1/11/2020 Buck Henry, Who Helped Create ‘Get Smart’ and Adapt ‘The Graduate,’ Dies at 89 - The New York Times https://nyti.ms/2N7atsQ Buck Henry, Who Helped Create ʻGet Smartʼ and Adapt ʻThe Graduate,ʼ Dies at 89 An unassuming screenwriter and actor, Mr. Henry thought up quirky characters with Mel Brooks and inhabited many more on “Saturday Night Live.” By Bruce Weber Published Jan. 9, 2020 Updated Jan. 10, 2020 Buck Henry, a writer and actor who exerted an often overlooked but potent influence on television and movie comedy — creating the loopy prime-time spy spoof “Get Smart” with Mel Brooks, writing the script for Mike Nichols’s landmark social satire “The Graduate” and teaming up with John Belushi in the famous samurai sketches on “Saturday Night Live” — died on Wednesday in Los Angeles. He was 89. His wife, Irene Ramp, said his death, at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, was caused by a heart attack. John Belushi, left, and Mr. Henry in the 1978 “Saturday Night Live” sketch “Samurai Optometrist.” Fred Hermansky/NBCUniversal via Getty Images As a personality and a performer, Mr. Henry had a mild and unassuming aspect that was usually in contrast with the pungently satirical or broadly slapstick material he appeared in — and often wrote. Others in the room always seemed to make more noise. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/09/movies/buck-henry-dead.html 1/6 1/11/2020 Buck Henry, Who Helped Create ‘Get Smart’ and Adapt ‘The Graduate,’ Dies at 89 - The New York Times Indeed, for almost 50 years he was a Zelig-like figure in American comedy, a ubiquitous if underrecognized presence not only in grand successes but also in grand failures. He wrote the screenplays for “Catch-22” (1970), an earnest but unwieldy adaptation, directed by Mr. Nichols, of Joseph Heller’s corrosively comic antiwar novel; and for “Candy” (1968), which turned a novel by Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg — a riotous sendup of “Candide” set during the sexual revolution — into a leaden and star-studded bomb. (Marlon Brando, Richard Burton, Walter Matthau and Ringo Starr all appeared as vamping lechers.) His working partners were among Hollywood’s brightest lights, if not when they worked together then later. They included not only Mr. Nichols, Mr. Brooks and Mr. Belushi, but also Warren Beatty, with whom he directed the plaintive drama about mortality “Heaven Can Wait” (1978), for which he was nominated for an Academy Award; and Barbra Streisand, for whom he wrote two cockeyed romantic comedies: “The Owl and the Pussycat” (1970), adapted from a stage play by Bill Manhoff, and “What’s Up, Doc?” (1972).(for which Robert Benton and David Newman also received screenplay credit). He wrote “Protocol” (1984), a vehicle for Goldie Hawn, and “To Die For” (1995), a grimly satirical take on the power of celebrity, adapted from a Joyce Maynard novel (itself derived from an actual news story) and directed by Gus Van Sant, which brought out a star-making performance by Nicole Kidman as a would-be newscaster who brazenly induces three hapless teenagers to murder her husband. He also wrote, anomalously, the screenplay for “The Day of the Dolphin” (1973), a science fiction thriller based on a novel by Robert Merle, also directed by Mr. Nichols. “I can write in anybody’s voice,” Mr. Henry said in 2009 in an interview for the Archive of American Television, “which is why I am most successful making screenplays from books and plays.” Anne Bancroft and Dustin Hoffman in the 1967 film “The Graduate,” for which Mr. Henry was the main screenwriter. United Artists ʻPlasticsʼ https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/09/movies/buck-henry-dead.html 2/6 1/11/2020 Buck Henry, Who Helped Create ‘Get Smart’ and Adapt ‘The Graduate,’ Dies at 89 - The New York Times His most enduring work, “The Graduate,” though also an adaptation (of a novel by Charles Webb), was his most personal. Like “To Die For,” which predated the era of reality shows but addressed the potentially poisonous allure of fame as only television can confer, “The Graduate” (1967) captured a moment of unease in the American zeitgeist. Set amid the affluence and sunshine of mid-1960s suburban Los Angeles, where drugs, sex, rock ’n’ roll and the specter of the Vietnam War had yet to rend the fabric of an older generation’s social expectations, the film caught the alienation of the American young who sensed, long before their parents did, that the world they were entering was a whole new place. The film introduced a young actor named Dustin Hoffman as the title character, Benjamin Braddock, whose anxiety and paralysis are dramatized when he has an affair with the wife of his father’s business partner, Mrs. Robinson, then falls in love with her daughter, Elaine. Mr. Henry’s screenplay, which was nominated for an Oscar, appropriated much of Mr. Webb’s dialogue but softened the smug, unpleasant edge evinced by Benjamin in the novel. And it was marked by a number of awkwardly comic exchanges that pointedly illustrated what was then becoming known as the generation gap: “I just want to say one word to you, just one word,” a friend of Benjamin’s father says to Benjamin, corralling him at his graduation party. “Yes, sir.” “Are you listening?” “Yes, I am.” “Plastics.” Bringing in record-breaking young audiences, “The Graduate” was the No. 1 movie in America for months in 1968 — it became the third-highest-grossing movie in history up to that time, behind only “Gone With the Wind” and “The Sound of Music” — and helped usher in an era in which Hollywood focused on making movies for people in their teens and 20s. “I think it was a film made by and for a generation that hadn’t had films made for it,” Mr. Henry said in an interview with the journal Cineaste in 2001. “We were just trying to make a film about something we understood. By we, I mean Mike Nichols; Larry Turman, the producer; and me.” Calder Willingham, who wrote an early version of the script, also received screenplay credit, but it was Mr. Henry’s that was the basis of the film, though the two shared an Academy Award nomination for best adapted screenplay. “When Nichols asked me to read the book, they’d already thrown away four scripts,” Mr. Henry recalled. “Nichols, Turman and I all thought we were Benjamin. That’s how the book affected us. Nichols and Turman saw the behavior and events in the film as reflecting what they felt at Benjamin’s age. So did I.” https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/09/movies/buck-henry-dead.html 3/6 1/11/2020 Buck Henry, Who Helped Create ‘Get Smart’ and Adapt ‘The Graduate,’ Dies at 89 - The New York Times Heir of Stockbrokers Buck Henry was born Henry Zuckerman in New York City on Dec. 9, 1930, to Paul and Ruth (Taylor) Zuckerman. His father was a stockbroker and an Army Air Corps pilot; his mother was a Ziegfeld Follies performer and an actress in silent films. He was named for his grandfather, also a stockbroker, acquiring his nickname, Buck, in the process. (In the 2009 archive interview, he said he did not legally change his name to Buck Henry until the 1970s.) Mr. Henry attended private schools in New York and attended Dartmouth, where he joined the theater crowd in campus productions. He recalled in an interview with Dartmouth Alumni Magazine in 2013 that three drama professors were the only ones “I really cared about.” After graduating, he was drafted and spent the Korean War years touring Army bases in Germany with an acting company, performing in a musical revue he wrote and directed. When he returned, he lived mostly in New York City, auditioning for acting jobs and sending off writing samples, to little avail. Then, in 1959, he joined forces with a friend, Alan Abel, who had created a hoax organization, the Society for Indecency to Naked Animals, which was dedicated to putting pants — or at least undershorts — on dogs, horses and cows as a response to society’s evident moral decline. [Read the obituary for Alan Abel here.] Mr. Henry became the public face of SINA, as the organization was known, playing the role of its president, G. Clifford Prout, giving interviews to newspapers and magazines and appearing on television, where he would argue that zoos should be closed down until the animals could be properly attired. The hoax wasn’t entirely unmasked until 1965, but until then many people — millions, perhaps — had been hoodwinked. Among them was Walter Cronkite, who featured a segment on SINA in August 1962 on the “CBS Evening News.” He never forgave Mr. Henry after learning that it had been a joke. In the early 1960s Mr. Henry performed with the Premise, an Off Broadway improvisational troupe. With Theodore J. Flicker, a fellow troupe member, he wrote his first movie, “The Troublemaker” (1964), a lampoon of city bureaucracy about a man trying to open a coffee house. He also landed a handful of television jobs, writing for Steve Allen and Garry Moore and for the satirical news program “That Was the Week That Was,” on which he also appeared. The producer Daniel Melnick put Mr. Henry together with Mr. Brooks to create the spoof of spy movies that became “Get Smart.” It was an idea born out of commerce, a high-concept melding of big hits — “Goldfinger” meets “The Pink Panther.” “I go to his office one day, and he says, ʻI want to give you guys an idea,’” Mr.