by Mark Harris
Hoffman went through the epic production of The Graduate, which shot for almost one hundred days, on a razor’s edge between elation and terror. He was thrilled when he came up with something that made Nichols laugh. “He ruined more than a few takes by cracking up,” says the actor. “But I guess he wasn’t laughing enough, because once we started shooting, I never thought I was doing a good job. I’ve heard and read since then that he wanted to keep me in a constant state of tension, but I think he had really bitten off more than he could chew. He knew he shouldn’t have cast me, and I think that’s what was plaguing him.”
In the course of a single day, Nichols could both reinforce the confidence of his hypersensitive star and demolish it. “I never had the feeling he was happy with what I was doing,” said the actor. “He’d throw out a cookie occasionally, but I always felt like a disappointment. He’d walk around the entire time saying, ‘Well, we’ll never work together again, that’s for sure.’”4 Sometimes his direction to Hoffman was as simple as, “Act less. What you think is nothing will, on a big screen, be something.” At other moments he was brutal, using the ear for perfect delivery he had honed in his years onstage to withering effect. “One time, I tried something in a scene and he said to me, ‘What were you doing?’” says Hoffman. “And I said, ‘Well, I made a choice….’ And he said, slowly, ‘I see. Well, the next time you get a thought, do the opposite.’” But Nichols also knew when his star needed a boost: “I remember sitting with Katharine Ross in a car and Nichols letting me hear him say to the DP [Robert Surtees], ‘He reminds me of Montgomery Clift.’ He could relax me in an instant…or not. That was Mike.”5
“To me, it seemed easy, all of it,” says Nichols. “It all sort of fell into place. Maybe that’s the rosy glow of memory talking, but I don’t think so.” If Nichols felt relaxed as production began, the reason was probably that, as he puts it, “I saw the whole thing—I knew what the movie was.”6 In that, he was a minority of one. “There were a lot of temperamental people,” says Buck Henry, “a lot of actors who weren’t coming from quite the same place.”7 And some of the director’s crew felt at a loss as well. “When we were given the script,” says Joel Schiller, who worked as an assistant production designer under Dick Sylbert, “I read it and said to Dick, ‘What is this?’ It didn’t seem to be anything. Dick just shrugged and said, ‘Mike’ll probably play it for comedy.’”8
But the studiously blasé Sylbert knew Nichols was up to something more ambiguous. Long before he started to scout locations and design sets, he had had a number of conversations with Nichols about giving The Graduate a hard, gleaming modernist look—the new-money sheen of California wealth. “California is like America in italics,” Nichols said at the time, “a parody of everything that’s most dangerous to us.”9 In the mid-1960s, most American sex comedies were shot quickly, cheaply, and with as little sex as possible: films like Divorce American Style and A Guide for the Married Man drew their color-filled art direction, their camera blocking, and their punch-line-driven sense of pace from TV sitcoms. For The Graduate, Sylbert wanted a colder, more muted palette, something that would represent Nichols’s and Buck Henry’s desire to refract Los Angeles through a prism of East Coast amusement and light contempt. Henry’s script even specified that the costumes were to embody “California Contemporary Sport Style: the adults in styles infinitely too young for them, the children in styles infinitely too old for them.”10 And Nichols decided to omit the opening scene of Benjamin’s graduation in part so that he could begin with him on an airplane, allowing the first line of the film to be the pilot’s voice-over: “Ladies and gentlemen, we’re about to begin our descent into Los Angeles.” “It’s a statement of theme that you don’t really hear, even though it’s perfectly loud and clear,” says Nichols. “It’s my thesis, but it’s invisible, which is just the way I want it.”11
Sylbert started by thinking about the Robinson and Braddock homes while driving around Beverly Hills with Schiller, who photographed every ostentatious new faux-whatever mansion with a swimming pool that he could spot. Since Benjamin’s and Elaine’s fathers were partners in the same company, Sylbert told Schiller that “they’d probably buy the exact same everything and charge it against the business. We’ve got to see how much we can make the houses look alike.”12 But in Sylbert’s final design, the relationship between the two homes became dialectical: The Braddock home was largely in white and full of right angles—an environment for bright, sunny, square people. The Robinsons’ house, by contrast, was full of shiny black surfaces and sensual curves, a nighttime lair for predatory animals, with a glassed-in, overgrown garden off the living room. Sylbert decided to literalize the idea of Mrs. Robinson as a wild beast, luring Benjamin toward his moral doom, in the appearance of Bancroft herself, down to the suggestion of a wild stripe in her hair. “In those days, you had a long time to plan these things,” says Nichols. “And Sylbert, who was a complicated man but a great art director, had so much fun with the beast in the jungle, as we used to call Mrs. Robinson, and her leopard underwear and her zebra-striped thing and her jungle plants. At one point, I was actually going to have an ape go through that garden, and then I thought, no, better just leave it lay. He even came up with the idea of seeing the bra strap marks—her tan—which they elaborately and carefully made up.”13
Nichols and Henry both knew that The Graduate, if it worked, would convey, in its very texture, what Henry called “the disaffection of young people for an environment that they don’t seem to be in synch with, the idea that Benjamin doesn’t fit with ocean boys, with people his age, with his parents, with his girlfriend. Nobody had made a film specifically about that.”14 Accordingly, Nichols sought to have Benjamin constantly cut off from the movie’s other characters either by water or by glass. From the opening scenes, in which Benjamin sits gloomily in front of an aquarium, to the final sequence, in which he is trapped behind a huge glass panel in a church as he tries to stop Elaine’s wedding, Nichols and Sylbert wanted Benjamin to be shot through or against clear but impenetrable surfaces as often as possible, as if he were trapped in a fishbowl. It was an aesthetic that caused no end of difficulty for Robert Surtees. “Cinematographers absolutely didn’t want to shoot with glass back then because it would catch too many reflections,” says Schiller. “Usually, when we built a window or a glass door, we’d just put an inch and a half of glass around the sash to fake a full window reflection, but Dick wouldn’t go for that. He said to Surtees, you’re gonna have glass in the windows and glass in the doors and you’re gonna figure out how to do it and you’re gonna get an Academy Award nomination.”15
Surtees had begun his career as an assistant cameraman on the 1931 RKO film Devotion; he had shot epics and melodramas and musicals and westerns, but little besides Wyler’s The Collector that would have been described as visually innovative. What Nichols wanted from him sounded preposterous; “I asked for such peculiar things,” he recalls. In the scene in which Elaine confronts Benjamin in the tiny apartment he has rented in Berkeley, Nichols wanted to use a long lens. “Surtees didn’t say to me, ‘But that has no meaning.’ He would figure out a way to do it. He took out the entire wall of the apartment and we shot the scene from all the way across the stage.”16
Surtees later said, “I needed everything I learned in the past thirty years to shoot The Graduate.”17 He had no choice. Though he may have grumbled privately, the cinematographer knew that, at sixty, he was the newcomer on the set, the stranger facing the tight-knit troika of Nichols, Sylbert, and editor Sam O’Steen, and that if he resisted their approach, he would find himself isolated and written off as a fogy from another generation. So he made it work. “Not only did he fall all over himself to do things he hadn’t done, but he would show me things that I didn’t know I was allowed to do,” says Nichols. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Surtees was especially interested in the subtleties of lighting. “Look at the sequence in which Benjamin and Mrs. Robinson are at the bar in her house, and then
she says, ‘Would you like to see Elaine’s portrait?’” says Nichols. “They go upstairs, and we have, ‘Mrs. Robinson, you’re trying to seduce me,’ and then Benjamin hears Mr. Robinson come home and he runs back downstairs. When we come downstairs, back to the bar, the lighting is entirely different from the first time we were there—it’s a dark and scary place because Mr. Robinson is scary and drunk, and she’s really scary when she comes in. I said, ‘How can we do this? How can we change the light in this room when nothing has changed?’ and Surtees told me, ‘It’s all right that it’s different. You’re allowed to do that in movies. How the lights were when they left the room is beside the point—it’s a new scene now.’ He knew all those things, and he taught them to me beautifully.”18
“Whatever Mike said, he got his way,” says Hoffman. “They built the Robinsons’ house on the set, the whole house, so you could open doors into rooms—there was a full bathroom even though it wasn’t in the script, because you didn’t know what Mike might want. I remember walking out of that hallway, and for some reason, he couldn’t get the camera through. And he said, ‘How long will it take to get these walls down?’ On a regular set, it would be nothing, but it was a fully built house. ‘Well, it might take a couple of days,’ they said. And he said, ‘All right, then we’ll wait.’”19
Waiting became the rule. Nichols would not be rushed on The Graduate any more than he had allowed his producer or his crew to hurry him along on Virginia Woolf; he was more than willing to use all of the capital he had earned with his first film’s success as long as Joe Levine, who had rented a soundstage at Paramount for the production, kept footing the bill. For Hoffman, who returned to his room every night at the Chateau Marmont as spring turned into summer and his weeks on The Graduate turned into months, exhaustion began to set in. The day he was filming the sequence in which Elaine slaps Benjamin in the face, Nichols didn’t like what Katharine Ross was doing. At several points during the shoot, he struggled with the young actress’s inexperience, as well as with her natural reserve. When Ross was shooting the scene in which Elaine finds out that Benjamin has been sleeping with her mother, “he wanted me to be crying,” said Ross later, “and I couldn’t…and I always felt sort of disappointed in myself.”20 “She’s driving me fucking crazy,” Nichols complained to O’Steen, “she can’t do it, she doesn’t have it.”21 That day, nothing she did could please him. Patiently, he filmed take after take. Fifteen hard slaps later, Hoffman felt a stinging pain in his ear. The next day, he got into his deep-sea-diving gear for the swimming pool scene; when he jumped into the pool, he felt as if his head were going to explode. He emerged from the water, blood pouring from his ear. Working on the film became an endurance contest, a test of his mettle. When the doctor examining his torn eardrum asked him how he liked making a movie, he replied weakly that the food on the set was good.22
Bancroft’s mood also darkened as the shoot went on. There were mornings she was hungover, and on some days she had such painful menstrual cramps that she couldn’t get out of bed. “She would just lie there in agony,” says Elizabeth Wilson. “And we’d reschedule around her.”23 The self-loathing beneath Mrs. Robinson’s glacial exterior wasn’t a completely foreign emotion for the actress who, before her success in The Miracle Worker, struggled to make it as a Hollywood ingenue and had essentially been washed out of the movie business for a few years. Sometimes the role seemed to come naturally to her; on other days she’d keep the character at arm’s length, almost refusing to connect with her. The scene in which Mrs. Robinson and Benjamin lie in bed and he begs her to have a conversation with him took days to film; in the draft of the screenplay that Nichols shot, it was almost a one-act play in miniature, fifteen minutes of uninterrupted dialogue (much of it straight from Charles Webb’s novel) in which Benjamin almost cruelly forces Mrs. Robinson to open up and learns that she was pregnant when she got married, that she once loved studying art, and that she wants him, above all, to keep clear of her daughter. He turns on her and calls her a “broken-down alcoholic,” gets dressed, and starts to leave; the exchange ends with a grim reconciliation as the two of them start to undress again for sex and Benjamin mutters defeatedly, “Let’s not talk at all.” In rehearsals, Nichols and Bancroft had talked extensively about what the scene meant. “When Benjamin says, ‘Art, huh. I guess you kind of lost interest in it over the years,’ and she says, ‘Kind of,’ that’s the key,” he told her. “That’s it. She just hates herself for having gone for the money, and she’s punishing herself with everything she does.” Bancroft understood him completely, but weeks later, when they were ready to shoot the scene, “she just tossed it off,” says Nichols. “I said, ‘Annie! Don’t you remember our conversation about this beautiful, crucial moment?’ She kind of casually said, ‘Oh shit, yeah, I forgot.’ And then she did it perfectly. For me, it was central. For her, it was just a line reading.”24
That rueful back-and-forth between the characters, punctuated by stage-style blackouts as they keep turning the lights on and off, was the only scene in The Graduate that Nichols and Buck Henry still didn’t feel they had gotten right once production began—it was too long, too diffuse, and its two-character, one-set, dialogue-based style seemed to belong on the stage, not on screen; it threatened to stop the flow of the rest of the movie. As Hoffman and Bancroft spent every working day in bed, feeling their way through round after round of bitter dialogue in which Bancroft had to play almost every moment with her back to Hoffman and the camera trained mercilessly on her face, gloom hung over the set. “We were not allowed to see rushes,” says Hoffman. “And I think one of the big reasons was Mike couldn’t let people see them and not let Annie in, and he didn’t want her to see how badly he was lighting her, to make her look older. But I used to have lunch in the commissary at Paramount, and I knew when they were screening it, so I would look through the slit in the door and see a little slit of myself on screen and get very excited.”25
By June, when Nichols and his cast and crew drove to La Verne, California, where Dick Sylbert had found a modern-looking church in which they could shoot the film’s climax, they were so happy to get out of the studio that the several days on location felt almost like a field trip. Hoffman acquired his first groupie, a local girl who would hang out near his trailer and flirt with him between takes. “Beautiful, thin, a real shiksa goddess,” he says. “I think Nichols took that as a sign—at least somebody found me attractive. And it didn’t get past me, either!”
The weather was scorching, Bancroft fainted during the scene in which everyone was pushing to get out of the church and had to be given oxygen and sent home, and the minister who had agreed to let Nichols film there was “very unhappy,” says Hoffman, “like they always are after they agree to have a movie come shoot and then see the reality after they say yes and everything starts to get the shit beat out of it.” When Nichols started to film Benjamin pounding on the glass wall, trying to get Elaine’s attention as she stands at the altar saying her vows, the huge pane of glass began to shake ominously, and the reverend yelled, “Everybody out! Out, out, out!” Trying to save the shoot, Nichols conferred with Hoffman—“the only time during the entire movie he asked me to compromise,” he recalls—and asked if he could think of any other way to get Elaine’s attention. Hoffman came up with the idea of spreading his arms apart and just tapping on the glass tentatively with his open palms. “The clincher was the reviews all saying this was Benjamin’s Christ moment,” says Hoffman. “It was a fix. That’s all it was. You gotta love critics.”26
As production of The Graduate rolled through its third month and into its fourth, Joe Levine started pressuring Larry Turman to wrap it up. “Levine may have chewed the producer’s ass out,” Sam O’Steen said later, “but at that point he was biting the bullet and pretty much left Nichols alone.”27 “It was endless,” says Elizabeth Wilson, “many, many, many, many takes, as if they had all the time in the world, and then reshoots. There was one point when I was finished and ba
ck in New York, and a call came that they were adding a scene with Dustin and Bill Daniels and me. I remember when I walked back onto the set, Mike really seemed up to his neck in something. I said to him, ‘Well, you always wanted to be a director,’ and he said grimly, ‘Ha ha ha.’”28 When the pressure got to Nichols, he rarely let it show, but few who worked for him found the production an easy experience. Nichols greeted each day with a serene opacity that, depending on what he was seeing and feeling as work got under way, could transform incrementally into warm affection or icy disdain without any dramatic change in his demeanor. (“Never let people see what you feel,” he had learned growing up, “because it gives them too much power.”)29 As had been the case on Virginia Woolf, his crew, not his cast, felt the brunt of his anger when it came. “One of the things in my life that I’m saddest about and most ashamed of,” says Nichols, “is that when we were shooting on the Sunset Strip, stealing a shot of Benjamin and Elaine walking toward the strip club, I said something snotty, as I often did to the crew. And I heard Bob Surtees say to them—it wasn’t meant for me to hear—‘It’s okay. It’s not going to be much longer.’ And I thought, oh, man, how could I have been such a shit that this man I revere feels that way about me? But I was.”30
When he had decided to make The Graduate three and a half years earlier, Nichols thought he knew exactly what his satirical targets were. “I said some fairly pretentious thing about capitalism and material objects, about the boy drowning in material things and saving himself in the only possible way, which was through madness,” he recalls. But the deeper he got into the shoot and the more intensely he pushed Hoffman past what the actor thought he could withstand, the more Nichols realized that something painful and personal was at stake, and always had been, in his attraction to the story. “My unconscious was making this movie,” he says. “It took me years before I got what I had been doing all along—that I was turning Benjamin into a Jew. I didn’t get it until I saw this hilarious issue of MAD magazine after the movie came out, in which the caricature of Dustin says to the caricature of Elizabeth Wilson, ‘Mom, how come I’m Jewish and you and Dad aren’t?’ And I asked myself the same question, and the answer was fairly embarrassing and fairly obvious: Who was the Jew among the goyim? And who was forever a visitor in a strange land?”31
