Pictures at a Revolution
Page 43
The Graduate did have a millisecond of skin: a blink-and-you-miss-it nipple that belonged to Anne Bancroft’s body double, used by Nichols as a shock cut from Benjamin’s terrified face in the scene in which Mrs. Robinson traps him in Elaine’s bedroom. (Bancroft, Hirshan, and her lawyer, Norma Zarky, had contractual veto power over not only whose nipple would be used, but how long it would appear on screen. They watched the footage together in a Los Angeles screening room and were then given copies so that if anything changed, said Hirshan, “what Anne had in the vault would be the evidence required to take appropriate legal action.”)34 But aside from that moment, the movie didn’t look much like either a sex film or a comedy to Levine. How was he supposed to sell something so uncategorizable?
“There was a brouhaha,” says Dustin Hoffman. “He wanted me and Anne to be naked in the poster. She was supposed to be sitting on the bed, and I would have my back to the camera so you can see my ass, and she’s looking up at me. And the reason he wanted that is that he was thinking, ‘All this movie’s ever going to be is an art-house release, and if people think there’s nudity, maybe they’ll come.’ Anne wouldn’t do it, but the one who really wouldn’t do it was Nichols.”35
Levine set an opening date of December 21 for The Graduate, but he seemed more interested in talking to the press about The Tiger and the Pussycat, an Italian sex comedy Embassy had imported that starred Ann-Margret and Vittorio Gassman.36 Nichols spent the fall directing Bancroft on Broadway in a revival of The Little Foxes that also featured George C. Scott, E. G. Marshall, and Beah Richards. Out of the editing room at last, he felt calm about his final cut—“I knew what I was attacking,” he says, “and I felt the movie was just the way I wanted it.”37
But the mood of his colleagues in the months preceding the opening was tense. Buck Henry was angry that Calder Willingham, whose draft of the screenplay had been discarded years earlier, had reappeared out of nowhere and demanded a Writers Guild arbitration for co-credit on the movie. Once he heard that Willingham was arbitrating, Peter Nelson, who had done a draft for Larry Turman years earlier, lobbied for credit as well. (William Hanley, who had also written a version, opted not to ask for a credit.) Since all three arbitrating writers had drafted screenplays that relied heavily on Charles Webb’s original novel, the Writers Guild decided to credit the script to Willingham and Henry, in that order, even though Henry had started from scratch and says he “didn’t know Calder Willingham existed until I had finished my work. Nobody told me there had been three previous writers. There’s nothing of Willingham’s in the film. I thought, what is this!? I can’t believe it! Was I pissed off? Yeah, I was pissed off that I wasn’t warned, although I should have asked—I just hadn’t had enough experience. Willingham was a really good writer, so I have to believe he thought he wrote it in some way. But he got a bad reputation for that.” Turman, who felt that he had “inadvertently helped Calder Willingham get a credit by telling him to put more stuff in from the book,” was upset as well. “But,” he says, “everyone knew Buck wrote the script.”38
Levine started to screen the movie for his friends and people in the industry. The first showings didn’t go well. “I particularly remember a screening at the Directors Guild,” says Nichols. “I was sitting behind Elia Kazan, who may have been with Budd Schulberg. Kazan was the reason I was in theater—I saw Streetcar when I was in high school, and I never got over it. And I sat behind them, and there was a lot of rolling of eyes. He was obviously not liking it. I was so sad.” Even some cast members were indifferent. “I was very annoyed because they had cut some things that Elizabeth Wilson and I had done together that I liked, only small things, but I probably had a chip on my shoulder,” says William Daniels. “I certainly didn’t sense that it was going to become a classic—I don’t think anyone did until it opened.” Wilson was working with Nichols on The Little Foxes as a standby for Bancroft when he invited her to a small screening of the film. “I’ll be honest—it just didn’t hit me the way I thought it was going to,” she says. “Now, of course, I love it, but that day…It was so stupid of me, but I went back to rehearsal and just couldn’t cover my disappointment and said something to Mike. He got pretty angry.”39
For the first time, Nichols’s calmness and composure began to fail him a little, as the single biggest gamble he had taken in casting the movie seemed to have fallen flat. “The first of the people who saw the movie would go up to him,” says Henry, “and say, ‘Oh, it’s wonderful, Mike, so, uh, beautiful to look at—it’s just a shame about the boy.’ They had only derogatory things to say about Hoffman.”40
Hoffman hadn’t been invited to any of the early private screenings of The Graduate. After the movie wrapped on August 25, he had returned to New York City and the cocoon of his former anonymous life. He survived for a few months on the $4,000 he had saved while working on the picture and then registered for unemployment, lining up on East 13th Street every week to pick up a $55 check while he looked for acting jobs.41 When he ran into Sam O’Steen on the street and asked him how the movie was going, O’Steen said to him, “I hope it’s not too fast! Mike cuts really fast!” and hurried on. Turman, Nichols, and Henry had shielded him from the early bad buzz about his performance, so Hoffman had little idea what to expect when he heard the movie had been booked into a theater on East 86th Street for its first sneak preview before a paying New York audience. He and his wife-to-be, Anne Byrne, went in just before the film started and sat in the back of the balcony: “I remember being in this excruciating, claustrophobic state, and the picture starts, and the first shot is a close-up of me. I literally shook through the entire movie.”
The house wasn’t sold out, but it was pretty full. “I had no sense of whether it was working or not,” says Hoffman. “I think there are laughs, but mainly I’m looking at scenes and thinking, ‘I should have done that better.’ And then it gets to the church, and what got me out of my self-flagellation is that I looked down, over the edge of the balcony, and these kids were on their feet, cheering for me to get away. They had gone wild.”
The movie ended. Hoffman and Byrne hung back until they were sure that everyone had left. Then they got up and pulled on their coats. Hoffman turned up his collar, and they started walking down the stairs. The only audience member left was a small woman in her mid-sixties, holding the railing and making her way toward the exit door with a cane. It was Radie Harris, who had written the “Broadway Ballyhoo” column for The Hollywood Reporter since the 1940s. She turned to Hoffman, peered at him, and pointed her cane at his chest. “You’re the man who played that part,” she said.
“Yeah.” Hoffman nodded.
“Your life is never going to be the same,” she said, and walked out of the theater.
“It was her way of complimenting me, but it felt like a death sentence,” says Hoffman. “We go outside to get a cab, and it starts to snow. And I was in such denial about what life was doling out that I looked up at the snowflakes and said to Anne, ‘See that? That’s real. That’s the only thing.’ I just wanted to wipe it all away.”42
But whatever confidence the reaction at the sneak preview might have instilled in Hoffman was erased by the movie’s premiere, an invitation-only event that Levine staged on both coasts a few weeks before The Graduate opened. In Los Angeles, Gregory Peck, Julie Andrews, Norman Jewison, Natalie Wood, and Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate were among those who turned out;43 the list of New York celebrities who attended the movie and dinner dance at the Hilton was a testament to the breadth of Nichols’s universe and included Diane Arbus, Myrna Loy, Sidney Lumet, Saul Steinberg, Burt Bacharach, Irene Selznick, Bobby Darin, Neil Simon, Peter Shaffer, and George Plimpton. Nichols came with Penelope Gilliatt; Hoffman brought Byrne.44 “That night, the suits, the tuxedos, I can’t remember a single laugh,” says Hoffman. “It was disastrous. I saw a lot of Levine’s friends there, and they all looked like, what is he doing on the screen? It should be Redford!”45
TWENTY-EIGHT
&nb
sp; Warren Beatty knew he was terrible at promotion but terrific at personal persuasion. In the early 1960s, when he made his first movies and was just entering the public eye, being a difficult interview subject still had a kind of cachet for a young movie star: Mumbling, murmuring, squirming, and answering questions with questions signified a reputation-enhancing unwillingness to play the publicity game, a Brandoesque attitude that implied one was up to something more substantial than behaving like the latest compliant product of the Hollywood studio machine. But slouching and surliness didn’t come any more naturally to Beatty than opening up, so generally he wouldn’t say very much at all. The interminable pause followed by the distracted nonanswer became his signatures, and he took them to maddening extremes: Just before going down to Texas to shoot Bonnie and Clyde in 1966, he reluctantly agreed to sit down with Barbara Walters for a Today show appearance promoting Kaleidoscope. Not only did Beatty neglect to mention the movie, he slid away from Walters’s questioning with answers so devoid of content that she told him, on the air, that she had never had a worse interview.1
But by the time Bonnie and Clyde opened, evasion was becoming passé; these days, top-tier celebrities were proving their seriousness by submitting to long, confessional, let-it-all-hang-out Q&As in Playboy. They were expected to unload about sex, revolution, and politics, to free-associate and rant, to spin out anecdotes about losing their virginity or dropping acid. Beatty couldn’t do that; although there was no mistaking his interest in sex and politics, talking about them was another matter. So when Bonnie and Clyde began to fail, he decided to try to save the movie not by embarking on a round of interviews, but by working the system from the inside, alternately deploying charm and a strong arm, using each tactic one-on-one wherever he saw a chance.
Beatty traveled from city to city and theater to theater, checking projector bulbs to see how Bonnie and Clyde looked, making sure that, per his specifications, projectionists turned the volume two calibrations higher than the standard wherever the film played,2 talking to exhibitors and telling them how well it was doing in New York, how young audiences were excited about the movie and urging their friends to go, how if movie houses just kept the picture booked for one or two more weeks, they’d see the needle start to move in the right direction and have a long-running hit on their hands. He would show theater owners week-by-week revenue charts from neighborhoods where the film’s business had improved during the course of its run. Beatty found this door-to-door salesmanship “demeaning,”3 but he didn’t let up. Before the London opening, he went to England and hosted a week of private midnight screenings for the city’s tastemakers, the people he had gotten to know when he was living there with Leslie Caron. He drafted Benton and Newman to work on the ad campaign with Dick Lederer, who had written the great slogan “They’re Young. They’re in Love. And They Kill People.” Finally, he worked Warner Brothers’ executive suites on both coasts, determined not to let a change in management sink his movie.4
In some ways, Seven Arts’ takeover of the studio benefited Beatty. Jack Warner no longer had a say in Bonnie and Clyde’s future, and Ben Kalmenson, who had never had much faith in Beatty as a star, found himself in a drastically reduced role in the new company and was soon to be bought out.5 Meanwhile, Lederer, a Beatty ally, was given more authority over advertising and publicity.6 While those involved in the film have often said that it was washed up by the end of October, two and a half months into its run, the numbers suggest that the movie was still performing strongly. Bonnie and Clyde had been a hit in Manhattan from the beginning, and in mid-October, Warner Brothers expanded it onto dozens of screens in the New York area, where it drew impressive crowds. For the month of October, it was the number three film in the country, a remarkable performance given its limited release.7 “The movie found, even at the very beginning, an audience of moviegoers, and word was getting out,” says Penn. “Lines began to appear at the box office [in New York], all these wonderful-looking kids of what was beginning to be the 1960s, probably smoking dope while they were waiting to get in.”8
In November, Bonnie and Clyde faltered, but not because its potential audience had been exhausted: Warner Brothers simply stopped booking the picture into theaters. Despite its high grosses in New York, the studio took the disappointing results of its Kansas City test run as justification for a decision not to give the movie a wide release anywhere outside of New York. Even though Variety reported Bonnie and Clyde’s weekly take as “big” in Washington, D.C., “boff” in Chicago, and “robust” in Los Angeles, the picture had only one print in each city; Warners was essentially treating it as an art-house release everywhere but New York. In Los Angeles, Bonnie and Clyde played to steady business at a single theater, the Vogue, for eighteen weeks without ever going wider.
Beatty was furious about the way the new Warner regime was handling the movie, particularly because he believed it was being shoved off screens in favor of Reflections in a Golden Eye, a movie Seven Arts had produced before it acquired Warner Brothers and which Beatty now believed that company chief Eliot Hyman was treating preferentially. In November, Reflections was on 250 screens, far more than Bonnie and Clyde, despite the fact that audiences had demonstrated little interest in seeing Marlon Brando play a half-mad repressed homosexual army colonel married to Elizabeth Taylor. Even the way Reflections looked was being widely rejected; moviegoers responded so poorly to director John Huston’s decision to desaturate the color and tint the entire picture brownish gold that in many cities they complained to theater managers and demanded their money back. After Reflections opened outside of New York, Warner Brothers spent a considerable sum of money recalling every print and having the picture reprocessed in normal, untinted Technicolor.9
If that kind of expense was being lavished on a film that had virtually no critical backing or popular word of mouth, Beatty wanted to know why Bonnie and Clyde wasn’t getting more attention, especially since the press was now almost completely on the side of his movie. Faye Dunaway was appearing in Harper’s Bazaar, Town & Country, Life, Vogue, Cosmopolitan, Paris Match, and Esquire;10 in November, a New York Times Style section reporter followed her as she previewed the spring 1968 collections, which were full of berets and knit pullovers clearly inspired by Theadora Van Runkle’s costumes; Dunaway’s “portrayal of Bonnie,” the reporter wrote, “is causing a resurgence of interest in nineteen-thirties fashions.”11 Arthur Penn found himself becoming a go-to talking head on the subject of violence in the movies throughout the fall, as critics found themselves weighing Bonnie and Clyde and The Dirty Dozen against John Boorman’s brutal, nihilistic Point Blank, Stuart Rosenberg’s Cool Hand Luke, and Richard Brooks’s In Cold Blood. Even publications like the National Catholic Reporter were issuing strong defenses of Beatty’s picture, writing, “There is a grim irony in hearing critics scream bloody murder when finally presented with an approximation of the genuine article (where were their outcries when a whole society was being marinated in violence?).”12
In early December, sixteen weeks after Bonnie and Clyde opened, the movie made the cover of Time magazine. Robert Rauschenberg created a collage of images of Beatty and Dunaway, adorned with the headline THE NEW CINEMA: VIOLENCE…SEX…ART… Inside was a five-thousand-word story in which the magazine admitted that its own original, dismissive review was a “mistake,” then went on to call the film “not only the sleeper of the decade but also, to a growing consensus of audiences and critics, the best movie of the year…a watershed picture, the kind that signals a new style, a new trend…. In the wake of Bonnie and Clyde, there is an almost euphoric sense in Hollywood that more such movies can and will be made.”
In a national media universe then dominated by three networks and three weekly newsmagazines (Life and Newsweek were the others), the impact of the Time cover can scarcely be overstated; it marked the public birth of the idea of a New Hollywood—and to believe in it was, by definition, to view the rest of the movie business as an archaic and doomed enterprise
. Although the magazine cited films as disparate as In the Heat of the Night, Two For The Road, Blow-Up, and the still-to-open The Graduate as examples of fresh, forward-looking filmmaking, the piece left little doubt about what was igniting all the excitement. To understand Bonnie and Clyde as “a commentary on the mindless daily violence of the American ’60s” (something that didn’t exist when Benton and Newman started writing the film) and to realize that movies were now allowed to “[cast] a coolly neutral eye on life and death and on humanity’s most perverse moods and modes” was to ally oneself with the future of film; to carp about realism, historical verisimilitude, or the moral effect on an audience “torn between horror and glee”13 was to be consigned to the past. Bonnie and Clyde was now not just a movie, but a movement—and sides were being chosen.