Pictures at a Revolution

by Mark Harris

  Crowther said a final good-bye to his colleagues on January 31 at Sardi’s, where the New York Film Critics Circle handed out the prizes they had voted on a month earlier. Robert Benton, David Newman, and their wives finally got to meet the man who had worked so hard to keep audiences away from their work and in the process argued himself out of his job. “We made small talk about the weather or the food or the room,” said Newman. “His wife came over, a white-haired woman, and he said, ‘Dear, these are the young men who wrote Bonnie and Clyde. You know something? They’re not so terrible after all.’”33 Crowther ended up introducing the two men to the assembled audience, getting a big laugh when he took one last shot at the movie’s departure from factual accuracy by dryly praising their “highly imaginative and indisputably original script.” Sidney Poitier showed up to hand Mike Nichols his Best Director prize; Nichols thanked Dick Sylbert, Sam O’Steen, and Robert Surtees.34In the Heat of the Night’s Best Picture award was presented by Bobby Kennedy, who had expressed enthusiasm about the project to Jewison more than a year earlier. “See?” said Kennedy. “I told you the timing was right.”35 The senator, just weeks away from announcing his candidacy for the Democratic nomination for president, got the night’s biggest laugh by referring to a hit movie that had just opened a few days earlier, remarking that a remake of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly was already being planned “with President Johnson, Gene McCarthy and myself. We haven’t quite figured out the casting on this last one yet.”36

  On February 20, when the Oscar nominations were announced, Bonnie and Clyde and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner led the field with ten apiece; The Graduate and In the Heat of the Night received seven. All four movies received nominations for their directors and writers, and collectively, they dominated the acting categories, taking thirteen out of the twenty available nominations. The news that Doctor Dolittle had won nine nominations, including one for Best Picture, was greeted with shock and, from several quarters, outright disgust. Arthur Jacobs’s prime-rib-and-free-booze campaign of dinner screenings had worked; though the picture received no nominations for directing, writing, or acting, it edged past In Cold Blood in the category that counted most. Richard Brooks was recognized with nominations for directing and writing, but he admitted that his wife, actress Jean Simmons, was in a “state of fury” when she heard of In Cold Blood’s omission from the Best Picture race, and Truman Capote went public with his outrage. “Anything allowing a Dolittle to happen is so rooked up it just doesn’t mean anything,” he fumed. “The only three good American films last year were Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate and In Cold Blood. In the Heat of the Night was a good bad picture. Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner is a bad movie that got there for sentimental reasons and all that political stuff. I think it’s unbelievable.”37

  Capote may not have helped his own cause. By awards season, his taste for social exclusivity, gossip, and New York high life was already beginning to overshadow his reputation as a writer; even Robert Benton and David Newman participated in a swipe at his famously lavish Black and White Ball in the December 1967 issue of Esquire, which featured eight celebrities on a cover adorned with the headline “WE WOULDN’T HAVE COME EVEN IF YOU HAD INVITED US, TRUMAN CAPOTE!”38 But Capote’s complaint, even if it smacked of poor sportsmanship, accurately reflected an East Coast consensus: The Graduate and Bonnie and Clyde, movies made by New York directors, were the year’s standouts (a feeling shared by the creative teams of both movies, who were friendly with each other). To support one film was to support both. In the Heat of the Night fell somewhere in the middle of the pack; the new cultural gatekeepers knew it was more about content than style but felt it was intelligently made and well crafted; Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner was brushed aside as self-important silliness—“that old Hollywood thing of, ‘Love us because at least our hearts are in the right place,’” says Penn;39 and Dolittle made them apoplectic. “Believe me, nobody was more surprised than I was when we got a nomination for Best Picture,” says Dick Zanuck. “How we got in there is amazing to me. But these things happen. And you know, Arthur Jacobs…it was a bonus to have a guy who had done that for a living mastermind the whole thing.”40 Jacobs had worked the voters—including the publicists, who then made up nearly 10 percent of the Academy’s membership—with consummate skill. He knew that the craft branches—sound, editing, art direction, costume design, cinematography, and music—were small, clubby, and among the most averse to change, and he used the old-fashioned familiarity of Dolittle to score nominations in every one of those categories.

  “It was all so silly,” said a disgusted Academy member a couple of years later about the Dolittle free-dinner campaign. “All the editors standing around, knowing they had been bought.”41 When the Los Angeles Times’ Charles Champlin said as much in print, Richard Fleischer wrote him a furious letter. Champlin wouldn’t back down: “A good many factors other than merit enter into the voting,” he wrote back to Fleischer. “If this impugns the integrity of the voters, then that’s what I’ve done. If I were a Fox employee and was aware that my studio had however many million it is—$18? $19?—riding on a picture which needs all the box office help it can get, I’d think twice about not voting for it.”42

  The nominations made manifest the rift between old and new, New York and Los Angeles, European-style cinema and studio establishment picture making, that had seized the industry, and in many cases, the old guard decided to make a defiant last stand. Haskell Wexler’s universally praised cinematography for In the Heat of the Night went unnominated, while Robert Surtees’s work on Doctor Dolittle was included, a choice that Variety reported was “astonishing to industryites.”43 Surtees’s work on The Graduate was also nominated, as was fellow veteran Burnett Guffey’s cinematography for Bonnie and Clyde. But Bonnie and Clyde’s Dede Allen was not nominated for her groundbreaking editing, nor was The Graduate’s Sam O’Steen. The Los Angeles Times called the double omission “a spleen-busting travesty” and “a tribute to the tenacity with which Hollywood’s gerontocracy still controls its guilds.”44 Somehow, an obscure and completely unexceptional war movie directed by Cornel Wilde called Beach Red did make the cut. Its editor, Frank Keller, was apparently in the habit of buying many of his colleagues a round of drinks during Oscar season; his nomination was one of several that represented the triumph of Tammany Hall–style Oscar politicking. (“Ever hear of Beach Red?” cracked O’Steen later. “You never will.”)45

  Bonnie and Clyde’s five stars—Beatty, Dunaway, Gene Hackman, Michael J. Pollard, and Estelle Parsons—would all be attending the Oscars as first-time nominees, as would Dustin Hoffman and Katharine Ross, who were nominated for The Graduate along with Anne Bancroft. Rod Steiger was up for Best Actor for In the Heat of the Night, and Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn, Cecil Kellaway, and Beah Richards had all been recognized for Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. Richards had received no major film offers since making the movie and had gone back to working in theater, hoping to find steadier employment. Stanley Kramer cabled her, telling her that he “could not be happier about any nomination.”46 Beatty, Hoffman, Steiger, and Spencer Tracy, whose posthumous nomination was unusual but not unprecedented, would be competing for Best Actor with Paul Newman, who had won his fourth nomination in the category for Cool Hand Luke. That meant that the odd man out was Sidney Poitier, who ended the year without a nomination for any of the three hit movies in which he had starred. The trade papers muttered a few words of disapproval and blamed split voting.

  THIRTY

  Twenty-seven weeks after it opened, Bonnie and Clyde had become a phenomenon without ever turning into an actual hit. Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway were greeted with delirious enthusiasm when the movie had its Paris debut; they and the Bentons and Newmans were driven along the Champs-Élysées to the premiere in vintage 1930s automobiles; Dunaway made the cover of Newsweek; and a spate of European pop ballads inspired by the movie climbed the international charts. But by the end of 1967, Bonnie and Clyde had retu
rned just $2.5 million in rentals to Warner Brothers, barely enough to cover its production and marketing costs. In January 1968, after Beatty’s behind-closed-doors confrontation with Eliot Hyman, the studio had quietly put the film back into a handful of theaters around the country with mildly encouraging returns. But not until the day after its ten Oscar nominations were announced did Warner give Bonnie and Clyde its first wide release. This time, the public was ready. Many of the same theaters that had knocked the picture off their screens after a week or two in the fall of 1967 now reported grosses for the rerelease that were five and six times what the film had taken in originally.1

  Bonnie and Clyde’s sudden and immense box office success flabbergasted Warner Brothers, made Warren Beatty wealthy beyond his wildest hopes, and turned the movie into the narrow front-runner for Best Picture. Suddenly, the 1968 Oscar race had become a referendum on something more than the quality of the five nominated movies. Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate were now automatically paired by many commentators, greater than the sum of their parts whether you loved them or loathed them. To their detractors, both movies were morally contemptible, smirky, and ripe for dismissal in the same language that critics on the right used when they wanted to write off hippies, political militants, campus organizers, and war protesters as nothing more than exemplifications of youthful laxity and bad manners. In John Simon’s harangue against The Graduate, he called Benjamin and Elaine “a younger Bonnie and Clyde, not forced into crime, but just as specious in their heroism, and pitted against just as simplistically villainous a society.”*

  But to their supporters, the two films added up to a kind of joint statement on what the future of American movies could and should be. In early 1968, as the studios were still racing to catch up with the headlines, Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate were both instantly understood by younger moviegoers as mirrors on the counterculture, even if they weren’t quite products of it. (The two films ran “neck-and-neck,” Richard Corliss observed in National Review, “in the Most Analyzed U.S. Film of the Decade sweepstakes.”)2 The collective determination to find “relevance” in both movies was, at least in part, wishful. A large, youthful audience, desperately impatient for films that reflected social upheaval in the way that music was already doing, finally had some evidence that American movies could speak their language. When they became campus favorites in the wake of Bonnie and Clyde’s success, Robert Benton and David Newman faced questions from students who, wrote Newman, thought it “was ‘really about’ police brutality…. Then there were the ‘really about Vietnam’ theorists and ‘really about the race riots’ crowd.”3 Benton and Newman may have been bemused when moviegoers interpreted Bonnie and Clyde as an encoded representation of events that hadn’t even occurred when they had written it, but those readings of the film were only fulfilling the mandate the two screenwriters themselves had issued five years earlier when they declared that the movie had to be about “what’s going on now.” When they wrote Bonnie and Clyde, that had meant creating unconventional love triangles, treating outlaw style as an act of rebellion, and encouraging moviemaking with a European texture; by the time the movie opened, “what’s going on now” also meant viewing crime as a political statement about social and economic injustice and a righteous response to the corruption of the Establishment.

  The degree to which the movie was taken as a call to rebellion surprised some of the people who had made it. “It was such a turnoff for me at that moment,” says Estelle Parsons. “I gave all these interviews in which I said, I believe in the rule of law and how terrible it is that this movie is going to say the law is bad! I was briefly horrified that I’d been a part of it.”4 But Arthur Penn was delighted with the way Bonnie and Clyde had been appropriated as an instrument of protest. “The social temperament of people in the Depression was what I think young people were experiencing at that point about the Vietnam War,” Penn says. “Instead of economics, it was, ‘This war’s going on, and we’re in the path of it, and we don’t know whether it’s going to roll over us.’ I recognized that feeling of broad pessimism from my own childhood.”5 With the arrival of The Graduate, Bonnie and Clyde had a companion piece, and each movie’s reputation was elevated by the other: The two movies were allied as indictments of the status quo, and The Graduate’s depiction of alienation and disaffection as a legitimate response to the false values of society was every bit as resonant for young audiences as Bonnie and Clyde’s prescription of insurrection. “Bonnie and Clyde have ironic companions—from across the railroad tracks—in Ben and Elaine,” wrote Robert Coles in Trans-Action. “They go off together in a bus, stared at incredulously, she in her wedding dress, he ragged and unshaven…. For all the world the accompanying music could now be that same light-hearted, confident, jazzy, racy score that carries us along with Bonnie and Clyde. Ben and Elaine will never be hunted down by the police, but things may well get increasingly scary and desperate. Men will continue to die from hunger, and the ‘restlessness’* that Lyndon B. Johnson mentioned but quickly dismissed could linger on and worsen.”6

  At thirty, Dustin Hoffman was suddenly famous. It was disorienting; he wasn’t even close to ready for it. His number was listed; his address was right there in the New York City White Pages. He would come home at night and find mason jars of matzoh ball soup that had been left for him on his stoop. Sometimes the nice Jewish girls who made the matzoh ball soup were waiting there, too. Sometimes they were neither Jewish nor “nice girls.” One day he was walking down Fifth Avenue with his fiancée, Anne, and they passed a beautiful young woman. She recognized Hoffman, looked through Anne, smiled at him, and lifted up her shirt. She wasn’t wearing a bra. “Sign me,” she said.7

  At first, nobody could let go of the fact that he didn’t fit the physical description of a movie star. Who was this young actor who, wrote Kathleen Carroll in the Daily News, “looks as if the worries of the world rested on his sawed-off body”?8 Newspaper and magazine profile writers referred to him as “Mr. Acne” and “Peter Schlemiel.”9 They called his looks “so extraordinarily ordinary it’s peculiar.”10 They made fun of his height and the size of his nose. Most of the pieces did not, of course, say much about him being Jewish. “They wouldn’t do that,” he says. “However, Rex Reed had read an interview with me where I said I wasn’t sure I wanted the part, and he called me a creep. They could call me a creep but not a Jew.”11 Nevertheless, the stories made their point: People with faces like Dustin Hoffman’s didn’t become the kind of star that Hoffman was becoming. “The press couldn’t believe that a movie actor could look like that,” says Buck Henry, “and soon, every movie actor looked like that. His success, and the fact that he became a heartthrob, radically changed the perception of who a leading man is.”12

  For a while, Hoffman got a lot of fan mail from people who thought he and Michael J. Pollard were the same person. Then The Graduate became such a phenomenon that there was no mistaking Hoffman for anyone else—except, of course, for the character he played. In the spring of 1968, Hoffman found himself turning into Benjamin in the opening scene of the movie—a young man being bombarded with insistent congratulations for an achievement with which he himself wasn’t even sure whether to be impressed. “I was an object,” he says. “No one knew my name. I wasn’t a human being to them. I was the Graduate.”13

  “I would see him on television, on various immensely vulgar shows, having Israeli starlets flirt with him and having moronic interviewers ask him unanswerable questions,” said Nichols that year, “and he seemed exactly like the boy in the picture.”14

  “It’s Nichols’ victory, not mine,” Hoffman would tell people. “Nobody will ever take such care with lighting on me again, I’m sure, but I don’t have much feeling of personal accomplishment about it.”15 Nobody really listened; they loved him, and if he didn’t love himself, they wrote it off as part of his endearing-neurotic shtick. He was the hot kid of the moment; the fact that he wasn’t a kid was as irrelevant as the fact that his momen
t had taken ten years to arrive. Old showbiz types wanted to meet him, needed to meet him, tried to claim him, had to introduce him to everybody else they knew. At a party, Otto Preminger—purple-faced, effusive, bellowing—literally grabbed Hoffman by the scruff of his neck and pulled him over to say hello to his friends. Embassy Pictures sent him off to Philadelphia to go make a guest appearance on The Mike Douglas Show. Hoffman walked into the green room and saw the other guest, sitting in a chair, looking at himself in a makeup mirror, catching Hoffman’s reflection behind him, and deciding not to turn around. It was Milton Berle. A couple of years earlier, Hoffman had met Berle briefly at Broadway’s Longacre Theatre; he had checked Berle’s coat. Now they were both stars. “Sorry, kid, forgive me, I can’t get up,” Berle rapped out, looking for a common language. “I just went to the dentist and I’ve got an impacted cunt.”

  What was being a celebrity supposed to feel like? Hoffman wasn’t sure. He had made $750 a week on The Graduate; now, Embassy was paying him $500 a week to go from one city to another and talk about it, and paying his hotel bills as well. It didn’t have anything to do with acting, but it was undeniably a good deal, and he didn’t have another job yet. Perhaps The Graduate would prove, in the long run, to be merely an exception, a brief interruption of his quiet life in the theater. Hoffman was socially committed, progressive, responsible; he hooked up with Eugene McCarthy’s presidential campaign, flying to various campuses with McCarthy’s daughter Ellen in a small plane, telling kids to “Get Clean for Gene.” But students didn’t want to talk about McCarthy; they wanted to talk to Benjamin Braddock, the young man they felt was their standard-bearer. “I’d say to these kids, I’m not that character,” says Hoffman. “I’m not your generation. I’m thirty years old. I’d get this look. They felt betrayed.”