The Making of the Graduate
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2/12/2018 The Making of "The Graduate" | Vanity Fair F R O M T H E M A G A Z I N E Here’s to You, Mr. Nichols: The Making of The Graduate Almost from the start, Mike Nichols knew that Anne Bancroft should play the seductive Mrs. Robinson. But the young film director surprised himself, as well as everyone else, with his choice for The Graduate’s misfit hero, Benjamin Braddock: not Robert Redford, who’d wanted the role, but a little-known Jewish stage actor, Dustin Hoffman. From producer Lawrence Turman’s $1,000 option of a minor novel in 1964 to the movie’s out-of-left- field triumph three years later, Sam Kashner recalls a breakout film that literally changed the face of Hollywood. by S A M K A S H N E R M A R C H 2 0 0 8 https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2008/03/graduate200803 1/23 2/12/2018 The Making of "The Graduate" | Vanity Fair Dustin Hoffman and Anne Bancroft in a publicity still for The Graduate. Photographs by Bob Willoughby. Any good movie is filled with secrets. —Mike Nichols magine a movie called The Graduate. It stars Robert Redford as Benjamin Braddock, the blond and bronzed, newly minted college graduate adrift in his parents’ opulent home in Beverly Hills. And Candice Bergen as his girlfriend, the overprotected Elaine Robinson. Ava Gardner plays the predatory Mrs. Robinson, the desperate housewife and mother who ensnares Benjamin. Gene Hackman is her cuckolded husband. It Inearly happened that way. That it didn’t made all the difference. It all began with a book review. On October 30, 1963, a 36-year-old movie producer named Lawrence Turman read Orville Prescott’s review of Charles Webb’s first novel, The Graduate, in The New York Times. Though Prescott described the satirical novel as “a fictional failure,” he compared Webb’s misfit, malaise-ridden hero, Benjamin Braddock, to Holden Caulfield, the hero of J. D. Salinger’s classic The Catcher in the Rye. Turman was intrigued. “The book haunted me—I identified with it,” he says. Now 81, Turman is lean, with white hair and bright eyes. Over lunch in West Hollywood, he recalls how he fell in love particularly with two of the novel’s images: “a boy in a scuba suit in his own swimming pool, and then that same boy on a bus, his shirttail out, with a girl in a wedding dress. I liked it so much, I took out an option with my own money—something I counsel my students not to do. Because no one else bid on the novel, I optioned the rights for $1,000.” Turman, who now chairs the Peter Stark Producing Program at the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts, considered himself something of an industry outsider, though by 1963 he had already produced several films (including The Young Doctors, with Fredric March and Ben Gazzara; I Could Go On Singing, with Judy Garland; and Gore Vidal’s The Best Man). https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2008/03/graduate200803 2/23 2/12/2018 The Making of "The Graduate" | Vanity Fair CELEBRITY. CULTURE. POLITICS. Get what's now. And what's next. Subscribe now to Vanity Fair. Perhaps he still feels like an outsider because he started life in the garment industry, following in his father’s footsteps, although he had majored in English literature at U.C.L.A. “Everyone always says how tough show biz is,” Turman says, “and, of course, they’re right, but it’s kid stuff compared to the garment business, where someone will cut your heart out for a quarter-cent a yard. I’d carry bolts of cloth five blocks after making a sale, only to learn that the customer bought it cheaper, and I had to schlep the bolts of cloth back to my dad’s office.” He can still vividly recall working his way down 14 flights of a manufacturing building, “getting rejected at every floor.” After five years of working with his father, he pounced on a blind ad in Variety: “Experienced Agent Wanted.” He got the job at the Kurt Frings Agency, a four-person operation specializing in European actors, including Audrey Hepburn, by candidly confessing that he “had zero experience, but was full of energy and would work very cheaply”—$50 a week. After optioning The Graduate, Turman needed a director. He immediately thought of another industry outsider, the comedian turned Broadway director Mike Nichols, then 33 years old. At the time, Nichols had just had a great success directing Robert Redford and Elizabeth Ashley on Broadway in Neil Simon’s Barefoot in the Park, but before that he had been half of the legendary satirical comedy team Mike Nichols and Elaine May. Their sharp, skewed portrayals of “Age of Anxiety” couples struck a deep chord in American life, and their comedy sketches were hilarious, such as the one about a pushy mother and her put-upon rocket-scientist son: “I feel awful,” the son says after his mother berates him for not calling. “If I could believe that,” she says, “I’d be the happiest mother in the world.” They were improvisation geniuses and could perform sketches in the style of everyone from Faulkner to Kierkegaard. Watch Now: Black Panther Cast Touches a Chameleon, a Guinea Pig, and Other Weird Stuff laine May was the daughter of a Yiddish actor named Jack Berlin. Nichols met his dark-haired muse at the University of Chicago, where he was a pre-med student, but like Benjamin Braddock, wanted his future “to be different.” Both he and May were members of the off-campus Playwright’s https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2008/03/graduate200803 3/23 2/12/2018 The Making of "The Graduate" | Vanity Fair Theatre, which later became the improvisational group the Compass Players (a precursor to Chicago’s Second City). By 1958 they were performing in New York’s Greenwich Village, at the Blue Angel and the Village Vanguard, and then began appearing on television shows such as The Steve Allen Show and Omnibus. The height of their success was An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May, a 1960 EBroadway hit at New York’s Golden Theatre, directed by Arthur Penn. Then they walked away from it all. It was Elaine May’s idea. She wanted to devote more time to writing and she also felt, with Kennedy just installed in the White House, there had been a seismic shift in the country’s mood, and the duo’s uptight, Eisenhower-era targets were no longer relevant. On July 1, 1961, they gave their last performance. “I stopped being a comedian,” Nichols now says, not the least bit wistfully. “Stand-up comedy is a very hard thing on the spirit. There are people who transcend it, like Jack Benny and Steve Martin, but in its essence, it’s soul destroying. It tends to turn people into control freaks.” Though he never did stand-up (or sit-down) comedy again, his canny, satirical edge would inform everything else Nichols later undertook as a theater and movie director. “Mike Nichols was an intuitive hunch,” Turman reflects. “Webb’s book is funny, but mordant. Nichols and May’s humor seemed like a hand-in-glove fit to me.” When they finally got together in New York to discuss the project, Turman, ever known for his candor, told Nichols, “I have the book, but I don’t have any money. I don’t have any studio. I have nothing, so let’s do this. We’ll make this movie together, and whatever money comes in, we’ll split 50-50.” Nichols agreed on the spot. “So I got The Graduate and Mike Nichols,” Turman recounts, “and I beat my brains out.” They sent the book to Brian Keith to read for the part of Mr. Robinson. “He came into our office,” Nichols recalls. “We sat down, and I asked if he had read the book. He said he had. ‘What do you think?’ I asked. He said, ‘I think it’s the biggest piece of shit I’ve ever read.’ I said, ‘Well, then we won’t do it. You agree, Larry?’ Turman said, ‘Absolutely.’ I said, ‘Thank you, Mr. Keith. You’ve saved us a lot of trouble.’ Turman and I both stood up, and Keith had to get up and leave. It was fun.” For nearly two years, Turman was turned down by every major studio: “No one thought the book was funny, and no one in Hollywood had even heard of Mike Nichols,” but that didn’t matter by the time he approached producer Joseph E. Levine. By then, Nichols had followed Barefoot in the Park with three more Broadway hits, The Knack, Murray Schisgal’s Luv, and Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple, which made a Broadway star out of Walter Matthau. And Nichols had been chosen by Elizabeth Taylor to direct her and Richard Burton in the movie of Edward Albee’s scandalous Broadway hit, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? It became the most controversial film of 1966, winning Taylor her second Academy Award. oseph E. Levine was known as “an enormously successful schlockmeister,” says Turman. “He would buy junky films, like Hercules, have an aggressive ad campaign, plaster his own name all over them, and make a lot of money for himself in the bargain. He was a great, flamboyant, throwback salesman.” His company, called Embassy Pictures, had graduated to classier fare—Marriage Italian Style, 8½, Two Women, JDarling—by the time Turman approached him.