The two girls were naked. That fact alone represented three problems. Naked was, of course, the first problem; even if there had been no other issues, naked was a deal breaker all by itself. Girls was the second problem; not women, but girls. Wasn’t one of them, one of the two that were giggling and wrestling and rolling around the floor naked, supposed to be a teenager, perhaps not even of the age of consent? And two was a problem; two girls together, with everything that might suggest to a moviegoer. Not to mention the presence of the male photographer whose clothes they were tugging off, who was happily diving into the action, threatening to become naked himself. Three naked young people, tumbling and laughing and thrashing and clearly about to have sex in several different combinations.
And then there was the scene in which the photographer stood over Sarah Miles, locking eyes with her, while another man thrust into her.
This was not possible.
The first letter that Geoffrey Shurlock sent to MGM had been polite but firm. Nobody at the studio could say they hadn’t been warned; they had been warned as far back as March, before the movie had even been shot. “As you know, nudity is prohibited under the Code,” Shurlock had reminded the studio, as if any reminder were necessary. “We notice that the story calls for Thomas to have a sex relationship between two teenagers. This … would not be approvable.” And the scene in which he just … watches? “This suggestion seems to us to verge on the pornographic.”1 Shurlock had warned MGM again in April, after the movie’s title had changed from The Shot to just The Antonioni Picture; this time he had used stronger language, phrases like “heightening the degree of offensiveness” and “unacceptably irreverent.”2 And he had tried one more time in July,3 but by then it was too late, because Blow-Up, as it was now called, was shooting all over London in the summer of 1966, and the old Code, thanks to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Alfie, was already on its way out. By the fall, when the movie was completed and edited, Shurlock was overseeing the new, more relaxed Code, which everyone knew was a halfhearted attempt to maintain the integrity of a system that still demanded a certain toeing of the line by studios while giving filmmakers a little more room. A little more room. Not room for bare teenage breasts and three-ways and a man trying, as Shurlock put it, “to incite the girl into a state of orgasm.”4
This time, Shurlock knew that he had Jack Valenti in his camp. Valenti was liberal, he was open-minded, he had sided with Warner Brothers and against the Code on Virginia Woolf, and he admired Antonioni, but, he said, “I don’t believe that everything that’s put into a film by a man of quality is sacrosanct …. We’ve got to draw the line somewhere.”5 And the National Catholic Office for Motion Pictures, even with a more permissive advisory board now in place, would certainly condemn the film. So Shurlock knew that MGM would have to yield: The studio needed to get a Production Code seal somehow. For a while toward the end of 1966, negotiations seemed possible. MGM even approached Shurlock for an ex parte discussion: What if the studio agreed to release Blow-Up with the “Suggested for Mature Audiences” label that had recently become an official part of the Code? Would that do the trick?6
It would not. The two girls were still naked.
Time was running out, which was bound to work in the Production Code’s favor. It was the end of November. Blow-Up was booked to open at New York City’s Coronet Theater on December 18. And Antonioni was apparently willing to make some cuts. A few seconds here, a few frames there. Cuts would, of course, be the best way to solve this. A small, willfully difficult art movie that would be seen by only a handful of East and West Coast cinephiles wasn’t worth the rupture of a system that had been in place for decades or the demolition of a new set of guidelines that had barely been road-tested.
On December 17, Shurlock and Valenti handed down their final decision. Blow-Up would not receive a Production Code seal.
The next day, MGM opened the movie anyway. The technicality the studio used was an insult in itself: It simply invented a new company, “Premier Production Company, Inc.,” which was not bound by the authority of the Code, and released the movie under that banner.7 The lion didn’t roar before the movie started—the lion wouldn’t have roared anyway, since MGM had decided to retire it a couple of months earlier in favor of a new, “mod” solarized lion graphic8 that its executives believed would appeal to young people—but the impact was the same. Variety’s reviewer predicted that Antonioni’s film would never go into general release and complained that “it goes far beyond the limits of good taste, thru nudie action and play which undoubtedly will be found offensive by many.”9 MGM didn’t even bother to get an official ruling from the National Catholic Office for Motion Pictures before the movie opened; by the time they gave Blow-Up a “C” rating in early January, their condemnation was moot. The movie was a smash: It played not just in New York and Los Angeles, but everywhere in the United States, in Michigan and Minnesota and South Carolina and Vermont, returning a huge profit to the studio. Ten years of steady art-house releases by upstarts and masters of the New Cinema from Europe had created what critic Stanley Kauffmann called a “Film Generation” whose conversation was no longer confined to cocktail parties and thoughtful essays in the kinds of magazines that published thoughtful essays: “Everyone in Zilchville [saw] Blow-Up,” wrote Kauffmann, “not just the elite.”10
Blow-Up began 1967 by throwing a stick of dynamite into the middle of the movie business, and the fifty-four-year-old Antonioni, a saturnine man given to pronouncements on the order of “I hate my films and do not wish to talk about them,”11 suddenly seemed to be the unlikely leader of what, for the first time, looked like a full-out revolution. A few theaters across the country were unwilling to show the movie without a Code seal; other exhibitors eagerly stepped in to take their place. The reviews, for the most part, were raves: In The New York Times, Bosley Crowther wrote favorably about Blow-Up four times in less than a month and pointedly asked, “Why should a picture as intelligent and meaningful as this one be stigmatized by the Production Code people and condemned without any appreciation by the National Catholic Office of Motion Pictures? … I would say that, in this instance, both organizations have committed a grievous error.”12 Crowther had been at the Times for twenty-seven years; he was known as an aesthetic conservative and was belittled by many of his colleagues for his sludgy, malaprop-riddled writing style and his middlebrow primness. But Crowther also had a long-standing and passionate aversion to anything that smacked of censorship, and he was a writer who was more than comfortable with the clout his particular pulpit gave him. His sustained praise for Blow-Up served notice that the country’s most powerful newspaper had lost its patience with the Production Code in any form.
Blow-Up’s success, though it enhanced MGM’s bottom line, only increased the atmosphere of uncertainty and paranoia that seemed to pervade the major studios at the end of 1966. When Arthur Penn remarked that Jack Warner’s eleventh-hour seizing of the reins on Bonnie and Clyde was a last hurrah, he meant it literally; in November, Warner had sold a third of his shares in Warner Brothers to Eliot Hyman’s production company Seven Arts, and the industry knew it was just a matter of months before Hyman took over completely.13 Warner’s decision, along with the sudden death of Walt Disney on December 15 at sixty-five, would leave Darryl Zanuck at 20th Century-Fox as the only mogul from Hollywood’s golden age still in power. United Artists was also being sold; days after Warner’s decision to go into business with Seven Arts, UA entered formal negotiations to become a subsidiary of the Transamerica Corporation,14 an insurance company that had in recent years become a diversified conglomerate, albeit one with no experience in the entertainment business. MGM itself was facing a proxy fight in February 1967,15 and the trade papers were full of talk that a French bank was beginning a takeover bid for Columbia Pictures.
The studios seemed to be under siege, and the men running them felt cranky and bewildered—torn between continuing to fight the enemy (which, at various times toward the end of 1966, they identified as runaway production, color TV, the new morality, and the influence of European directors and filmmakers) and trying to profit by allying with their adversaries. The studios’ relationship with television networks was proving particularly nettlesome. The public appetite for theatrical movies on TV was insatiable—in 1967, they aired on at least one network every night of the week but Monday and sometimes drew more than 50 percent of the viewing audience. While the studios were making fortunes by selling packages of their films to the networks, they were also holding movies back: As the year began, MGM rejected a $10 million TV offer for Gone With the Wind and decided to rerelease it theatrically instead.16 With a collective sense of uncertainty and alarm about what the moviegoing public now wanted, many studios clung to the past, announcing plans to put The Alamo, Spartacus, The Longest Day, and The Greatest Show on Earth back in theaters, too.17 The choice of long, massive visual spectacles was no accident; with the conversion of all television shows to color, the only enticements that Hollywood still had to offer movie fans that they weren’t already getting at home were size, scope, length, and lack of commercial interruption.
But the studios couldn’t ignore the fact that their current product was held in almost universally low regard. Embarrassments seemed to come at every turn; when the 1966 Venice Film Festival announced its selections, it bypassed traditional studio product completely, choosing instead the Roger Corman biker-exploitation movie The Wild Angels, an American International Pictures melodrama about a barely disguised version of the Hells Angels that ended with a drug-saturated orgy in a church. The fact that the picture starred Peter Fonda and Nancy Sinatra seemed only to underscore Corman’s generational nose-thumbing at what Hollywood’s old guard viewed as its obligation to export its best possible image to the rest of the world. The Wild Angels was hardly Easy Rider; Corman and AIP staked out a shrewd middle ground that was characteristic of the period, making sure that the film was officially appalled by the behavior of its drunken, brawling, sex-mad bikers while giving audiences a good, long, passably lurid look at every one of their misdeeds. After the movie grossed forty times its $360,000 budget, the major studios held their noses and quietly started making plans to produce imitations. At the beginning of 1967, any possible loss of corporate dignity was giving way to bottom-line realities—and there wasn’t much dignity left to lose, anyway. “Experience has long since prepared us to accept the uncomfortable fact that the best work in motion pictures—the most intelligent, progressive, astute and alert to what is happening to people—is being done abroad,”18 wrote Bosley Crowther before announcing that his list of the ten best films of 1966 would include only two studio movies set in America, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming.
Mike Nichols and Norman Jewison spent much of the first part of 1967 running into each other on the awards circuit, as both their films came in for year-end honors. On one evening that quickly earned a spot in the annals of awards ceremony horror stories, they both found themselves in attendance at the Directors Guild of America banquet, where they were among the ten nominees. Walter Matthau, the awards presenter, took the stage to announce that the winner of the guild’s Best Director award was Nichols for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Nichols, genuinely startled, got up and made a long, heartfelt acceptance speech, then returned to his seat with his plaque. When Matthau returned to the podium, he announced with some embarrassment that he had misunderstood his presenting task—and that each of the ten nominated directors was to receive the plaque that Nichols had just accepted. The Best Director winner, he then announced, was Fred Zinnemann for A Man for All Seasons. A mortified Nichols somehow managed to laugh it off.19
After leaving Tennessee, Jewison had wrapped In the Heat of the Night in Los Angeles on a note of confidence. His two stars finished the production as friends, and newcomer Scott Wilson had, thanks in part to Sidney Poitier’s urging,20 gotten a major break that would only increase his stock; just as the movie finished, he and Robert Blake—the actor Wilson had essentially replaced as In the Heat of the Night’s vagrant suspect—had been cast over such big names as Paul Newman and Steve McQueen as murderers Dick Hickock and Perry Smith in Richard Brooks’s high-profile adaptation of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood for Columbia. The news, and the year of publicity that would precede its release, could only help In the Heat of the Night get noticed.
Jewison spent the Christmas holidays in Sun Valley, Idaho, skiing with his wife and kids, only to wind up in a local emergency room when one of his sons broke a leg on the slopes. The concerned father sitting across from him in the hospital waiting room, waiting to hear about his own son’s broken leg, was New York’s junior senator, Robert F. Kennedy. The two families began chatting, and Kennedy offered Jewison some encouraging words about his movie, telling him he thought the moment was right for a film about a black detective in the South and promising to mail him research from his Senate office about southern race relations, which he did. “Timing is everything,” Jewison says Kennedy told him, “in politics, art, and life.”21
Other studios now had the same idea: Just before Jewison’s ski trip, producer Samuel Goldwyn Jr. announced that he had acquired the rights to seven of Chester Himes’s detective novels featuring the Harlem cops Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson, and Jewison knew that feelers had gone out to Poitier and Harry Belafonte to play the leads.22 But without a director or a script, he also knew there was no possibility the project would reach screens before his own film. With little to worry about, Jewison was ready to spend some time with Hal Ashby in the editing room and to start planning his next film for the Mirisch Company, a light-spirited, sexy comedy-drama about a master thief called The Crown Caper (later retitled The Thomas Crown Affair). He had wanted Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton to star,23 but after the huge success of Virginia Woolf, they were freer than they had ever been to choose the films that struck their fancy and embarked on what would turn out to be an ill-fated year of conspicuous consumption and bloated international production, beginning with Franco Zeffirelli’s leaden adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew.
As 1967 began, Nichols was considerably less cheerful than Jewison; he was beginning to wonder if The Graduate had taken so long to come to fruition that it was in danger of being rendered irrelevant by movies that were already beating it to the finish line. In Los Angeles, he and Buck Henry went to see a movie about a young man who rejects the oppressively bourgeois lifestyle of his parents to take his first timid and neurotic steps into a new world of free-spirited sexuality. The film, an $800,000 comedy called You’re a Big Boy Now, was the MFA thesis project of Francis Coppola, a twenty-seven-year-old UCLA graduate student who had been getting steady work as a screenwriter for Seven Arts (he had written drafts of This Property Is Condemned, Is Paris Burning?, and Reflections in a Golden Eye).24 The movie and its brash director were now being hailed as the first piece of evidence that the widespread emergence of film school programs might have something to offer Hollywood. You’re a Big Boy Now also suggested a glimmer of a new business model for cheap color movies; thanks to a lucrative presale to network TV, the film was already guaranteed to make a profit. Coppola, wrote critic Hollis Alpert, is “new generation, new breed, possessed of talent, boldness, drive; and … now has the chance to prove his genius,” adding, “Chances that might otherwise not have been taken, because of their commercial risk, are now quite feasible, especially if the film can be in color.”25 Henry and Nichols left the theater glumly convinced that the movie they had just seen “had clearly and totally pre-empted The Graduate,”26 wrote Turman. Even Nichols’s usually droll press interviews started to betray his depression as he temporarily lost his perfect pitch. “I’m doing it better than anyone, and I can’t do it at all,” he complained. “I’m a fraud.”27
Nichols and Turman weren’t getting much encouragement from Joseph E. Levine, the Embassy Pictures czar who had agreed to finance the movie but now, in a temporary cash crunch, was threatening to pull the plug. The large and youthful audience that was turning Blow-Up into a hit did not impress the indefatigably lowbrow producer. “Some of these films are liked by the critics and no one else,” he told a group of college students while getting an honorary degree. “Antonioni, Truffaut, Resnais, Fellini are known to maybe only 1 percent of filmgoers. Antonioni is getting to be better known because of Blow-Up, but before that, mention the name Antonioni and most filmgoers would think it was some kind of Italian cheese.”28
Levine told Turman not to count on him for The Graduate’s budget, sending the producer on a frantic series of return visits to all of the studios that had rejected the project in the first place. “He said he couldn’t do it—he doesn’t have the money,” says Turman. “And there are no secrets in Hollywood. So, ‘secretly,’ ‘surreptitiously,’ I sent it back out to everyone. For a second time. And they all turned it down again. The problem was, nobody got the book. Nobody liked it. I don’t even think Joe Levine got it, but he saw it as a chance to rub shoulders with class, to do something that would contradict his image as the king of trash.”29
One problem for the studios may have been Nichols’s persistent inability to find the actors he wanted, a dilemma that bewildered the director himself. “It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever tried to cast,” he told a reporter at the beginning of 1967. “These people are so far removed from stock characters.”30 In early January, Turman announced a “nationwide talent search” for a twenty-two-year-old actor to play Benjamin, a halfhearted attempt at a Scarlett O’Hara–style publicity spin for what was essentially a bicoastal open call for résumés and head shots.31 At the same time, they finally nailed down one of the principals. “I was walking on the Paramount lot,” says agent Leonard Hirshan, “and on the first floor, an office window opened and Larry Turman stuck his head out and said, ‘Can you come in here for a minute? I want you to meet Mike Nichols.’ I go in and they say, ‘We’re very interested in Anne Bancroft for a role in this picture The Graduate.’… So I said, ‘Give me a script,’ and the rest is history. I got her $200,000, which was a nice salary at that time.”32
“I had dated Annie a little bit, long before this,” says Nichols. “She was certainly a beautiful, exciting, wonderful, angry young woman. Which I happened to like. But it took us a long time to think of her. Now, one of the reasons I didn’t think of Annie is the famous thing that she was too young [Bancroft was thirty-five when she was cast]. But then we decided it didn’t matter.”33 Nichols, having just aged the thirty-three-year-old Taylor into a hardbitten middle-aged drunk, knew he could do the same for Bancroft, and besides, says Turman, “she was a name. Not a blockbuster name, but a name Hollywood knew, and a name I could get for a price.”34
Turman and Nichols seemed to be inching closer to signing a Benjamin, especially after the director started to realize a built-in problem with his casting strategy: “I discovered that boys who really were that age couldn’t get the distance to get rid of the self-pity and… have an attitude toward that point in one’s life,”35 Nichols said. Once they started looking at older actors, Charles Grodin, a thirty-one-year-old TV and theater performer with a growing list of credits, impressed them both with a very sharp reading. “Grodin got very close,” says Nichols. “His reading was hilarious, he’s brilliantly talented, and he understood the jokes. But he didn’t look like Benjamin to me.”36
“Chuck Grodin gave the best reading,” says Henry. “And maybe one of the best readings I’ve ever heard in my career, so funny and interesting. He thinks we offered him the part—I don’t think we did. But I don’t remember his screen test, whereas Dustin’s was really memorable.”37
It was Nichols who first asked to see Hoffman, remembering his performance a couple of years earlier in Harry Noon and Night off Broadway. In mid-1966, Nichols had auditioned him for the musical The Apple Tree. Hoffman lost the part to Alan Alda, but shortly after that, he had a true breakthrough success as a New York stage actor for the first time in his career. The vehicle was a comedy by Henry Livings called Eh?, a British import in which Hoffman was playing a distractible teenage night watchman. “The play went through two directors, neither of whom wanted me,” says Hoffman. “The first one wanted me to ‘do’ David Warner, who had done the play in London.” He told Hoffman to go see Warner in the Vanessa Redgrave movie Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment and simply duplicate the performance. “Of course, I reacted negatively to that,” says Hoffman. To the actor’s amazement, Theodore Mann, the artistic director of New York’s Circle in the Square Downtown, where Eh? was being staged, kept Hoffman and fired the director. “The second director wanted a kind of camp performance,” says Hoffman, “and I don’t do camp very well. I don’t think it’s funny. I do farce, but I don’t do camp. So he fired that director, too.” The third director Mann chose was Alan Arkin, who hit it off with Hoffman immediately but, says Hoffman, “was so afraid that this play wasn’t going to be a hit that he didn’t use his real name” in the program or on the posters.38
When Eh?, with staging credited to the pseudonymous “Roger Short,” opened in October 1966—two nights before Nichols’s The Apple Tree—it was an instant sellout hit, and Hoffman, whom The New York Times’ Eliot Fremont-Smith called “one of the most agile and subtly controlled comedians around,”39 was suddenly a local sensation. A follow-up rave by Walter Kerr comparing the twenty-nine-year-old actor to a young Buster Keaton cemented his success.40 Now, Hoffman was also turning up on television with regularity, and not just in one-line roles. He starred in adaptations of The Journey of the Fifth Horse and Maxwell Anderson’s The Star Wagon that aired within a week of each other on public television and in a couple of ABC specials as well. “It’s funny—I don’t think Mike ever saw me in Eh?,” says Hoffman. “He was the hot director, so if he had come, I would have remembered.”
Hoffman was sent the script for The Graduate and a copy of Charles Webb’s novel and sat in his apartment on West 11th Street reading both. On his coffee table was Time magazine’s recent “Man of the Year” issue: at the end of 1966, the editors had selected “The 25 and Under Generation.” The drawing on the cover focused on a blondish, square-jawed young white man with the determined, clear-eyed mien of a future Apollo astronaut. Hoffman looked at the illustration and tossed aside the screenplay. “I thought, that’s your guy. I reacted against all of it. I didn’t want to read for it. I was right. Nichols was wrong. I was not in any way right for that part,” Hoffman says. “I thought, are these people having a breakdown? The guy’s name is Benjamin Braddock, he’s like six feet tall, he’s a track runner.”
After eight years of trying, Hoffman, at twenty-nine, finally had the career he thought he wanted. “I had this kind of chutzpah, this New York coffeehouse-and-Kerouac-and-Ginsberg thing: You weren’t there to ‘make it,’ you were there to be an artist,” he says. “That conceit kind of propelled me. I thought, I’ll work off Broadway for the rest of my life and I’ll be very happy and I’ll have a nice apartment, and I’m not going to screw it up by making a Hollywood movie and being miscast, even though I respected the director.”
Hoffman got a call from Nichols, who was still in Los Angeles doing screen tests. “Nichols said to me, ‘Did you like the script? Did you think it was funny?”’ says Hoffman. “And I said, ‘Yeah, very much.’”41 Taking a couple of days off from Eh?, the actor flew to Los Angeles in mid-January to test with Katharine Ross, a dark-eyed, strong-jawed twenty-six-year-old contract player at Universal who reminded Nichols of his first wife (Barbara Hershey and Kim Darby were among the other actresses who had read for Elaine).42 Although potential Benjamins and Elaines had read for Nichols and his team separately, Nichols preferred to screen-test them in pairs. Hoffman was whisked through a quick meeting with Bancroft—“It was all ‘How do you do?’ ‘How do you do?’—a blur to me,” he says—and then into the makeup room. “It was awful. I had only two or three days to memorize ten pages, and I’m a slow memorizer—I tried to do it on the plane. And then my memory jumps to the makeup chair, and, you know, feeling ‘What am I doing here?’ while they tried to turn my face into an Aryan. I remember Nichols saying, kind of kiddingly, ‘What can we do about his nose? What can we do about his eyebrows?’ I think they plucked me. It was his sly kind of humor, but it wasn’t helping me.”
Hoffman was then marched onto a soundstage that contained a bed, Katharine Ross, and a crane on which a camera was mounted. “He had a crane,” says Hoffman. “How many screen tests use a crane? Maybe he was working something out—it was only his second movie. Or maybe he was trying to see whether I could do a movie at all—‘Can the kid sustain?’ All I know is that through lack of sleep, makeup chair paralysis, and nerves, I couldn’t get through it.” Nichols did take after take, coaching Hoffman, trying to relax him, taking breathers. It was going badly—so badly that Ross began to tense up as well. “He looks about three feet tall, so dead serious, so humorless, so unkempt,” she thought. “This is going to be a disaster.”43 At one point as the hours dragged on and the two sat wearily on the bed, Hoffman reached over and pinched her bottom, trying to relax her or perhaps energize himself. She spun around in cold anger. “Don’t you ever do that!” she said. “I’m in the wrong place,” he thought. As Nichols seemed to shift his attention to Ross, Hoffman got even more clenched and inexpressive.44
“He was just sitting like a lump,” says Nichols, “not visibly doing much, which of course I’m usually crazy about. But it was a hard day.” Nichols was impressed by Ross—“I thought, this is her, this is how I want Elaine to look, she even knew what to wear”45—but less sure about Hoffman. After twelve hours, it was over. Hoffman shook hands with the director, “and Nichols’s hand was so damp that I really got nervous because I realized how nervous he was.” Hoffman shoved his hands back into his pockets; when he pulled them out again, several subway tokens flew out. “Here, kid,” said an exhausted and annoyed crew member, picking them up. “You’re gonna need these.”
Hoffman flew back to New York, where his costars in Eh?, Elizabeth Wilson and Alexandra Berlin, were anxious to hear if they were going to lose their leading man. He told them not to worry.46 In Los Angeles, enthusiasm wasn’t running much higher. “I looked at it, and it was just this ugly boy playing the part, and I thought, ‘Ugggh,’” Nichols’s editor, Sam O’Steen, said later.47 “There was no ‘Eureka!’” says Nichols. That is, until they printed the screen test and watched Hoffman on film. “He had that thrilling thing that I’d only seen in Elizabeth Taylor,” says the director. “That secret, where they do something while you’re shooting, and you think it’s okay, and then you see it on screen and it’s five times better than when you shot it. That’s what a great movie actor does. They don’t know how they do it, and I don’t know how they do it, but the difference is unimaginable, shocking. This feeling that they have such a connection with the camera that they can do what they want because they own the audience. Elizabeth had it, and by God, so did Dustin.”48
“With that, in one fell swoop, we lost all the blonds we were thinking about,” says Buck Henry. “I remember Mike said, ‘I have the rationalization for Dustin—he’s a genetic throwback. Somewhere in the genes of these people, there was some twisted dark pirate uncle, and that gene got passed on to Dustin. His whole appearance suggests that he doesn’t belong in that laboratory full of blond gods.”49
A few days later, Hoffman got a call from his agent telling him to phone Nichols. It was a snowy Sunday morning, and Hoffman had walked to the Upper West Side apartment of his girlfriend, a ballet dancer named Anne Byrne, to make breakfast with her. “Anne was cooking eggs at one end of the apartment, and I was on the line at the other, and there was a typical Nicholsian pause, and he said, ‘Well … you got it,’” says Hoffman. “And I didn’t say a word, except maybe thank you. And he said, ‘You don’t seem very excited.’ And I said, ‘Oh no, yeah, thanks.’ All I knew was that I was working with the greatest director of my life and that he was about to make the biggest mistake. I hung up the phone and looked at my girlfriend and said, ‘I got it,’ and there was this terrible, sad moment when she said, ‘I knew you would.’ It was heavy. Laden with potential regret that this was going to break us up.’”50 Ironically, Hoffman was now going to have to turn down a second movie role—one that had been offered to him by the husband of his new costar, Bancroft. Mel Brooks was also working for Joe Levine; he too had seen Hoffman’s performance as Harry Noon and Night’s German transvestite and now wanted him to play a Nazi playwright in his new comedy, tentatively titled Springtime for Hitler. “I thought he was the most original, spectacularly funny guy,” says Hoffman, “and I had to call him up and say, I can’t do it.”51
Nichols brought Hoffman to meet Levine in his New York office on a rainy afternoon. The financier was not impressed with Nichols’s choice of star. “The windows leaked when it rained,” Levine said years later. “Mike pushed him through the door with a towel in his hand. I thought it was the plumber who had come to fix the leaks. I pointed to the window that was leaking and said, ‘It’s over there.’”52 But Hoffman, at least, came cheap: He would cost Levine just $750 a week.53 His casting was announced in February 1967; production would begin in April, after he returned from Italy, where he had agreed to spend a few weeks shooting an ultracheap comedy called Madigan’s Millions. A couple of days after the news broke that an unknown young New York actor would star in The Graduate, the Academy Award nominations were announced. Nichols’s adaptation of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? led the field with thirteen, and suddenly Joe Levine realized that he had the money to make The Graduate after all.
1. Letter from Geoffrey M. Shurlock to Robert Vogel, March 30, 1966, MPAA file, Margaret Herrick Library.
2. Ibid., April 27, 1966.
3. Ibid., July 19, 1966.
4. Ibid., April 27, 1966.
5. Gold, Ronald. “Valenti Won’t ‘Blow-Up’ Prod. Code for Status Films.” Variety, January 11, 1967.
6. Various memos, November 1967, MPAA file, Margaret Herrick Library. A November 9, 1966, memo from Sidney Schreiber to Ben Melniker indicates that MGM actually solicited advice from the Code office about the viability of releasing the movie under a subsidiary company without a seal.
7. “Approval Denied to Antonioni Film.” New York Times, December 17, 1966.
8. “M-G-M’s Leo the Lion Is Cast as a ‘Mod’ Type.” New York Times, September 20, 1966.
9. Variety, December 21, 1966.
10. Kauffmann, Stanley. “Some Notes on a Year with Blow-Up.” In Film 67/68, op. cit., pp. 274–281.
11. Reed, Rex. “Antonioni: After the ‘Blow-Up,’ a Close-Up.” New York Times, January 1, 1967.
12. Crowther, Bosley. “In the Eye of the Beholder.” New York Times, January 8, 1967.
13. Sloane, Leonard. “7 Arts to Buy 33% of Warner.” New York Times, November 15, 1966.
14. “United Artists’ Sale Backed in Principle.” New York Times, November 21, 1966.
15. Canby, Vincent. “‘ Blow-Up’ May Get New Code Review.” New York Times, February 7, 1967.
16. Variety, February 15, 1967.
17. Ibid., March 1, 1967.
18. Crowther, Bosley. “The Ten Best Films of 1966.” New York Times, December 25, 1966.
19. Author interview with Turman and Nichols; Turman, So You Want to Be a Producer, op. cit.
20. AI with Wilson.
21. AI with Jewison. In his autobiography, Jewison appears to misplace the conversation with Kennedy at the end of 1965 rather than at the end of 1966.
22. Weiler, A. H. “Success Spangled Simon” (third item, headed “Harlem Whodunits”). New York Times, December 4, 1966; a September 26, 1966, memo from Hal Ashby to Norman Jewison (Hal Ashby files, Margaret Herrick Library) indicates that the possibility of a movie series based on Himes’s books was a matter of mild concern to both men.
23. Memo from Ashby to Jewison, September 14, 1966, Ashby Collection, Margaret Herrick Library, op. cit.
24. Useful background on Coppola’s early career can be found in Godfather: The Intimate Francis Ford Coppola by Gene D. Phillips (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2004) and Francis Ford Coppola: Interviews, edited by Phillips (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004).
25. Alpert, Hollis. “Off the Hook.” In Film 67/68, op. cit., p. 111–112.
26. Turman, So You Want to Be a Producer, op. cit.
27. Bart, Peter. “Mike Nichols, Moviemaniac.” New York Times, January 1, 1967.
28. “Most Fans Think Antonioni Is a Cheese—Levine.” Variety, May 24, 1967.
29. AI with Turman.
30. Bart, “Mike Nichols, Moviemaniac,” op. cit.
31. “Manhunt Is On for ‘Graduate.’” New York Post, January 17, 1967; and “New York Sound Track.” Variety, January 18, 1967.
32. AI with Hirshan.
33. AI with Nichols.
34. AI with Turman.
35. Day, Barry. “It Depends On How You Look at It.” Films and Filming (November 1968).
36. AI with Nichols.
37. AI with Henry.
38. AI with Hoffman.
39. Fremont-Smith, Eliot. “Theater: What’s That?” New York Times, October 18, 1966.
40. Kerr, Walter. “The Theater Looks at Our Times: ‘Eh?’—No Security for Us?” New York Times, November 6, 1966.
41. AI with Hoffman.
42. Rambeau, Marc. “‘The Graduates’ Undergraduate.” Los Angeles Times, August 13, 1967.
43. Zeitlin, David. “A Homely Non-Hero, Dustin Hoffman, Gets an Unlikely Role in Mike Nichols’ ‘The Graduate.’” Life, November 24, 1967.
44. Ibid.
45. AI with Nichols.
46. AI with Hoffman.
47. O’Steen, Cut to the Chase, op. cit.
48. AI with Nichols.
49. AI with Henry.
50. Hoffman eventually told the story of the moment Nichols gave him the part to Neil Simon, who took the notion of an actor’s success breaking up a relationship and, ten years later, turned it into the screenplay The Goodbye Girl.
51. AI with Hoffman.
52. “Dialogue on Film: Joseph E. Levine.” American Film (September 1979).
53. AI with Hoffman.