by Mark Harris
Faced with its worst nightmare, a movie that, in the words of one reviewer, was “neither light enough nor fantastic enough for children, and…neither sophisticated enough nor adult enough for their elders,”51 Fox did what it could, but to little effect. Studio publicists touted the film’s $91,000 first-week gross on a single screen in New York, although it was already clear that advance ticket sales were responsible for most of that and would dry up quickly. With no way to refute the U.S. reviews, the studio got Los Angeles Times columnist Joyce Haber, a sort of friend of the Hollywood court, to run an item saying that the notices in London had been the best for any American movie in ten years except for Bonnie and Clyde. (Haber must have missed Penelope Mortimer’s Dolittle critique in the London Observer, in which she reported, “What a wretched, disconsolate Scrooge I must be…under different circumstances, I probably would have crept away in the interval.”) Even the $11 million invested in Dolittle product tie-ins was a disaster: “Merchandising has always been a problem for Doctor Dolittle,” says Christopher Lofting, “because you’re trying to sell a stuffed animal that looks like a dog, not a character. Many of the manufacturers got seriously burned on that movie.”
Fox’s decision to press forward with an Oscar campaign for Doctor Dolittle came partly because it had nothing else to push; the studio’s other year-end release, Valley of the Dolls, was doing sensational business but had gotten reviews so spectacularly scornful that they made Dolittle’s look kind, and the two most acclaimed performances in Fox’s 1967 lineup, Paul Newman as a grim gunslinger in Martin Ritt’s western Hombre and Audrey Hepburn as a disenchanted wife in Stanley Donen’s romantic seriocomedy Two for the Road, had been overshadowed when Newman’s Cool Hand Luke and Hepburn’s Wait Until Dark (both from Warner Brothers) became bigger hits. In recent years, no studio had been shrewder than Fox at working the Academy; using the large portion of the voting membership that it employed, the studio had muscled its way to Best Picture nominations for one borderline-or-worse movie after another, from The Longest Day to Cleopatra to The Sand Pebbles. The studio had no choice but to try again. In January and February, Fox booked sixteen straight nights of free Dolittle screenings at its theater on the lot,52 and promised dinner and champagne to any voter who showed up.
TWENTY-NINE
The opening of The Graduate on December 20, the day after Doctor Dolittle, was not a banner moment in American film criticism. Pauline Kael called Nichols’s technique a “bad joke” and compared it to a “television commercial.”1Time magazine dismissed the movie as “alarmingly derivative and…secondhand” and called its director “a victim of the sophomore jinx.”2 And John Simon seethed at its “oversimplification, overelaboration, inconsistency, eclecticism, obviousness, pretentiousness…and sketchiness” as well as its “rock bottom” music.3 But the movie’s opening did allow Bosley Crowther to finish his duties at The New York Times with genuine enthusiasm and open-mindedness. “Suddenly, when the…prospects of an Oscar-worthy long shot coming through get progressively more dim,” he wrote in his farewell piece for the paper, “there sweeps ahead a film that is not only one of the best of the year, but also one of the best seriocomic social satires we’ve had from Hollywood since Preston Sturges was making them.” Benjamin Braddock, he went on, “is developed so wistfully and winningly by Dustin Hoffman, an amazing new young star, that it makes you feel a little tearful and choked-up while it is making you laugh yourself raw…. The overall picture has the quality of a very extensive and revealing social scan.”4
However, even critics who loved The Graduate couldn’t agree on exactly what was being revealed. “This is no mean picture whether taken as entertainment or as a social statement,” wrote Archer Winsten in the New York Post. “It demonstrates a youth movement that can be cheered or jeered, enjoyed or criticized. The point is that Nichols has come through with something distinctly new under the movie sun.”5 But what? Variety’s reviewer called the picture “excellent” but felt that “Hoffman’s achievements in school are not credible in light of his basic shyness.”6 And the National Catholic Office for Motion Pictures came up with a pained endorsement of the movie by claiming that “the bedroom scene where Ben tries to talk with his mistress” is “perhaps the best statement on film about how joyless a thing an affair can be,” adding, “There is no mistaking the point.”7
Younger reviewers, unsurprisingly, didn’t think that was the point at all and didn’t have to twist themselves into knots to find redemption in the movie. Twenty-five-year-old Roger Ebert, who had just won the top reviewing job at the Chicago Sun-Times, saw Benjamin as a hapless hero lost in “a ferociously stupid upper-middle-class California suburb. He would like the chance to sit around and think about his future for several months. You know—think?” He called The Graduate “the funniest American comedy of the year…because it has a point of view. That is to say, it is against something.”8
What many of The Graduate’s naysayers felt the movie was against was them—their standards, their notion of what a well-made picture should be, their ability to control a cultural conversation that they suddenly felt was slipping out of their grasp. Hollis Alpert wrote in Saturday Review that when older audiences went to see The Graduate, “it was almost as though they felt themselves personally attacked.”9 In Life magazine, Richard Schickel, who was then all of thirty-three, fretted that the movie might be the latest symptom of the “battle cry, ‘Never trust anyone over thirty,’” and wrote of his alarm at the “growing tendency among my fellow fuds to ingratiate themselves with their adolescent critics by agreeing with them.”10 A tone of contempt and anger united many of The Graduate’s negative reviews, possibly because the film’s release marked the first time in many years that so many American moviegoers had felt the direct sting of a generational insult. David Brinkley, writing in Ladies’ Home Journal, called the movie “frantic nonsense” but admitted that he had had a “heated argument” with his college-age son and his friends, who “thought The Graduate was absolutely the best movie they ever saw…they liked it because it said about the parents and others what they would have said about us if they had made the movie—that we are self-centered and materialistic, that we are licentious and deeply hypocritical about it, that we try to make them into walking advertisements for our own affluence.”11
Those college kids—the ones who filled the theater where Andrew Greeley watched the movie and who “had absolutely no trouble throwing themselves into the story and laughed loudly at lines their parents would not have caught”12—turned out to be a far more potent force than any friend or foe of The Graduate anticipated. Variety’s initial prediction of “hot b.o. in the young market”13 proved true, but it was easy for the studios, all of which had rejected the script out of hand, to rationalize its success at first: Kids were home from their campuses for Christmas break and needed something to see. But in January, when they went back to school, The Graduate really took off. An industry report at the beginning of 1968 revealed that 48 percent of all movie tickets in America were now being sold to filmgoers under the age of twenty-four;14 in other words, the first wave of the baby boom generation had grown up. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, they had been kids and teenagers, and their tastes had reshaped pop music. But when it came to movies, the industry’s biggest hits—cheerful musicals and family-friendly epics—had been, by and large, the films their parents had chosen for them.
Movies from A Hard Day’s Night to The Wild Angels to Francis Coppola’s You’re a Big Boy Now had played with the idea already, but The Graduate was the first true blockbuster of the sixties to exploit the fracture—the “generation gap,” in the endlessly repeated term of the moment—between those kids and their parents. Its impact was felt even in the White House, where Lynda Bird Johnson, the president’s twenty-three-year-old daughter, had a furious fight with her father after she learned that her husband, Charles Robb, was bound for Vietnam; she consoled herself, sobbing, through a screening of the film.15 As The Graduate
grew at the box office, first becoming the number two movie in the country and then number one, where it stayed for months, its success shattered a long-standing Hollywood studio business model. Warner Brothers and United Artists both announced that they were rethinking their entire development slates and marketing tactics with an eye toward courting younger audiences and hiring younger filmmakers;16 other studios quickly followed their example. “We must hypothesize…that there are at least two huge American audiences,” wrote Alpert about the movie. “One made up of the seventeens to the twenty-fives, the other over thirty-five…one wonders which is the more mature.”17
On December 28, fifteen members of the New York Film Critics Circle gathered to vote on their thirty-third annual prizes, marking the unofficial start of the 1968 awards season. The best-foot-forward, values-driven taste of Crowther, its chairman, had dominated the group for decades, and its membership did not yet overlap with that of the newer National Society of Film Critics; although the two groups would have many members in common in later years, in 1967 only Newsweek’s Joseph Morgenstern belonged to both. At the meeting, Crowther argued passionately against awarding Best Picture to Bonnie and Clyde and prevailed, but only by a hair. Initially, Bonnie and Clyde led the voting but lacked the two-thirds majority then required for a first-round win; by the sixth ballot, the New York critics chose In the Heat of the Night for Best Picture.18 The group voted to give a special prize to Crowther for his years of service to the Times, but it came with a bitter pill: He’d have to watch David Newman and Robert Benton collect the Best Screenplay prize. Nichols was named Best Director for The Graduate, and Rod Steiger won the Best Actor award for In the Heat of the Night. Best Actress went to seventy-nine-year-old Edith Evans for her delicate performance as a London pensioner barely scraping by and tormented by loneliness and senility in The Whisperers, a black-and-white character study that had come and gone quietly earlier in the year.
A few days later, the eleven members of the National Society of Film Critics—“the anti-Crowther gang,” as Andrew Sarris called them—convened in New York, where most of them lived, to vote on their second annual awards. It was not a sweet-tempered meeting of colleagues, and the movie that most divided the room was, predictably, Bonnie and Clyde. Critics either loved it—Kael, Morgenstern, and Esquire’s Wilfrid Sheed all chose it as the year’s best picture—or left it off their ballots altogether. Sarris was just about to publish his landmark auteurist guide to directors, The American Cinema, which would become a defining work for a generation of dedicated moviegoers (or, in a coinage the press had just started to use, “film buffs”).19 He filled out his ballot with works by two of the directors whom he was about to install as members of what he called “the Pantheon”—Jean Renoir (whose 1932 comedy, Boudu Saved from Drowning, he counted as a new movie, since it had gotten its first New York release in February) and Howard Hawks, whose El Dorado Kael had derided as “exhausted,” “tired,” and a “studio job.”20 Sarris’s picks were, in part, a way of thumbing his nose at his rival, now starting her new life at The New Yorker. “It’s strange that we should have been pitted against each other that way so often,” he says, “but I really didn’t like her.”21
In the end, Bonnie and Clyde came in second: The winner of the group’s Best Picture and Best Director awards was Ingmar Bergman’s Persona,22 which had opened early in the year and drawn virtually no audience, even by the standards of foreign-language films, but had excited tremendous admiration. The praise crested with a long and influential essay by Susan Sontag in Sight and Sound in which she declared the film Bergman’s masterpiece, somewhat mysteriously attacked its treatment by American critics (which had been almost entirely positive) as “paltry,” and explained that their attempts to explain the movie in narrative terms were futile since it existed in a realm “beyond psychology.”23 Much of the awe for Bergman’s film was mixed with a degree of befuddlement—“After seeing Persona twice, I still cannot be sure that I understand it,”24 wrote John Simon, who nonetheless gave it his Best Picture vote—but the support for Persona was also a way of reaffirming the primacy of Europe in world cinema from a group that wasn’t quite ready to recognize the first stirrings of a new American aesthetic.*
The National Society’s Bonnie and Clyde partisans got the movie prizes for Best Screenplay and for Gene Hackman’s supporting performance, and the group gave In the Heat of the Night awards for Steiger and for Haskell Wexler’s cinematography. Although they awarded nothing to The Graduate, the film was very much on their minds. The group met to conduct its voting in the East Side apartment of Hollis Alpert, an ardent supporter of The Graduate who gave it his votes for Best Picture, Director, Actor, and Actress. Alpert’s living room overlooked “the Block”—the street that housed the four Third Avenue theaters that were then among the most desirable in Manhattan. Joe Levine had succeeded in booking The Graduate into one of them, the Coronet. At one point, the critics took a break from bickering and balloting and stared out the window at the street below. The line of young, shaggy moviegoers was endless, snaking around itself again and again. “It wasn’t lost on us,” said Sarris. “The line looked different from other lines. It felt quite symbolic.”25
The Academy Awards race was hardly a gentleman’s game in the 1960s. If campaigning was less costly and public than in more recent years, it wasn’t due to a sense of decorum as much as to the fact that the Academy itself was half the size it is today, much more heavily populated with rank-and-file studio employees, and thus easier to manipulate and control. Oscar prognostication was not yet a blood sport; each year, the movies that would be the subject of campaigns were selected by their studios and then essentially dictated to selected gossip columnists and writers from Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, and the Los Angeles Times, the only major publications that then took much notice of the nominating process. In due course, the papers would print dutifully unsourced reports on what pictures “people” were citing as contenders. In the middle of January, Variety ran a piece breathlessly calling the 1968 Academy Awards contest “the closest in years,” citing a dozen contenders for Best Picture nominations.26 But in reality, the contest for nominations was hardly extraordinary: Critics’ awards and “ten best” lists had already made it clear that In the Heat of the Night, Bonnie and Clyde, and The Graduate were all headed for Best Picture nominations, and given Stanley Kramer’s Oscar pedigree and the big business the film was doing, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner was a likely nominee as well. “The Academy was conservative then, and demographically, it leaned on the upwards side even more then than it does now,” says Dick Zanuck. “It was not what you would call youth-oriented.”27
The fifth Best Picture slot was genuinely up for grabs. Some studios had just a single movie to promote—at Fox, Zanuck was putting everything behind Doctor Dolittle, MGM was campaigning aggressively for The Dirty Dozen, and Universal had no hopes for anything other than Thoroughly Modern Millie. Warner Brothers and Columbia each boasted a deeper roster of potential nominees, leading Variety to speculate that both companies “could be hurt by too much good product.”28 Besides Bonnie and Clyde, Warner was also getting behind Cool Hand Luke, the thriller Wait Until Dark, Camelot, and Up the Down Staircase, and Columbia was campaigning not just for Kramer’s film, but for To Sir, with Love, The Taming of the Shrew, and the film that many in the business thought was most likely to be the fifth nominee, Richard Brooks’s well-received adaptation of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood.
From the moment In Cold Blood was published in The New Yorker in four installments in the fall of 1965 until the day Brooks’s movie premiered more than two years later, the project was scarcely out of the headlines. Brooks, who wrote, directed, produced, and controlled every aspect of the film himself, had insisted on casting virtual unknowns—Robert Blake and In the Heat of the Night’s Scott Wilson—as killers Perry Smith and Dick Hickock, and he resisted more than one plea from the studio to use color, instead hiring the great young cinematographer Conra
d Hall to shoot the film in black and white, which Columbia warned him would impair a possible sale to television. Life and Look sent photographers to the Kansas town where the film was shooting, noting that the murder scene at the center of the picture would be filmed in the very farmhouse where the killings of the Clutter family took place. The movie met with Capote’s approval, a relief, said Brooks, since “if he had disliked it, he could have murdered us…. He can really sting like a hornet.”29 Instead, Capote made a point of praising it and hosted a premiere for eighty-five of his friends, including Bill and Babe Paley, Lee Radziwill, Mike Nichols, Katharine Graham, Leonard Bernstein, Arthur Schlesinger, and Alan Jay Lerner, while announcing to the press, “I just want it to open in a quiet way.”30
That proved all too easy to achieve. In the wake of Bonnie and Clyde, The Dirty Dozen, the Leone/Eastwood pictures, and Point Blank, Brooks’s restraint and visual discretion—he presented the crime only in flashback and shot the murders indirectly, averting the eye of the camera at pivotal moments—worked against the film with audiences. The long-standing argument that serious movies should be shot in black and white because color was inherently festive and trivializing had become unsustainable in the face of the past year’s subtle, thoughtful cinematography in Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, and In the Heat of the Night, and the very thing critics admired about Brooks—his “admirable skill and good taste…without once showing the raw performance and effects of violence,” in Crowther’s words31—apparently kept moviegoers away. In Cold Blood’s approach felt derived from a vanishing aesthetic, an Old Sentimentality, or, as Andrew Sarris put it, “the kind of facile Freudianism that is supposed to have gone out in the forties.”32 The movie, which was made for just $2 million, returned a solid profit, but its earnest, unself-conscious storytelling, which reached its end with a stern, Stanley Kramer–esque denunciation of capital punishment, was too much a product of the Hollywood establishment to have any impact with the young moviegoers who were now dominating the marketplace, and Columbia undersold it, making no real push for nominations for either of its two leading men, despite spectacular reviews for both of them.
