Pictures at a Revolution
Page 50
Mike Nichols and Lawrence Turman each received 16 percent of the profits from The Graduate. After its success, Nichols and Buck Henry re-teamed as the director and writer of Catch-22, an $18 million adaptation of Joseph Heller’s novel that began production in early 1969. The film was Nichols’s first financial failure. Two weeks after the 1968 Academy Awards, Joseph E. Levine sold his company, Embassy Pictures, to the Avco Corporation for $40 million in stock. In the fall of 1968, the new company, Avco Embassy, released its first reserved-seat road-show film, The Lion in Winter. The movie was Katharine Hepburn’s first picture after the death of Spencer Tracy and won her a second consecutive Best Actress Academy Award in the spring of 1969.
Nichols still owed Levine one more movie and rebounded from Catch-22 by directing Carnal Knowledge for him in 1970. Levine resigned from Avco Embassy in 1974 to become an independent producer. He died in 1987.
Dustin Hoffman came back to New York after the Academy Awards. In the summer, he began work on his next movie, John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy. His salary rose from the $20,000 he had been paid for The Graduate to $250,000. In September, Hoffman returned to working in the theater, starring in the Broadway play Jimmy Shine. Elizabeth Wilson came to see the performance and have dinner with her “son.” When she got into Hoffman’s limousine after the show, “these young girls surrounded the car,” she says, “and they started pushing it back and forth and shouting, ‘We want you! We want you! We want you!’ My God, they practically tipped the car over. It was like he was one of the Beatles.”8
“What I’m trying to do is keep my feet on the ground,” said Hoffman in 1968. “This sudden stardom stuff completely knocks you out of perspective.” Hoffman visited his psychoanalyst twice a week.9 In 1969, he married his longtime girlfriend, Anne Byrne.
“It’s nice, and slightly frightening, and it’s not going to last,” said Katharine Ross of the dozens of offers that came her way after the success of The Graduate. “I want to do something that is really good…. But how do you decide as an actress what’s really going to be good? I can’t tell. If I saw a part with a lot of horseback riding, I’d say ‘Hey, that’s good.’”10 Soon after, Ross signed to costar in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
AfterGuess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Stanley Kramer made six more movies before retiring. None were financial or critical successes. (The first of them, 1969’s The Secret of Santa Vittoria, was the last screenplay written by William Rose, who died in 1987.) “Stanley would get an idea for something contemporary,” says his longtime associate Marshall Schlom, “but by the time it would get to the screen, it was old news.”11 But the immense financial success of Dinner allowed Kramer to weather his failures; his share of the film’s profits, which he received incrementally through the 1970s, totaled more than $4 million.12 Kramer died in 2001 at the age of eighty-seven. Since 2002, the Producers Guild of America has given an annual award in his name, administered by his widow, Karen, to a producer “whose work illuminates provocative social issues.” Among the winners have been Good Night, and Good Luck, Hotel Rwanda, and An Inconvenient Truth.
Katharine Houghton made a handful of films after Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, but “the movie showed me,” she says, “that Hollywood was just not my calling, that the movies were not where it was gonna be for me, and that I should go back into the theater.”13 She continues to work as an actress and playwright.
Leslie Bricusse tried his hand at a movie musical one last time with 1970’s Scrooge. The film was to star Rex Harrison, but two weeks before production was to begin, Harrison dropped out, citing illness. He was replaced by Albert Finney.
Richard Fleischer directed twenty-two more movies after Doctor Dolittle, none of them family musicals. He died in 2006 at age eighty-nine.
Unhappy with his new assignment at The New York Times, Bosley Crowther officially retired from the paper in September 1968 to take a consulting job with Columbia Pictures, but he continued to write about movies, publishing several books of criticism in which he revisited old films. In 1977, he returned to Bonnie and Clyde. In his reconsideration of the movie, he called it “clever and effective,” admitted that Beatty and Dunaway brought “interesting and affecting emotional range” to their roles, and wrote that he now appreciated Arthur Penn’s calibration of lightheartedness and bloody violence, which made the movie’s climax “shattering and sad.” Bonnie and Clyde, he concluded, was “a landmark…. No film turned out in the 1960s was more clever in registering the amoral restlessness of youth in those years.”14 Crowther died in 1981.
After Doctor Dolittle,Arthur Jacobs’s career as a producer was saved by the huge popularity of Planet of the Apes. The film spawned four sequels, all of which he produced. In May 1968, soon after the Academy Awards, Jacobs married his girlfriend, Natalie Trundy; he found small roles for her in all of the Apes sequels. Jacobs never lost his enthusiasm for movie musicals. Undeterred by the failure of Doctor Dolittle and Goodbye, Mr. Chips, he went on to produce popular children’s musicals based on Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn in the early 1970s. In 1973, while working on the latter film, he suffered a fatal heart attack. He was fifty-one.
Shortly after the 1968 Academy Awards, Sidney Poitier was named the biggest box office star in America in a national poll of theater owners, the first time a black actor had ever held the top spot. He was, he told an interviewer, “totally free—owned by no man or woman.”15 It didn’t matter; as Poitier himself had predicted, his days as a movie star were over. In the face of increasingly brutal and public attacks—“Even George Wallace would like that nigger,” said H. Rap Brown after seeing Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner16—Poitier retreated, by degrees, from the very public life that he had led. He gave fewer interviews, he spent less time in the United States, and while he continued to make movies for several more years (including two in which he reprised his role as Virgil Tibbs) before a twelve-year retirement from screen acting that began in 1977, none of them had the cultural or popular impact of the three films he made in 1967.
Poitier rarely spoke in detail of the pain he felt at being jeered as a symbol of accommodation to white America. Stanley Kramer urged him to keep working, to try not to think about the insults, to stay focused.17 As ever, Poitier kept his own counsel. A couple of years after their rift, he and Harry Belafonte repaired their friendship; in 1972, Poitier stepped behind the camera for the first time to direct Belafonte in Buck and the Preacher. He went on to direct eight more movies.
In 1967, shortly before the release of In the Heat of the Night, Poitier told a reporter that he had always tried to “make a positive contribution to the image of Negro people in America” with the roles he had chosen. “I guess I was born out of joint with the times,” he said. “I have not made my peace with the times—they are still out of kilter. But I have made my peace with myself.”18
APPENDIX
1967 ACADEMY AWARD NOMINEES AND WINNERS
BEST PICTURE
Bonnie and Clyde, produced by Warren Beatty
Doctor Dolittle, produced by Arthur P. Jacobs
The Graduate, produced by Lawrence Turman
Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner, produced by Stanley Kramer
In the Heat of the Night, produced by Walter Mirisch
BEST DIRECTOR
Richard Brooks, In Cold Blood
Norman Jewison, In the Heat of the Night
Stanley Kramer, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner
Mike Nichols, The Graduate
Arthur Penn, Bonnie and Clyde
BEST ACTOR:
Warren Beatty, Bonnie and Clyde
Dustin Hoffman, The Graduate
Paul Newman, Cool Hand Luke
Rod Steiger, In the Heat of the Night
Spencer Tracy, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner
BEST ACTRESS
Anne Bancroft, The Graduate
Faye Dunaway, Bonnie and Clyde
Edith Evans, The Whisperers
Audrey Hepburn, Wait Until Dark
Katharine Hepburn, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner
BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
John Cassavetes, The Dirty Dozen
Gene Hackman, Bonnie and Clyde
Cecil Kellaway, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner
George Kennedy, Cool Hand Luke
Michael J. Pollard, Bonnie and Clyde
BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Carol Channing, Thoroughly Modern Millie
Mildred Natwick, Barefoot in the Park
Estelle Parsons, Bonnie and Clyde
Beah Richards, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner
Katharine Ross, The Graduate
BEST SCREENPLAY WRITTEN DIRECTLY FOR THE SCREEN
Bonnie and Clyde, by David Newman and Robert Benton
Divorce American Style, by Norman Lear, story by Robert Kaufman
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, by William Rose
La Guerre Est Finie, by Jorge Semprún
Two for the Road, by Frederic Raphael
BEST SCREENPLAY BASED ON MATERIAL FROM ANOTHER MEDIUM
Cool Hand Luke, by Donn Pearce and Frank R. Pierson
The Graduate, by Calder Willingham and Buck Henry
In Cold Blood, by Richard Brooks
In the Heat of the Night, by Stirling Silliphant
Ulysses, by Joseph Strick and Fred Haines
BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY
Burnett Guffey, Bonnie and Clyde
Conrad Hall, In Cold Blood
Richard H. Kline, Camelot
Robert Surtees, Doctor Dolittle
Robert Surtees, The Graduate
BEST ART DIRECTION/ SET DECORATION
John Truscott and Edward Carrere (art direction); John W. Brown (set decoration), Camelot
Mario Chiari, Jack Martin Smith, and Ed Graves (art direction); Walter M. Scott and Stuart A. Reiss (set decoration), Doctor Dolittle
Robert Clatworthy (art direction), Frank Tuttle (set decoration), Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner
Renzo Mongiardino, John DeCuir, Elven Webb, and Giuseppe Mariani (art direction); Dario Simoni and Luigi Gervasi (set decoration), The Taming of the Shrew
Alexander Golitzen and George C. Webb (art direction); Howard Bristol (set decoration), Thoroughly Modern Millie
BEST COSTUME DESIGN
Theadora Van Runkle, Bonnie and Clyde
John Truscott, Camelot
Bill Thomas, The Happiest Millionaire
Irene Sharaff and Danilo Donati, The Taming of the Shrew
Jean Louis, Thoroughly Modern Millie
BEST FILM EDITING
Frank P. Keller, Beach Red
Michael Luciano, The Dirty Dozen
Samuel E. Beetley and Marjorie Fowler, Doctor Dolittle
Robert C. Jones, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner
Hal Ashby, In the Heat of the Night
BEST SOUND
Camelot
The Dirty Dozen
Doctor Dolittle
In the Heat of the Night
Thoroughly Modern Millie
BEST ORIGINAL SONG
“The Eyes of Love,” music by Quincy Jones, lyrics by Bob Russell, Banning
“The Look of Love”, music by Burt Bacharach, lyrics by Hal David, Casino Royale
“Talk to the Animals,” by Leslie Bricusse, Doctor Dolittle
“The Bare Necessities,” by Terry Gilkyson, The Jungle Book
“Thoroughly Modern Millie,” by James Van Heusen and Sammy Cahn, Thoroughly Modern Millie
BEST ORIGINAL SCORE
Lalo Schifrin, Cool Hand Luke
Leslie Bricusse, Doctor Dolittle
Richard Rodney Bennett, Far from the Madding Crowd
Quincy Jones, In Cold Blood
Elmer Bernstein, Thoroughly Modern Millie
BEST SCORING—ADAPTATION OR TREATMENT
Alfred Newman and Ken Darby, Camelot
Lionel Newman and Alexander Courage, Doctor Dolittle
DeVol, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner
André Previn and Joseph Gershenson, Thoroughly Modern Millie
John Williams, Valley of the Dolls
BEST SPECIAL VISUAL EFFECTS
L. B. Abbott, Doctor Dolittle
Howard A. Anderson Jr. and Albert Whitlock, Tobruk
BEST SOUND EFFECTS
John Poyner, The Dirty Dozen
James A. Richard, In the Heat of the Night
BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM
Closely Watched Trains
El Amor Brujo
I Even Met Happy Gypsies
Live for Life
Portrait of Chieko
BEST ANIMATED SHORT
The Box
Hypothese Beta
What on Earth!
BEST LIVE-ACTION SHORT
Paddle to the Sea
A Place to Stand
Sky over Holland
Stop, Look and Listen
BEST DOCUMENTARY FEATURE
The Anderson Platoon
Festival
Harvest
A King’s Story
A Time for Burning
BEST DOCUMENTARY SHORT
Monument to the Dream
A Place to Stand
The Redwoods
See You At The Pillar
While I Run This Race
IRVING G. THALBERG MEMORIAL AWARD
Alfred Hitchcock
JEAN HERSHOLT HUMANITARIAN AWARD
Gregory Peck
HONORARY AWARD
Arthur Freed
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The magazine, newspaper, and trade journal articles used in research for this book are too numerous to list here and can be found in individual citations in the end notes.
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