Improv Nation

by Sam Wasson

  “After TW3 we all interrelated,” Henry said. “Arkin and Nichols and everybody else. Everybody did everything with everyone. But there were always some people we couldn’t fit into our new age of success. We couldn’t get them out of Chicago and into the rest of the world. The most obvious two were Severn Darden—who was a god to all of us—and Del Close.” They were always writing parts for scientists and inventors on Get Smart, an opportunity, Henry thought, to give Del the Hollywood break he needed. So Del came out to California, and met with casting director Pat Harris. Del arrived in a lab coat (“one doesn’t ask,” Henry said) carrying a little box that looked to Henry like something out of early Scientology. “It’s really simple,” Del explained to Harris, offering her the box. “You hold on to these two handles for about two minutes.” She did, and he pumped her frail body with enough voltage to blast her off her chair. Del did not get the part.

  Nichols and Buck Henry had instant shtick. New York Jews, expertly educated (Henry at Choate and Dartmouth), and acutely versed in show business custom and history (Henry’s mother was silent film actress Ruth Taylor, his father, Paul Zuckerman, a stockbroker), they had the motor, means, and material to live up to each other’s challenge. Nichols said, “I thought Buck was the funniest and most serious guy I’d ever met—simultaneously.”

  “You should read this book, The Graduate, and see what you think of it,” Nichols told him.

  Henry had written only one screenplay, The Troublemaker, a film Ted Flicker made with the Premise Players. Nichols had never seen it (few had), but he didn’t need to familiarize himself with Henry’s writing to know he could write. Buck Henry could improvise. He knew that.

  “I think you could do it,” Nichols said. “I think you should do it.”

  Henry went back to the Chateau and read the book. He related. He could see how Mike related. They were Benjamin Braddock.

  Del Close’s Committee workshops, held in the empty theater during the late-afternoon hours, were inexpensive and open to the public. Putting his own spin on Spolin’s “everyone can improvise” credo, Del said, “It’s much more useful for me as a teacher to treat everyone as a poet and a genius because they’re more likely to behave that way than if they’re treated like they’re an idiot.” While most of professional San Francisco worked at their desks, about twenty or twenty-five twenty-year-olds, in beads and bell-bottoms, would trickle in to the Committee Theater, sober and stoned, and sit at Del’s feet, which he flung over the edge of the stage.

  His hair was long now, like a hippie’s, but determined to stay, in some fashion, an apolitical beatnik, Del always pulled it back tight, in a ponytail, as if in old-man protest of time. Del’s glasses were electric-taped at the bridge and held to his neck by a chain holding on to a rope. Up and down his arms, he’d like you to notice the constellation of broken veins and needle marks he called his track suit—a joke Del dropped with a Groucho double-bounce of eyebrows. The cigarette was his all-purpose costume. For Groucho, he would twinkle it out in front of him; for FDR, he flipped it up tall; he let it go limp for Parisian roué; for Barfly there was always the right corner; between the teeth for ventriloquist’s dummy; and, ladies and gentlemen, the circus freak twirled a lit one up and under five dirty fingers and flicked it back into his mouth.

  Because you got a different Del every day, you got a different lecturer, and differing lecture style—all improvised. Generally, the day’s style and subject was influenced by whatever books Del’s brain had eaten the night previous. What is the purpose of theater? he might ask them, crowded at his feet.

  “To entertain . . .”

  “To communicate?”

  “To . . . connect.”

  “You want to know what Freud said was the purpose of psychoanalysis?” he replied. “To discover the universal elements of our everyday lives. Those elements of our seemingly private and unique experience that are, in fact, archetypical . . .” Everybody is the same. With negligible variation, we face identical problems. Improvisation is finding and sharing solutions to those problems, a ritual we must repeat to discover the rituals we need. Think of the Minotaur and the maze. Tribes as geographically diverse as Africa, South America, and the Outback each had their version of the myth. In some tribes it’s a dance, and you dance it your whole life so that when you die, and you cross the dark waters on your way to the beach, you’re prepared. “Beyond the beach is a cave,” Del said, “where your loved ones are waiting. On the beach is traced a complex path, which you must tread—on the beach is also a hideous monster in the shape of a vagina with teeth that erases half of the path, which you must reproduce by dancing it into the sand, and thus proving you are an initiate, and have the tribal right to paradise.” And you can dance it because you’ve been dancing it your whole life. “Zowie,” Del said. “Theater is in the same tradition as that peculiar, ancient maze dance.” We, the improvisers, have to teach the steps. Workshops were for finding them.

  Del led workshops for the professional company too, an ensemble made up of improvisers from all walks, from Compass to Premise to Second City, divided by ethic and training, but united in their weariness with shortform, two- or three-person scenes. Cut loose from the anchor of Second City and urged on by the radicalism he inhaled on both sides of the theater walls, Del urged Committee improvisers to all get up on the stage at once and let what happened happen—with a vengeance. Real art, powered by anger, ripped up brains; it should hurt both sides. Propelled by a similar urge, the Committee had been playing with group scenes of extended duration like Myerson’s Fear, Guilt, and Impotence Collage since before Del’s arrival, but Del, said Howard Hesseman, “was really urging you to try anything and . . . abandon all of the rules and notions of safety that you had.” On the back wall, in block letters big enough for the improvisers to see from the stage, he had written FOLLOW THE FEAR.

  Meanwhile, Alan Myerson, guest teaching improvisation at San Francisco State, was continuing his own experiments in longform, testing collages with the students. These collages arose by following an improvised scene with a Spolin game followed by an improvised scene . . . until one day, semimiraculously, the parts came together in a cohesive dramatic whole—a short play instead of unrelated scenes. To all involved, this was a powerful awakening, nearly spiritual in the shared discovery of unconscious forces that had guided these improvisers toward a single organizing narrative. How had it happened? Without planning or discussion, Myerson’s ensemble had unknowingly submitted to an awareness of impulses none of them had ever known as individuals. What?

  Bill Mathieu, formerly of Second City, whom Myerson had hired as the Committee’s musical director, had at that approximate moment, by coincidence, made an eerily similar discovery. Teaching musical improvisation at the San Francisco Conservatory to a class of actors, musicians, and singers, he alternated Spolin’s games with his own musical games and reminded his ensemble, “Anything can happen at any time, commit to spontaneity, and listen.” His musical collective, as if conducted by a ghost, would harmonize. “The ghost,” Mathieu said, “was the musical narrative.” What was happening? Close, Myerson, and Mathieu came together in the summer of 1967 to ask that very question. Comparing their notes over several months, they recognized in the simultaneity of their discoveries some verification of the zeitgeist. How else to explain these continuities? Just as the individuals in their three distinct workshop sessions had moved spontaneously toward a “group mind”—Del’s phrase—so had Close, Myerson, and Mathieu, in activating their ensembles, been their own group mind. “We knew we had something here,” Mathieu said, “but we didn’t know how we were going to reproduce and sustain it time and again. Even if two or three were successful, the rest were abominable, but those two or three would be so brilliant I’d be happy to be alive.” To lasso the free beast of longform improvisation, they needed guidelines like the Westminster Place Kitchen Rules, or the kind of preset structure Myerson had given his students at San Francisco State. But too much structure
would be limiting. To truly develop and evolve, this form—whatever they called it—would have to have some built-in self-destructive outs, the flexibility to revise itself on a moment’s notice; it had to be improvised alongside the improvisations themselves. But then again, too flexible and it would basically disappear.

  Through the fall of 1967, the Committee played under the microscope, rotating the company through workshop directors Close, Myerson, and Mathieu, pitting three different personalities—the dangerous, the social-political, and the musical—against the longform beast to observe the results. Mathieu could tell the improvisers were none too thrilled with his abstraction, and neither was Del. Sitting at his stable, strung out in yesterday’s clothes, and still as a stone, he watched the improvisers struggle and fail to implement Mathieu’s musicality. At the experiment’s end, in lieu of verbal feedback, Del dumped his can of apricot juice over his own head. “End of workshop,” Mathieu concluded. “I was deeply offended by Del, but I learned I wasn’t allowed to turn [the improvisers] into abstract motion and sound. What I did have was the freedom to change the scene with music, like adding the sound of a storm.”

  After one productive workshop, Committee members Ed Greenberg, Ruth Silveira, and Julie Payne were lounging around the theater, analyzing the day’s efforts with Close, Myerson, and Mathieu. All buzzed on the high of new purpose.

  “We gotta name this thing,” announced Close. He was sitting apart from the others at one of the Committee’s square bistro tables.

  “How about Harold?” Mathieu joked. He thought of some guy named Harold, sitting in his undershirt with a dead cigar in the ashtray.

  “That’s a bad idea,” Del said.

  But the actors loved it. “Harold”: as cheeky as George Harrison’s Hard Day’s Night answer to “What do you call that haircut?” (“Arthur.”)

  It stuck. “Harold.”

  But what was it?

  For months, Mike Nichols and Buck Henry met in the house Nichols rented in Brentwood, settling every day in a sequestered back patio Henry called the Stone Room. They played records—Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 15 in A-minor, Schubert’s String Quartet in C-major, Duke Ellington—and improvised not so much scene ideas, but montage sequences, image by image, for The Graduate. Bouncing visual ideas off Henry, and having complementary visuals bounced back to him, Nichols gathered a complex, interconnected chain of free-associated images—switching from Ben’s purposeless home life and his affair with Mrs. Robinson—linked by spacial symmetries, lighting accents, and color.

  Hanging out was part of the job. Nichols needed to merge with his writers; he needed to play with them. When it came to putting words on the page, he would give Henry all the space he needed to earn his screenwriting credit, but the phase of exploratory prewriting, the ideation, Nichols extended all through the actual writing and rewriting of the script, for as long as time and money would allow, until he lost his writer to another project, until the actors needed their lines and the crew had to set up the shot. There the conversation ended. It had to. Until then, with Henry in the Stone Room, Nichols was forever asking, as he would in an improvisation, what is this film really about?

  “I want this to be about not becoming a thing in a world of things,” he told Henry.

  Previous screenwriters had struggled to implement this concept. William Hanley, writer one, parted ways with The Graduate after declining Nichols’s suggestions, and anyway, “Hanley had no humor,” Larry Turman said. “He was capital-D dark. He didn’t get this was a comedy.” Calder Willingham’s draft vulgarized the central love triangle and was summarily rejected; and Peter Nelson, recommitting the story to the source material, was perhaps too faithful to the novel. “And none of them,” Nichols said, “were terribly funny. Buck improvised comedy.” And unlike Charles Webb, the book’s author, Buck Henry empathized with Benjamin. Simpatico with Nichols’s description of Benjamin’s alienation—the otherness that still beset Mikhail Igor Peschkowsky these thirty years after his arrival in America—Henry could play within Nichols’s emotional parameters. “Working with Buck is very like what Elaine May and I used to do,” Nichols said. “Both of them have spectacular inventiveness and hundreds of ideas and my role has always been to pull our certain threads and try to strengthen them.”

  Together, they turned The Graduate into a compassionate comedy, and the part of Benjamin Braddock, the WASP outsider, into a nervous nebbish. A Jew.

  7

  1967–1968

  Mike Nichols and Robert Redford were playing snooker at Nichols’s rented house in Brentwood. They’d just enjoyed a lovely dinner; Nichols decided the time was right to let Redford know he was wrong for The Graduate.

  “You can’t play it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you can’t play a loser. Look at you.”

  “Yes I can! Of course I can play a loser!”

  “Really? When was the last time you struck out with a girl?”

  “What do you mean?”

  Nichols had looked at countless actors for the part of Benjamin. Warren Beatty, Steve McQueen, George Peppard, Keir Dullea . . . “goy after goy,” Nichols said. Crystal-eyed blonds fit the film’s Beverly Hills, swimming-pool-and-palm-trees setting. WASPs were story-appropriate, and when it came to playing America’s young men, represented a casting ideal as old as movies. “He [Benjamin] needed to be an outsider for this story to happen,” Nichols said. “And we didn’t even know that until we’d seen all these other actors not make it.” It seemed obvious in retrospect, but considering Hollywood convention, equally improbable. Nichols had only to recall his own dark days as a starving actor in New York, when, alone and hungry in his mattress-sized apartment, he flipped depressingly from channel to channel in search of himself, and found nothing.

  Dustin Hoffman, on the phone with Nichols from his one-bedroom apartment on West Eleventh Street, was gratified to hear that a powerful and gifted film director had admired his work in the 1964 off-Broadway production of Harry, Noon and Night, but “I’m not right for this part, sir. This is a Gentile. This is a WASP. This is Robert Redford.”

  Hoffman was then appearing at the Circle in the Square, in Eh?, a British import on its third director. The first two, before they were fired, hadn’t known what to do with Hoffman. One plainly instructed him to go to the movies and copy the mannerisms of actor David Warner, who’d starred in the original production. The third director, suggested by cast member MacIntyre Dixon, a former Second City player, was hired ten days before opening. Under the pseudonym Roger Short, director Alan Arkin took Eh? through to its successful run. Hoffman said, “Arkin was the first director that didn’t want me fired and the first director that I connected with. We had the same sense of humor.”

  Eh? brought success to all involved, further proof that, after years of trying, Hoffman, at twenty-nine, had finally found a home in the theater. I’m not supposed to be in movies, he thought. An ethnic actor is supposed to be in ethnic New York in an ethnic off-Broadway show. I know my place. But Nichols pressed. He wanted Hoffman to come out to L.A. for a screen test.

  Plus, Nichols had already seen everyone else. Hoffman was his only lead. But neither side was sure it was a good idea.

  “Did you see this week’s Time magazine?” Hoffman protested. It was lying there on his coffee table—“Man of the Year” in January 1967 was the collective “Now Generation,” the under-twenty-five set, and the cover illustration featured a young guy, good-looking, screamingly master race. “That man, Mr. Nichols, that man on the magazine. That’s the guy who should be playing it.”

  “You mean he’s not Jewish?” Nichols joked.

  “Yes, this guy is super-WASP. Boston Brahmin.”

  Nichols tried another tack. “Did you think the script was funny?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, maybe,” Nichols improvised, “he’s Jewish inside.”

  Hoffman, reluctantly, flew out to Los Angeles for a screen test. At Paramount, he was led int
o makeup, where they plucked and powdered him in preparation for the camera. The more they fussed with his face the more Hoffman was convinced his original instinct had been correct; he was absolutely wrong for the part.

  Nichols walked in and studied Hoffman’s reflection in the mirror. He then turned to the makeup artist and, loud enough for Hoffman to hear, asked, “Do you think you could make him look a little less Jewish?”

  If Hoffman was nervous before, he was exasperated now. Had he already lost the part? Was Nichols giving up on him already?

  For the test, Hoffman was paired with Katharine Ross, who, auditioning for the part of Elaine Robinson, was just as uneasy as he was. It was a very long scene, a bedroom scene no less, and both Hoffman and Ross kept flubbing their lines. To casting director Lynn Stalmaster Hoffman mouthed, “What am I doing here?” When he glanced up at his director, he found him glaring back with an intense look that was not happiness.

  Nichols called Hoffman aside. “Relax. Don’t be nervous.”

  Hoffman extended his hand to shake Nichols’s, and found the director’s hand was so sweaty his own slipped out. I guess I’m not the only one who’s nervous, Hoffman thought.