuter,’ whereas Tracy was always the hometown boy,”5 Stanley Kramer himself said shortly after the awards that he was “opposed to a posthumous Oscar…it would not have been right.”6 Best Actress was seen as a contest between Edith Evans for The Whisperers and Dunaway, who had supplanted Julie Christie as the fashion and magazine icon of the moment and whom her pleased Thomas Crown Affair costar, Steve McQueen, was no longer calling “Done Fade-Away.” The runaway success of The Graduate would probably be recognized with an award for Nichols, who had already taken top honors from the Directors Guild. And there was a growing sense that Bonnie and Clyde was going to complete one of the most stunning turnarounds in movie history by taking home the prize for Best Picture. In March, the National Catholic Office for Motion Pictures—which had rated the movie “morally unobjectionable for adults, with reservations”—presented Beatty, Penn, and Warner Brothers chief Eliot Hyman with a special award, Best Film for a Mature Audience. Variety speculated that such recognition from a religious body would go a long way toward soothing the anxieties of Academy voters who were “nervous about the violence…and are concerned about the ‘image of Hollywood’ which might be created by giving it the top award.”7
Violence, and popular entertainment’s role in either promoting or preventing it, was very much at the center of industry discussions in the weeks after the Oscar nominations. Memories of the previous summer’s urban riots and images of armed National Guardsmen rolling into American cities were still fresh, and on February 29, the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders—better known as the Kerner Commission—that President Johnson had appointed to study the causes of the rioting issued its famous report, warning that “our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal” and unambiguously implicating “white racism” as a primary cause of the riots.8 The report’s call for sweeping social and economic reforms extended to Hollywood. THINK BLACK, shouted a trade-paper headline, noting the commission’s conclusion that network TV “must hire Negroes, it must show Negroes on the air, it must schedule programs relevant to the black ghetto.”9 The story noted that four of the seventeen new shows scheduled to air that fall would have black actors in key roles, including Julia, a gentle comedy in which Diahann Carroll would play a middle-class nurse whose husband had been killed in Vietnam; it would be the first TV series ever to star a black woman who wasn’t playing a maid.
Hal Kanter, Julia’s creator, was also the head writer of that year’s Academy Awards, and Carroll, though her experience in movies was limited, was drafted to be an Oscar presenter, ensuring a plug for her upcoming show and also helping Peck in his attempt to make the ceremony look even slightly racially diverse. Louis Armstrong signed on to perform one of the nominated songs, The Jungle Book’s “The Bare Necessities.” Sammy Davis Jr. committed to singing his popular hepcat version of Doctor Dolittle’s “Talk to the Animals.” And in a coup for Peck, Sidney Poitier agreed to present the Best Actress award: “I was delighted I was not nominated,” he insisted. “To sit in that hall knowing full well that you’ll be one of the four losers is not very pleasant.”10
The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called the Kerner Commission Report, which became an instant best seller,11 “a physician’s warning of approaching death, with a prescription for life.” It was also, for the industry’s bottom-liners, a blueprint for sound economic health. Now that Hollywood had some hard numbers about how essential black urban moviegoers were to the continued success of their product, they were quick to advocate reform; violence that shut down cities was bad for business. When King flew to Memphis at the end of March and a protest rally erupted into shooting and bloodshed, a curfew was imposed and the night streets were empty; Variety’s spin was that “showbiz [was] hit hard” economically by the local racial strife.12
On the night of Thursday, April 4, just before 7:30 p.m. on the East Coast, Walter Cronkite interrupted his own CBS Evening News broadcast with the bulletin that King had been shot and wounded.13 Later that evening, most Americans learned that King was dead when the networks broke into their prime-time entertainment shows to cover the story and await a statement from President Johnson.
In some quarters of Hollywood, the first instinct was to say nothing, do nothing, change nothing. The Academy Awards were scheduled for 7:00 p.m. on Monday, April 8, at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium; the show was to be broadcast live by NBC one day before King’s funeral in Atlanta. At first, nobody at the Academy saw any reason for a postponement. But by Friday night, it became clear that if the Oscars proceeded as planned, the awards would be handed out to a largely empty house. Carroll, Poitier, Armstrong, and Davis had all notified Gregory Peck that they would not even consider participating in the ceremony if it took place before King’s burial. Rod Steiger dropped out as well, and Mike Nichols, Norman Jewison, and Arthur Penn all told the Academy they’d be staying home, too.14 “I certainly think any black man should not appear,” Davis told Johnny Carson that evening on NBC’s Tonight Show. “I find it morally incongruous to sing ‘Talk to the Animals’ while the man who could make a better world for my children is lying in state.”15
Peck denied that pressure from black entertainers had anything to do with his decision, but he got the message. On Saturday morning, he hastily convened a meeting of the Academy Board of Governors. That afternoon, he announced that for the first time in the history of the Oscars, the ceremony would be postponed and would now take place two nights later, on Wednesday, April 10. The delay, and the cancellation of the Governor’s Ball, said Peck, “reflects the deep respect of all Americans for Dr. King and the Academy’s sorrow over his tragic death.”16 Margaret Herrick, the Academy’s executive director, immediately sent telegrams to all of the nominees and presenters asking them to confirm their availability for that evening.17 All four black performers said they would gladly participate. “There was never a doubt, after they made this very fine gesture, that we would be on the program,” said Davis, adding that everyone “from the most extreme militants to the most moderate were thrilled that the picture industry finally did something for the black man as a whole.”18
“Two days?” says Nichols, shaking his head. “That was all? That was what we thought was taking a big stand? But until then they really were going to go right ahead with it as planned.”19
Over the weekend, prominent Americans started to converge on Atlanta, where a service for King was to be held at the Ebenezer Baptist Church on Auburn Avenue, followed by a four-mile march to the campus of Morehouse College, where over one hundred thousand assembled mourners would hear a eulogy. At the beginning of the week, there was no longer much talk of “getting back to normal”; the Johnson administration struggled nervously with the question of how to treat the death of an unelected leader whose assassination seemed to have torn open a national wound. Johnson sent Vice President Hubert Humphrey to represent him. Jacqueline Kennedy was in attendance; so was Richard Nixon. Television networks preempted their schedules of game shows and soap operas to carry three hours of funeral coverage; Major League Baseball canceled its opening day. Ossie Davis came to speak, as he had done at the funeral of Malcolm X three years earlier; Mahalia Jackson sat in a pew in the church and wept, listening to the singing; Wilt Chamberlain, Jim Brown, Jackie Robinson, and Rafer Johnson could all be seen in the march. Norman Jewison, Haskell Wexler, and Hal Ashby flew to Atlanta; so did Marlon Brando, who had co-hosted SNCC fund-raisers with Arthur Penn in Hollywood.20
When Sidney Poitier arrived in the city, Harry Belafonte was already there; he had flown Coretta Scott King from Memphis to Atlanta on his own chartered plane. Belafonte, more than any performer of the time, was as much activist as entertainer; he and his wife, Julie, were close to the Kings, and he was perhaps the critical liaison between the civil rights movement and the Hollywood community. For years, he and Poitier, who were just nine days apart in age, had been brothers and rivals, competitors who were bound together by the uniqueness of their status in the entertainment industry but sometimes pulled apart by the same struggles that divided so many black Americans at the time: accommodation versus action, confrontation versus compromise, patience versus protest. There is little doubt that Belafonte had made Poitier into more of an activist than he otherwise would have been—and little doubt that Belafonte thought his friend could have done still more.
Poitier walked into a planning meeting of King’s inner circle at which Belafonte was advocating strongly for an additional commemorative event in Atlanta, possibly a rally in a stadium to be held the night before the funeral. Poitier spoke up in opposition, feeling it would be impractical to plan a huge event on such short notice and that another large-scale gathering might draw attention away from King himself. It was the wrong moment for a conflict. Poitier, by far the more formidable cultural presence, had challenged Belafonte in the one arena where he was used to preeminence. Belafonte’s wife tore into Poitier in a way that made it clear that resentment had been simmering close to the surface for some time. Poitier won the point, but, at least temporarily, he had lost a friendship. “I just knew I had hurt him awfully,” he wrote later. “After that day in Atlanta, Harry didn’t speak to me.”21
The next day, Poitier flew to Los Angeles, where the Oscars were back on schedule and everybody was pressing ahead. Nobody canceled; nobody declined to appear. Hollywood had made its statement, and now it was going to have its celebration. “Oh, there were so many phone calls beforehand,” says Penn. “‘Are you going?’ ‘I’m not going.’ ‘Well, I’m not going!’ ‘Well, I’m not going, either!’ And in the end, everybody who called me and said ‘I’m not going’ went.” He laughs. “But I didn’t go. I went once, for The Miracle Worker. That was enough.”22
The only other major nonparticipant was far more surprising: Arthur Jacobs. The man who had worked so hard to make Doctor Dolittle, and then to secure a Best Picture nomination for it, had decided to stay away. One week earlier, Jacobs’s newest movie, Planet of the Apes, had opened; it was already shaping up to be a major success. But Jacobs, perhaps sensitive about the charges that Dolittle’s nominations were all but bought by 20th Century-Fox, chose to avoid the spotlight. “He never wanted to go,” says Natalie Trundy. “That was the shy part of him. We went to a party at the home of Lew Wasserman’s then son-in-law and watched it on TV. After all that! Can you imagine?”23
In the bleachers outside the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium that night, eight hundred movie fans gaped at the red carpet arrivals. Army Archerd asked them to vote for their choices in the top categories by cheering: They picked Bonnie and Clyde for Best Picture, Cool Hand Luke’s Paul Newman for Best Actor, and Anne Bancroft for Best Actress.24
When Faye Dunaway walked in on the arm of her boyfriend, the photographer and soon-to-be director Jerry Schatzberg, a teenager in a T-shirt yelled, “Hey, Bonnie, where’s Clyde?” She smiled and waved.
Inside, the mood was more sober. “The world has always looked to Hollywood for escape,” Hal Kanter told the audience in a warm-up speech before the telecast began. “In our ceremonies tonight, we hope to provide a measure of relief to a nation which today has again begun the normal routine.”25 The tone was to be tranquilizing; the theme of the show was the fortieth anniversary of the awards, and the evening was meant to reflect Hollywood’s sense of its own history, elegance, and importance. Whether by design or chance, the seating arrangement reflected the year’s thematic division: The nominees for Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, and In the Heat of the Night were seated along one aisle; on the other were Cecil Kellaway, Audrey Hepburn, Carol Channing, Edith Evans, and George Kennedy.26 Other than the stars who lined the aisles, the audience in the auditorium appeared to be, literally, old Hollywood: Peering anxiously from their seats as the camera panned their faces very briefly, the vast majority of attendees looked elderly, weary, and sour—a group of unenthusiastic Rotarians and their wives stuffed into formal wear for an evening of forced jollity.
Eastman Kodak, the telecast’s sole sponsor, had made sure to prepare an array of commercials showcasing America’s racial harmony, so after a long advertisement for X-ray film that featured a black radiological technician, the curtain rose on an incongruously ornate set meant to replicate a Louis XIV drawing room. Gregory Peck walked to the microphone. “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen,” he began. “This has been a fateful week in the history of our nation. We join with fellow members of our profession and men of goodwill everywhere in paying our profound respects to the memory of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Society has always been reflected in its art, and one measure of Dr. King’s influence on the society we live in is that of the five films nominated for Best Picture of the Year, two dealt with the subject of understanding between the races.”
It was a good start. The room was quiet and tense, but there was a sense that Peck had navigated a difficult path between the cheery artificiality of the evening and the bleakness of the day’s headlines with modesty and taste. Those qualities vanished the moment he introduced the evening’s master of ceremonies, Bob Hope, “that amiable national monument who pricks the balloons of pomposity.” Hope ambled out and made it immediately clear that he thought the two-day delay was much ado about nothing. “It didn’t affect me, but it’s been tough on the nominees,” he said. “How would you like to spend two days in a crouch?” As Hope went on, talking about how “any delay really snarls up programming” and joking that Eastman Kodak’s image would be hurt by “a show that took three days to develop,” there was some uneasy laughter. Mike Nichols squirmed in his seat. “What I remember is that it felt like he was saying something to the effect of, ‘Well, here we are after an absolutely needless postponement,’” he says. “And in that moment, he sort of became the enemy.”27
As Hope continued, trotting through jokes about Bing Crosby and Zsa Zsa Gabor, it became clear that beneath the surface of his comedy was barely concealed reactionary anger. “A year ago we introduced movies with dirty words,” he said. “This year we brought you the pictures to go with it.” The telecast’s director avoided audience reaction shots for the most part but caught Hoffman barely smiling (“I can’t imagine nominating a kid like Dustin Hoffman,” Hope said of the thirty-year-old. “He starred in a picture he can’t get in to see”). The camera also spotted Beatty and Dunaway looking awkwardly ahead when Hope started in on their movie (“I don’t know what the writers have been smoking this year…Bonnie and Clyde is about happy killers…”).
The first award of the night, for Best Sound, went to In the Heat of the Night. Norman Jewison, who had gone into the ceremony not daring to hope for much, began to sense the evening might go well for him. When Patty Duke came out to read the Best Supporting Actor nominees, the camera captured Bonnie and Clyde’s Michael J. Pollard in a ruffled collar and Gene Hackman looking apprehensive; the winner was Cool Hand Luke’s George Kennedy, who got up and made a brief, abashed speech in which he thanked the Academy for “the greatest moment of my life.” “I was favored to win in Las Vegas,” recalls Pollard. “George Kennedy wasn’t even going to come because he thought I was going to win…. Warren said, as soon as [I] didn’t win, he knew it was going to go downhill from there.”28
“George Kennedy!” says Arthur Penn. “Jesus!”29
As the night went on and the leaden Camelot started to rack up victories, Buck Henry, who was nominated for The Graduate and remembers feeling “a boredom and irritation so deep that the next time I was nominated I went straight to New York and stayed there,” kept exchanging glances with Robert Benton and David Newman across the aisle. “We were old friends,” he says. “We had worked together, and as the awards were given out and some old-guard person won over infinitely better work, we gave each other a look that said, ‘We’ve had it—we’re out of this race.’”30
The evening was dying on its feet. Hope’s material alternated between the overfamiliar and the inadvertently tasteless (he remarked that an usher was on his way to check “the lump in Warren Beatty’s pocket” and introduced presenter Natalie Wood as “the most talented beauty who ever came out of the Woods”). The winners seemed almost embarrassed, confining their speeches to a sentence or two. The Best Cinematography Award went to Burnett Guffey, who had shot, then quit, and then returned to Bonnie and Clyde. It was the movie’s first award of the night. “Thanks, everyone who helped me do it,” said Guffey. “That’s really all I can say.” He walked off. The speech by L. B. Abbott, who won the Visual Effects Oscar for Doctor Dolittle, was even shorter. When Alfred Hitchcock, who had never won an Oscar, was presented with the Irving Thalberg Award by Robert Wise, he trundled to the microphone, said, “Thank you,” and began to walk away. The gesture was so perfectly in keeping with the perfunctory tone of the night that the audience could no longer contain its laughter. Hitchcock seemed startled; he walked back to the podium as if he had suddenly remembered something important and added, “Very much indeed.” The two Hollywoods seemed to be fighting each other to a draw; when Dustin Hoffman and Katharine Ross were brought out to present an award with Bob Hope, they looked as if they were trapped at a family dinner with an uncle they didn’t like. “Hi, kids,” said Hope, barely bothering to conceal his lack of interest. At one point, Martha Raye came out to read a telegram from General William Westmoreland, thanking the entertainment community for its USO shows. There was a smattering of polite applause. A film clip of Gone With the Wind ended with the Confederate flag flapping in the breeze. The audience greeted it with silence.
Many of the evening’s early winners were from England, Canada, and France; the Best Foreign Language Film winner was Czech director Jiri Menzel’s Closely Watched Trains. Menzel, enjoying the brief freedom of the Prague Spring, was there to accept. “Anne Bancroft sat right in front of me,” says Dustin Hoffman, “and Mel Brooks sat right next to her, and he was driving her crazy. Every time they would announce a foreign nominee or winner and he would come down the aisle, Mel would say out loud, ‘Wacko! Another wacko!’ Anne was literally sinking in her seat, saying, ‘Mel, please, jeez, stop!’”31
With very few reaction shots, and with the audience observing what was then a long-standing tradition of withholding its applause during the reading of the nominees, it would have been hard for television viewers to gauge the mood of the room as the first hour of the show unfolded, but the level of energy and anticipation rose somewhat when Walter Matthau came out to present the award for Best Supporting Actress. The camera cut from Thoroughly Modern Millie’s Carol Channing to Barefoot in the Park’s Mildred Natwick, then to Estelle Parsons, who was starring on Broadway in a struggling Tennessee Williams play, The Seven Descents of Myrtle, and had had no intention of going to the Oscars until her producer, David Merrick ordered her to take the night off and Warren Beatty sent her a plane ticket; Warner executive and future Academy president Sid Ganis was her escort for the evening.32 Viewers then saw Beah Richards, the lone black acting nominee, staring stoically ahead; she had been shaken to her soul by King’s assassination. “It was a terrible time,” Richards said later. “I was kind of unconscious during the whole thing. I wasn’t even ‘there,’ do you know what I mean?…I didn’t know what anything meant.”33 Matthau read the name of the last nominee, The Graduate’s Katharine Ross, and then announced that the winner was Parsons, news that was greeted with the first cheers of the evening. Parsons covered her face, giddy, and ran to the stage. “Boy, it’s heavy!” she said before going on to thank Penn, whom she called “my own particular genius” and “of course, Warren Beatty,” who beamed from the audience as his film took home its second Oscar of the night.
In the Heat of the Night won its second award when Hal Ashby took the prize for Best Film Editing. Ashby had trimmed his long hair and beard but had forgone the white-tie dress code in favor of an ivory turtleneck and love beads. (“Groovy. Really groovy,” Steve McQueen cabled him the next day.)34 Ashby’s brief plea that the industry “use all of our talents and creativity toward peace and love” was the closest thing to a political moment on the telecast since Peck’s opening remarks; in fact, no presenter or winner alluded to King again until Peck himself, who was brought out to receive the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award and remarked, “It’s a humbling experience to hear oneself described as a humanitarian at any time, but especially this week.” He went on to make a brief plea that viewers show their support for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, “with its nonviolent approach to our most pressing problems,” by sending contributions to the Martin Luther King Jr. Fund. Peck exited to warm applause, and as the show moved into its next segment—a film clip of Rod Steiger and Sidney Poitier facing off at the Sparta train station—a sense developed that the evening was beginning to take a particular direction.
Leslie Bricusse was in England working on the musical version of Goodbye, Mr. Chips for Arthur Jacobs, so he missed Sammy Davis Jr.’s finger-snapping, hip-shaking rendition of “Talk to the Animals,” which ended with Davis, in a nod to the new series Laugh-In, saying, “Sock it to me, sock it to me, sock it to me, bay-bee! Here come de judge, here come de judge…” (“Here come de judge,” replied a somewhat bewildered Hope, hoping to ride the laugh.) Bricusse didn’t realize that he had won the Best Song Oscar for the song that Rex Harrison couldn’t stand until weeks later, when Davis, who accepted for him, handed him the statuette. When the composer received all the congratulatory calls and telegrams, he assumed he must have won for Best Original Score—an award he lost to Thoroughly Modern Millie’s Elmer Bernstein.35
A tin-eared, all-brass version of “The Sound of Silence” played as Leslie Caron came out to present the Best Director Oscar, which went to Mike Nichols—the only award The Graduate was to win that night. Norman Jewison held his breath as the winner was announced, then slumped back in his seat, feeling “terrible disappointment”36 as Nichols took the stage to sustained applause. In his genial and low-key speech, Nichols said he shared the award with the people who worked on the film, smiled, and wished his mother a happy birthday. Inside, he says, “I was completely blank. I stopped thinking, I stopped feeling. I was Mister Anhedonia—I just had no pleasure in it. Back then, I was a) very spoiled, b) very neurotic, and c) I had a very impaired sense of reality. To me, the Academy Award meant that you ended up at the Beverly Hills Hotel at midnight feeling empty. I don’t know where I was, but that night, I just wasn’t there.”37
Rod Steiger was so visibly nervous when he and Claire Bloom took the stage to announce the nominees in the two screenplay categories that their somewhat flat scripted banter got big laughs. He mumbled something about the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who, thanks in part to the Beatles, had become an international cult figure in the last year and was something of an obsession for him. “Are you ready?” Bloom asked him. “Your mind seems to be on something else.” “I can’t imagine what that could be,” Steiger replied. In the Heat of the Night’s screenwriter, Stirling Silliphant, had told his friends and family not to expect much; he’d encouraged them to watch the telecast, although he warned them, “I feel I will be defeated by either The Graduate or In Cold Blood.”38 He was shocked to win. “I really have no speech,” he said. “The Writers Guild doesn’t permit us to do any speculative writing. I’m deeply grateful and very touched. Thank you, Rod, Norman, Walter, Sidney, everybody.”
As Steiger and Bloom read the nominees for Best Original Screenplay, Robert Benton prepared himself. “All of our friends kept saying, ‘You’re gonna win, you’re gonna win.’ And David and I were so naive, we thought, ‘They must know something!’ It never occurred to us that all of the nominees had friends who were saying to them that they were going to win…. I sat up, I buttoned my jacket, I fixed my cuffs. And then they said, ‘And the winner is…’ And I stood up. And they said, ‘William Rose for Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner!’ And I sat down, fast!”39 Rose, still almost phobic about Hollywood, had not come to the ceremony; Stanley Kramer made a brief acceptance speech in his place.
Steiger’s category was next; nominee Audrey Hepburn was the presenter. Publicly, Steiger had said that he expected the Best Actor award to go to Spencer Tracy and joked that if he won, his acceptance speech would be, “Ladies and gentlemen, please make your checks payable in cash.” But he also admitted, “I want to win it. It’s important. It gives you greater latitude in the business and a chance to get bigger and better parts. I just don’t think I’ll get it.”40
“I remember he was wearing cowboy boots,” says Dustin Hoffman, who was sitting across the aisle from him. “And he was tapping his feet the whole night. I knew I wasn’t going to win, so I was pretty comfortable, but he wasn’t. And when she said his name, he came out of his seat about three feet.”41 For the first time that night, the whole room erupted in cheers. Claire Bloom, watching her husband take the stage, looked touched and oddly sad. Steiger praised the Maharishi again. “I find it unbelievable. I find it overwhelming,” he said. He thanked the Academy, Norman Jewison, and the public, then took a deep breath. “Fourthly and most importantly,” he said, “I would like to thank Mr. Sidney Poitier for the pleasure of his friendship, which gave me the knowledge and understanding of prejudice in order to enhance this performance. Thank you, and we shall overcome.” As he left the stage, the room was electrified. Steiger had broken form—bringing any political reference into an awards acceptance speech was still exceedingly rare in 1968—and had chosen the perfect moment to do it. As Bob Hope came out, the applause for Steiger continued. “It’s a little tense out there, isn’t it?” he remarked, waiting. Hope then introduced the next presenter: Sidney Poitier.
Whatever the nature of the sentiment that had been building all evening in the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, Poitier’s appearance immediately after Steiger’s victory gave the night its emotional climax. Waves of applause, whistles, cheers, and bravos greeted him as he walked to the center of the stage. A point was being made—although whether the point was that Poitier should have gotten an Oscar nomination, or that the white attendees found the characteristics they believed Poitier embodied to be exemplary, or simply that Steiger’s words had given everybody license to use Poitier as a conduit through which they could pay tribute to Martin Luther King, was left to the imagination and understanding of each viewer.
Poitier, with a steady gaze and a gentle smile, waited for the applause to subside, engaged in some scripted back-and-forth with Hope, and then read the nominees for Best Actress, announcing with a surprised grin that the winner was Katharine Hepburn. Trade papers the next morning called Hepburn’s win the biggest surprise of the evening, but it was in keeping with a kind of last-stand traditionalism that had emerged over the course of the broadcast. George Cukor accepted for Hepburn, who was privately furious that Tracy had lost; nonetheless, she quickly sent a telegram of thanks in which she said that she felt the award was “a great affectionate hug from my fellow workers” and fascinatingly chose to add that her character was “a good wife, our most unsung and important heroine. I’m glad she’s coming back in style.”42
In the Heat of the Night had seemed to be a long shot for the Best Picture Oscar when the evening began, but by the time the last envelope was opened, nobody was particularly surprised. Walter Mirisch made a brief acceptance speech, and Bob Hope reappeared to push his way through some dreadful scripted equivocations to the effect that Adolph Zukor and Samuel Goldwyn “had at least one thing in common with the man from Atlanta—they had a dream,” followed by a series of pieties: “United we stand, divided we fall. Rioting and indifference are equal sins. Everyone must face up to their responsibilities.” After cryptically reminding the home audience that conquering prejudice is something “each of us must face…through our own way of life and our own station,” he sent the winners and losers on their way.
“I think it had a lot to do with timing,” says Norman Jewison of In the Heat of the Night’s victory. “I really think that The Graduate is a brilliant film, and Bonnie and Clyde is a brilliant film. We happened to arrive at a moment when people felt strongly about race.”43
Silliphant, who was never entirely comfortable with his own award for the movie, agreed. The script won, he said thirty years later, not “for its craftsmanship, or for its unique and polished style of holding back, holding back, but [for] its black-white content…. Getting plaudits for In the Heat of the Night was like waving the American flag or pushing Mom’s apple pie. It was just too damn easy to manipulate people with issues which for the moment [had] flagged their attention.”44
“It was a surprise,” says Nichols, laughing. “I was living with Penelope Gilliatt, and we loved Bonnie and Clyde. Who wouldn’t? It seemed perfectly clear to me that it should be one of us, but what did I know?”45
“Listen, In the Heat of the Night was a really good, rousing melodrama,” says Buck Henry. “And a movie that has a lesson to teach about brotherhood will trump everything every single time. Brotherhood does pay.”46
Some people took the movie’s success as a triumph against the new, a defeat of what one congratulatory telegram called “those smug ones who thought they had it in the bag.”47 “So much for the Bonnie & Clyde-Graduate night predictions,” Silliphant’s son wrote to him. “The champagne went down oh-so-well.”48 If anything, In the Heat of the Night’s five Oscars represented a temporary compromise between the generationally divisive Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate and the dug-in fustiness that young moviegoers were mocking in their response to Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. “It was clear that the Academy collectively retains an inherent conservativism,” said the Los Angeles Times, “being less than eager to endorse the value-questioning of Bonnie and Clyde or the daring plot turns of The Graduate.”49
It had been five years since Robert Benton and David Newman had started talking about Bonnie and Clyde. They were no longer upstarts; they, along with Beatty and Towne and Dunaway and Nichols and Hoffman, were among the charter members of what would become a new Hollywood establishment, a group whose ranks would swell over the next decade as they redefined studio movies. But the day after the Oscars, Benton says, “I think I was a little disappointed. Miloš Forman said to me years later, ‘You get all this attention, and it’s wonderful, but it’s like getting run over by a train.’ And I knew enough, by then, to know that there was a good chance I might never do anything that would get recognized again.”50
Benton and Newman and their wives went home to New York, feeling that they had had their adventure. “We was robbed,” Beatty had said, smiling, as he was leaving the Oscars that night. His line was picked up by everyone—Bonnie and Clyde’s detractors took it as sour grapes, while the film’s fans understood it as nothing weightier than a wink. “Oh, I wish I had a nickel for every telegram we got afterwards saying, ‘You wuz robbed!’” says Leslie Newman. “But my favorite one came from Jean-Luc Godard.” After the Academy Awards, the man who had come within one conversation of directing the movie dashed off a cheerful cable to Benton and Newman. “Now,” he wrote, “let’s make it all over again!”51
As is the case with most Academy Awards ceremonies, there was less symbolism to be extracted from the evening than morning-after analysts might have imagined, and even that applied only to the Academy’s taste in movies, not to the country’s. The weekend after the Oscars, The Graduate and Bonnie and Clyde continued to be two of the most popular films in the United States. And 2001: A Space Odyssey was already drawing large and curious crowds transfixed by Stanley Kubrick’s intergalactic light show with its mesmerizing final visual metaphor—an ancient traveler, racked by the decrepitude of extreme age, crawling to the finish line of his life so that a starchild could be born. What did it all mean? moviegoers asked as they emerged into the light. Even Benton and Newman weren’t sure. “Plotless? Or beyond plotting?…It matters not,” they postulated in Esquire. “The debate is: Does it have anything to do with movies?”52
It had, of course, everything to do with movies. Hollywood, which had held insistently to its own ways for so long, was suddenly moving forward, impelled by the demands of an audience that had, in 1967, made its wishes for a new world of American movies so clear that the studios had no choice but to submit to them. The outsiders were about to take flight and to discover that the motion picture universe was now theirs to re-create, to ruin, or to rule.