FREE HER AGAIN: BECOMING MERYL STREEP PDF Michael Schulman | 304 pages | 28 Apr 2016 | FABER & FABER | 9780571330980 | English | London, United Kingdom Her Again: Becoming Meryl Streep by Michael Schulman, Paperback | Barnes & Noble® On March 12,the man Meryl Her Again: Becoming Meryl Streep had been dating for nearly two years died as she sat at his hospital bed. She had met John Cazale, the crane-like character actor best known for playing Fredo Corleone in the Godfather films, when they starred together in a Shakespeare in the Park Her Again: Becoming Meryl Streep of Measure for Measure in the summer of From the beginning, they were an unusual pair: a pellucid year-old beauty just a year out of the Yale School of Drama and a year-old oddball with a forehead as high as a boulder and a penchant for Cuban cigars. But the romance was tragically short-lived. Only months after she moved into his Tribeca loft, Cazale was diagnosed with advanced lung cancer. When he was cast in the Vietnam epic The Deer Hunter, Meryl joined the film, in part, just to be with him. He brought along a friend she had met once or twice—a sculptor named Don Gummer, who lived a few blocks away, in SoHo. Only weeks after losing the love of her life, she had found the second love of her life, the man who would become her husband. It was this Meryl Streep—simultaneously grieving and infatuated, a theater actress new to movies—who got word from her agent, Sam Cohn, about a possible Her Again: Becoming Meryl Streep in Kramer vs. Kramer, based on a novel by Avery Corman. He has a wife, Joanna, and a little boy named Billy. In the early chapters, their marriage is portrayed as superficially content, with wells of ennui underneath. Sex with Ted is mechanical. Ted overcomes his shock and gets back into the swing of single life. More important, he learns how to be a good father. It is then that Joanna does the unthinkable: she returns from California and tells Ted she wants Billy back. The ensuing custody battle, which gives the novel its title, lays bare the ugliness of divorce proceedings and the wounds they allow people to inflict on each other. Before Kramer vs. Kramer even hit the bookstores, the manuscript fell into the hands of Richard Fischoff, a young film executive who had just accepted a job with the producer Stanley Jaffe. Ted and Joanna Kramer, Fischoff thought, were like Benjamin and Elaine in The Graduate 10 years later, after their impulsive union has collapsed from the inside. The movie would be a kind of generational marker, tracking the baby- boomers from the heedlessness of young adulthood to the angst of middle adulthood. Jaffe took the novel to the director Robert Benton, best known for co-writing Bonnie and Clyde. Everyone liked the idea of a spiritual sequel to The Graduate, which meant that the one and only choice for Ted Kramer was Dustin Hoffman. Amid contentious experiences filming Straight Time and Agatha, he was mired in lawsuits and countersuits, and was in the middle of an emotional separation from his first wife, Anne Byrne. Jackson had the name recognition and the crystalline beauty that Columbia Pictures required. According to Fischoff, the studio Her Again: Becoming Meryl Streep over a list of possible replacements, essentially a catalogue of the bankable female stars of the day: Ali MacGraw, Faye Dunaway, even Jane Fonda. Katharine Ross, who had played Elaine in The Graduate, was a natural contender. But she and Benton shared an agent, and if Her Again: Becoming Meryl Streep knew how to get someone into an audition room, it was Sam Cohn. Meryl marched into the hotel suite where Hoffman, Benton, and Jaffe sat side by side. When Dustin asked her what she thought of the story, she told him in no uncertain terms. They had the character all wrong, she insisted. Her reasons for leaving Ted are too hazy. We should understand why she comes back for custody. They were thinking of her for the minor role of Phyllis, the one-night stand. Still, she seemed to understand the character instinctively. Maybe this was their Joanna after all? The story the men told was completely different. And she just listened. She was polite and nice, but it was—she Her Again: Becoming Meryl Streep just barely there. When Meryl left the room, Stanley Jaffe was dumbfounded. Benton turned to Dustin. Dustin turned to Benton. The reason was John Cazale. Dustin knew that Meryl had lost him only months earlier, and from what he saw, she was still shaken to the core. Benton agreed. It was always for the role of Joanna. Clearly, there was a discrepancy between what they saw and how Meryl saw herself. Was she a fearless advocate, telling three powerful men exactly what Her Again: Becoming Meryl Streep script was missing? Or was she a basket case whose raw grief was written all over her face? Whichever Meryl Streep walked out of that hotel room, she got the part. On the first day of principal photography, everything was hushed on the Twentieth Century Fox soundstage at 54th Street and 10th Avenue in Manhattan. Benton was so anxious he could hear his stomach grumbling, which only made him more anxious, since he worried the sound might wind up in the shot. He should look like Meryl: a constant reminder of the absent Joanna. But she had her advocates, including Dustin Hoffman and Robert Benton, and that was enough to twist some arms. In preparation, Meryl flipped through magazines such as Cosmopolitan and Glamour, the kind Joanna might read. They all featured profiles of working mothers, brilliant judges who were raising five adorable children. She sat in a playground in Central Park and watched the Upper East Side mothers with their perambulators, trying to outdo one another. Her college took care of her. Then Ted took care of her. Suddenly she just felt incapable of caring for herself. In contrast to most films, they would shoot the scenes in order, the reason being their seven-year-old co-star. To make the story real to Justin, they would tell him only what was happening that day, so he could experience it instead of acting it, which would inevitably come off as phony. His direction would be communicated solely Her Again: Becoming Meryl Streep Dustin, as a way of bonding on-screen father and son. On the second day, they continued shooting the opening Her Again: Becoming Meryl Streep, when Ted follows the hysterical Joanna into the hallway. They shot the bulk of it in the morning and, after lunch, set up for some reaction shots. Dustin and Meryl took their positions on the other side of the apartment door. Then something happened that shocked not just Meryl but everyone on set. Right before their entrance, Dustin slapped her hard across the cheek, leaving a red mark. Benton heard the slap and saw Meryl charge into the hallway. Instead, Meryl went on and acted the scene. The cameras were set up on Meryl in the elevator, with Dustin acting his part offscreen. Improvising his lines, Dustin delivered a slap of a different sort: outside the elevator, he started taunting Meryl about John Cazale, jabbing her with remarks about his cancer and his death. And if Dustin wanted to use Method techniques like emotional recall, he should use them on himself. Not her. They wrapped, and Meryl left the studio in a rage. Day two, and Kramer vs. Kramer was already turning into Streep vs. Across Her Again: Becoming Meryl Streep small table covered in a checkerboard cloth, Dustin Hoffman glared at Meryl Streep. The crew had taken over J. Melon, a burger joint at Third Avenue and 74th Street. Kramer, in which Joanna informs Ted that she plans to take back their son. The weeks had been fraught, and Benton was panicking. We need to save all the money we have. Dustin, meanwhile, had been driving everyone nuts. In his effort to fill every screen moment with tension, he would locate the particular vulnerability of his scene partner and exploit it. Before playing a serious scene, Dustin would tell him to imagine losing his dog. For the harrowing sequence in which Billy falls from the monkey bars at the playground, Justin had to lie on the pavement and cry through fake blood. Knowing how the crew had befriended Justin, Dustin crouched over Her Again: Becoming Meryl Streep explained that film families are temporary and he would probably never see his pals again. When it became clear that most of her dialogue would be unusable, she was replaced by Jane Alexander. According to Strickland, Her Again: Becoming Meryl Streep was going fine until Dustin asked her to memorize a new batch of improvised lines. Then there was Meryl. She thought of the movie as work, not as a psychological minefield. As they sat in J. Melon, she had Her Again: Becoming Meryl Streep question. The way the restaurant scene was written, Joanna starts off by telling Ted that she wants custody of Billy. That way, Joanna could present her quest for selfhood as a legitimate pursuit, at least as the character saw it. She could say it calmly, not in a defensive crouch. Benton agreed that re-structuring the scene gave it more of a dramatic build. But Dustin was pissed. Her Again: Becoming Meryl Streep by Michael Schulman Sign up for our newsletters! As of the printing of this book, she has been nominated for 19 Oscars and won three.