Pictures at a Revolution

by Mark Harris

  Allen and Penn shared an admiration for the suggestive, almost sensual editing of French New Wave movies: The sequence in which Bonnie first sees Clyde’s pistol—a series of disembodied shots of her moist lips and flashing eyes, his gun at his waist, her lips parting in excitement as her mouth plays over the rim of a Coca-Cola bottle, her hand tentatively reaching over to fondle his gun, and a couple of close-ups of his distracted, detached expression—conveys Bonnie’s charged, troubled sexual appetites and Clyde’s uneasy relationship to his own body purely through the rhythm of shot selection and cutting. Beyond that, Allen proved instrumental in shaping the performances of a group of actors who, aside from Beatty, were largely new to film and whose work could vary wildly from take to take and within single takes as well. “Dede is enormously sensitive to a good, well-acted moment,” says Penn. “A lot of actors owe a great deal to her.”2

  That may have been especially true of Dunaway, whose performance as Bonnie was full of brilliant, quicksilver flashes that had to be selected carefully from takes in which her nerves got the better of her. The help came at a critical moment for the actress. The fact that she had been cast in three films in quick succession had won her a spate of “It girl” publicity, but as Penn and Allen were editing Bonnie and Clyde, Dunaway’s first two movies opened to receptions that were indifferent or worse. Elliot Silverstein’s The Happening never quite decided whether it was supposed to be a lark about youth culture or a crime thriller; it opened early in the year, just as the idea that 1967 was to be a “Summer of Love” was gathering currency, and its portrait of hippies as “menacing” hoods already seemed quaint and silly, two steps behind the romanticization of Haight-Ashbury, LSD, and human be-ins. And Hurry Sundown was a disaster; no trace of comprehension of the very real contemporary racism that the cast and crew had experienced in making the film under the shadow of the Klan in Louisiana had rubbed off on the movie itself. When Paramount released Otto Preminger’s long, turgid melodrama, which showcased a depiction of southern race relations that included a group of black farmhands spontaneously bursting into song on a porch, reviewers moved into shoot-to-kill mode. “Gather roun’, chillun, while dem banjos is strummin’ out ‘Hurry, Sundown’ an’ ole Marse Preminger gwine tell us all about de South,” wrote Judith Crist, saying it “stands with the worst films of any number of years.”3 Even Variety, which rarely had a negative word to say about any expensive studio picture, shook its head at “the darkies-are-a-singin’ discredited racial stereotype.”4 Dunaway’s brief, strong performance was completely overshadowed by near unanimous contempt for the “awful glop of neo–Uncle Tomism”5 that defined the movie as a whole.

  Then Dunaway got a lucky break: Norman Jewison, having been turned down by Elizabeth Taylor, Julie Christie, and Brigitte Bardot, was still looking for an actress to star opposite Steve McQueen in The Thomas Crown Affair. Jewison hadn’t been any more impressed by The Happening or Hurry Sundown than critics or audiences had been, but when Allen and Penn offered to show him sequences of her performance in Bonnie and Clyde, he was sold. Everyone else took some convincing. “Nobody knew Faye Dunaway,” said Jewison. “She wasn’t hot.”6 Even McQueen accepted his decision only grudgingly and replaced the nickname—“Fadin’ Away”—that Dunaway had acquired on Penn’s set with a crueler version. According to cinematographer Haskell Wexler, McQueen was so sure his new leading lady was headed nowhere that he wrote her off as “Done Fade-Away.”7

  While Jewison prepared to shoot Thomas Crown, he experienced his first real lapse of optimism about In the Heat of the Night. Postproduction had, he felt, been going smoothly; he had brought in the movie for just over $2 million,8 and he and Hal Ashby had been working together in the editing room for weeks, fine-tuning each scene, stripping away anything that felt extraneous—including almost every moment that remained of Virgil Tibbs’s relationship with a black family in Sparta (“I sure resented being preached at like that,” Jewison’s own secretary told him after she saw the scenes).9 Together, they whittled the finished film to a taut 110 minutes. Jewison had liked the jazz-inflected scores of Sidney Lumet’s The Pawnbroker and Sydney Pollack’s The Slender Thread, so he hired the same composer, thirty-three-year-old Quincy Jones, to score In the Heat of the Night; Jones suggested that they sign Ray Charles to sing a bluesy, mood-setting title song over the opening credits.

  In the spring, the Mirisch Company scheduled the film’s first sneak preview, and Jewison and Ashby took a print to San Francisco, a city they chose for its hip, liberal, antiauthority moviegoing audience. “In those days, we used to do real sneak previews,” says Jewison, “on a Friday or Saturday night. After the audience had already seen a film, we’d say, ‘If you want to stay, we have another movie to show you.’ And that’s what we did on In the Heat of the Night.” The audience watched quietly as the first few scenes of the movie unfolded—the discovery of a dead body on Sparta’s main drag in the middle of the night, the introduction of Virgil Tibbs as he’s hauled into the police station for questioning, and his first encounter with Chief Gillespie. “When Steiger said to Poitier, ‘What do you do up there in Philadelphia to make that kind of money?’ and Poitier answered, ‘I’m a police officer,’” says Jewison, “the audience went nuts. But with laughter. They were stamping their feet, they thought it was so funny.” The laughter came again, in a tremendous wave, when Poitier spoke his signature line, “They call me Mister Tibbs!” and Jewison’s heart sank completely. As the movie ended, he walked out of the theater dazed and sorrowful, with Ashby trailing behind him.

  “I thought I had made a film that had a little bit of humor,” says Jewison, “but not a comedy. I was devastated. Truly devastated. I said to Hal, ‘Oh, my God. What have we done here?’”

  Ashby was unfazed. A proud hippie, he was more in touch than Jewison was with an emerging post-Strangelove generation of moviegoers who weren’t interested in earnestness but got the barbed sociocultural joke of a smart black cop waiting with ever-decreasing patience for a backward southern sheriff to drag his carcass into the modern world. They weren’t laughing at the movie, he told Jewison; they were just grooving on the humiliating comeuppance Poitier was handing to Steiger in every scene. “You don’t understand,” he told Jewison. “They were enjoying the film. They were into it. They get it.” Jewison wondered if the movie needed a major recut; Ashby suggested losing a couple of lines here and there, but nothing more. Jewison returned to Los Angeles with serious misgivings. But he was able to console himself with one reaction. “Even in San Francisco,” he said, “when we got to the scene where Endicott slaps Tibbs and Tibbs slaps him right back, there was suddenly no sardonic or ironic feeling in the audience. There was a gasp, an intake of breath throughout the theater that was almost palpable. From the white audience and the black audience. They didn’t take that as a joke. And at that moment, I knew we had them.”10

  In March, Mike Nichols assembled the cast of The Graduate on a Los Angeles soundstage for what was to be an almost unheard-of luxury for a small film: three weeks of rehearsal, during which the actors would have a chance to explore their characters, improvise scenes, and feel their way into relationships while Nichols shaped them into an ensemble. Dustin Hoffman, Anne Bancroft, and Katharine Ross took their places at a long table, scripts in hand, as did the rest of the actors Nichols had hired: Elizabeth Wilson, who had costarred with Hoffman onstage in Eh?, was to play his mother; William Daniels, another theater veteran who had just finished starring in a short-lived sitcom overseen by Buck Henry called Captain Nice, would play Benjamin’s father, though he was just ten years older than Hoffman; and Gene Hackman, fresh from Bonnie and Clyde, had won the role of Bancroft’s husband, the unsuspecting Mr. Robinson. Nichols’s brain trust was also present: Buck Henry, editor Sam O’Steen, and production designer Dick Sylbert. And, as Warren Beatty had done on Bonnie and Clyde, Nichols completed the mix with a veteran cinematographer. Robert Surtees came to the project with three Academy Awards, thirty-five years of e
xperience, and a résumé that had included some of the most difficult productions of the last several years: William Wyler’s The Collector, Arthur Penn’s The Chase, and, most recently, Doctor Dolittle, from which he had gotten an early parole in order to join Nichols’s crew. O’Steen, remembering Nichols’s sometimes stormy relationship with Haskell Wexler on Virginia Woolf, warned Surtees that Nichols was going to push him hard,11 but Surtees couldn’t imagine that The Graduate would offer him any more of a challenge than a thousand animals had. While the actors worked, Sylbert would scout locations in Los Angeles12 and Surtees would begin to map out shots, with O’Steen serving as a sounding board for Nichols and consulting along the way, just as Ashby had done for Jewison on In the Heat of the Night.

  “Don’t do anything,” Nichols told his cast before they opened the script. “Don’t push. Don’t try to perform. This is just for us.”13 And then they turned to page 1, starting with one of the very few scenes in Henry’s screenplay that did not make it into the finished film, an overexplicit prologue in which Benjamin the valedictorian, in cap and gown, reads his speech in front of thousands of classmates. “What is the purpose of these years, the purpose for all this demanding work, the purpose for the sacrifices made by those who love us?” he asks. As he builds to the answer, he begins to panic; he can’t remember it. Wind rustles the pages on the lectern; perspiration begins to bead on his brow. The audience stares at him expectantly. “The purpose is…” he says, searching for the word as the pages of his speech blow away. “There is a reason, my friends, and the reason is…,” he trails away, pouring sweat. He never finds the answer.

  Two hours later, the actors got to the last moments of Henry’s original screenplay, in which Benjamin and Elaine, fleeing from the church, jump onto a bus. “Let’s go. Let’s get this bus moving!” Benjamin says to the driver.14

  The bus was not moving. The panic Benjamin expressed in the movie’s first scene had, by the end of that morning, spread to the entire table of actors. “That day,” says Hoffman, “I’ll never forget. That movie just fell right on its ass. By the time that reading was over, there was a glumness on everybody’s faces. The same expression. And I remember Nichols just saying, ‘Okay, let’s break for lunch, and then we’ll come back and start rehearsal.’”15

  “I don’t think there was a lot of love in the room,” says Buck Henry. “Dustin was very withdrawn. And when Anne started working, I don’t know what was wrong, but I thought, Lord, there’s no Mrs. Robinson in there that I know of.”16

  Hoffman’s initial struggle wasn’t surprising; his character was the center of the movie, his grueling screen test just weeks earlier had felt like a giant vote of no confidence, and he still worried that he had been miscast as a young superachiever in a romantic triangle. As he began rehearsals, every bit of his meager off-Broadway theater experience was telling him to hold back, refuse to commit himself, and wait until later in the process to discover the character. “That’s why we never got jobs, me and Hackman and Duvall!” he says. “Duvall would say, the ones that get the jobs, what you see at the audition is what you get. Whatever they did to get the part, that was it—that was the character. But we would try to develop a character, and when we didn’t know what it was going to be, we were taught to do zero, it’ll come to you, just read the lines.”17

  Bancroft’s troubles were harder to decipher. By 1967, she was an experienced film actress who, after her Academy Award in 1963, had moved on to a challenging role as an unhappy woman heading toward her third marriage and sixth child in the British drama The Pumpkin Eater, written by Harold Pinter, and won another Oscar nomination. But the kind of movie stardom she might have expected in the five years since The Miracle Worker had eluded her; in the early and mid-1960s, the era of sex comedies, westerns, and war films, Hollywood didn’t have much use for an actress with her kind of dark, brittle strength. Playing the bored, alcoholic wife of a successful businessman, she seemed lost, disconnected from the character’s intelligence and suffocating ennui. “I wasn’t seeing upper middle class in her performance,” says Henry. “I was seeing lower middle class, or upper lower class. It took them a while. But that’s what rehearsals are for, and she and Mike both knew how to use it. It made me admire her more that she had to climb out of someplace to get there.”18

  “Do you like my character?” the irritated actress asked Nichols after a few days of rehearsal.

  “No, not at all!” said Nichols. “She’s much too nice! She doesn’t sound like that.”

  “Why isn’t she nice?” said Bancroft.

  “I can’t tell you,” said Nichols. “I don’t know why. But I can do it for you.”

  “All right,” said Bancroft. “Let me hear it.”

  Nichols read her one of Mrs. Robinson’s lines—“Benjamin, will you drive me home?”—with as much frosty, deadpan neutrality as he could muster.

  “Oh!” she said. “I can do that. I know what that is. That’s anger.”19

  “Annie was tough,” says Elizabeth Wilson. “I don’t think she was a happy camper from the first day I worked on the film. She had a sort of aloofness—she wanted to be left alone to work on her character and to think whatever she had to think. It made sense for her to do that, but it wasn’t easy.”20

  “Annie wasn’t Mrs. Robinson,” says Nichols. “She was very different. But she also had this tremendous anger—that was real, that was her power. Years later, we were all together for some anniversary of The Graduate, and we were encouraged by some studio or other to reminisce. And every time someone would say something about how much fun it was, she would contradict them, almost harshly. She would say, ‘No, it wasn’t like that, it wasn’t such a wonderful time, we worked hard!’ Afterwards, I said to her, ‘We remember everything differently, but I have to ask you, do you remember the moment when you said, “That’s anger!” the same way I do?’ And she said, ‘Yes, word for word—and sometimes I think I’ve never lost the anger since then.’ Which I think was sort of true.”21

  “One of Mike’s great gifts is as a casting director,” says Wilson. “He can somehow pick up on the essence and spirit of a person, and study it, and then tap into it.”22 For Bancroft, that meant unlocking her rage. For Hoffman, it meant exploring, and more than once exploiting, his awkwardness, his stubbornness, his embarrassment, and his dreadful certainty that the experience of making The Graduate would end in humiliation for him, an anxiety that had, in a way, started the moment Nichols peered at Hoffman in the makeup chair and asked, “Can’t we do something about his nose?” One afternoon, reporter Betty Rollin watched as Nichols took the actors through a rehearsal of the scene in which Mrs. Robinson sits in Benjamin’s car and warns him to stay away from her daughter. Nichols had Hoffman and Bancroft push their chairs together and sit side by side, looking straight ahead. “You threaten him with something so terrorizing that you know he has to do what you want,” Nichols told Bancroft.

  “Oh, I have so much anger I can’t breathe!” said Bancroft, exhilarated.

  “Now, Dusty,” said Nichols, turning to Hoffman. “It’s like you just won an award, say, for that [Italian] picture you just did, and I say, ‘Listen, I have permission from SAG to see that you never work again.’” Hoffman just nodded, the blood draining from his face.

  The barbs Nichols aimed at the young actor could sting, especially when they focused on his appearance: “Oh, I’m so sick of that shirt off,” he said, sighing, when Hoffman started undressing to rehearse a bedroom scene with Ross. “It’s not like he’s Bardot.”23 Hoffman had already endured an early round of publicity that focused, sometimes caustically, on his “extraordinarily ordinary” looks and a childhood that had included “braces on the teeth, polyps in the nose, acne on the skin.”24 But Hoffman thrived on the push and pull with his director. “The rehearsal period was the greatest experience I’ve ever had in terms of film, bar none,” he says. “What he did was what I had always heard directing should be. I remember when we were rehearsing the hotel s
cene [in which Benjamin beds Mrs. Robinson for the first time], he took me into a corner and said, ‘Do you remember the first time you had any action at all?’ And I said yeah. It was a sweater feel. I was in junior high school, playing the piano, doing Al Jolson in blackface, if you can believe that, and this girl was in the show, and we were waiting to be called. And we’re kind of attracted to each other, but I can’t get too close to her because of the blackface. And somehow, at one point, I put my hand on her breast.

  “Mike said, ‘Let’s do the scene again, and do that to Annie. Don’t tell her. Just find a place to do it.’ So I go up behind her, and just as she takes her sweater off, I put my hand on her breast. And she was brilliant. She just looked at it, and then went back to her sweater, taking a stain out of it or something. And I started to break [into laughter]. I took my hand off her breast, and I turned away and thought, I’m gonna get fired, because breaking is the worst thing you can do. I turned my back on her and Nichols and walked over to the wall and started banging my head against it. And he goes into hysterics. He said, ‘That’s in the movie.’”25

  Nichols would constantly come up with new questions for Hoffman: Do you think Benjamin’s a virgin? Did you have any idols when you were growing up? How would you play this scene if you were twelve years old and Mrs. Robinson were in her twenties? What would Benjamin do if he went over to the Robinsons’ for a barbecue? “He was talking the talk that I’d been learning for years,” says Hoffman. “It was exhilarating.”26

  But several other cast members still felt mystified about The Graduate. They found the chilly tone of Henry’s screenplay jarringly bleak for what seemed, in its plot contours, to be a fairly standard dirty joke—the one about the nice boy, the nice girl, and the predatory older woman. “We all knew Mike’s reputation,” says William Daniels. “He had done Barefoot in the Park, so when you looked at the script for The Graduate, and thought, ‘Here’s a New York director who does light comedies,’ you looked at it in a certain way. We assumed it was a light comedy about Anne Bancroft and the young boy. But in the second week of rehearsal, Mike said to us, ‘I’m thinking of using these two kids for the music—one tall and one small.’ And he put on ‘The Sound of Silence.’ Well, I completely turned around. Suddenly, I realized, hearing the music, that this was going to be told entirely through Dustin’s eyes. And that was something I hadn’t seen before. All of a sudden, the film felt more significant.”27