Back to the beautiful Los Angeles Theatre we go, my favorite theater on Broadway in downtown Los Angeles, where just three weeks ago Mom and I saw the 1967 flick How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. Tonight they showed The Graduate, another film from '67. That's not a coincidence. If you read the How to Succeed post, you'll know that 2010 is a special year for the Conservancy. It's the year of Sixties Turn 50, a project by the Conservancy's Modern Committee, or Mod Com. As the literature says, the sixties start turning fifty in 2010, and so what better way for a group like this to celebrate it than to show movies made in the sixties? Or, in the case of American Graffiti last week, movies that take place in the sixties? The Sixties Turn Fifty is a nine-month program highlighting and celebrating sixties architecture in Los Angeles County and how best to preserve and protect it. As they were three weeks ago, members of the Mod Com were set up on the lower level of the Los Angeles, in that huge wood floor space between the men's and ladies' rooms that was originally a kids' playing area in the theater's heyday. They were manning their tables and chatting up folks while video kiosks looped footage of sixties buildings around L.A. County.
You might say L.A. is the perfect place to celebrate sixties architecture. Seriously, if you have a minute, head over to laconservancy.org and click through to their Sixties Turn Fifty site (yes, they built a whole site for this) and check out some of the landmarks. We're talking an awesome mix of styles. It's funny. When I go to Opera League seminars, sometimes they talk about these top notch European composers who moved to L.A. for the great weather and the lucrative work in the movie industry. Well, it was sort of like that with architecture. Some of the most awesome architects from around the world came to L.A. for the work and the weather. The result? While Hollywood movies were being made with some of the best soundtracks ever, some of the most awesome and unique residences and office buildings and churches and hotels were being designed and built right here. L.A. sounds like a fun place to be in the sixties, doesn't it? Folks who were around at that time, the more discerning folks at least, were getting to see the modern L.A., the L.A. we all know and love, the L.A. Randy Newman sings about, being born.
Whereas the Modesto-set American Graffiti was filmed in Northern California and How to Succeed was made in New York (or at least takes place in New York, I'm not sure where the interior sets were), The Graduate has an extra dimension of relevance to the Sixties Turn Fifty because a lot of it was filmed on location in L.A. It's not set here, mind you. Like American Graffiti, the story takes place up in the Bay area. George Lucas actually did shoot American Graffiti in the Bay area since that was his home. The Graduate director Mike Nichols, on the other hand, stayed close to the studio, and perhaps close to where most of the cast lived. As a result, the UC Berkley scenes were actually shot at USC. That hits home for me since I was a student there in the late nineties. Doheny Library really stands out, as does Von KleinSmid Hall, where the business school is based. The program I attended, Masters of Professional Writing, was based on the fourth floor of Waite Phillips Hall, next door to Von KleinSmid (since then it's moved across the way to Taper Hall). You can see the phys ed building at one point as well. Other L.A. spots used in the film include the United Methodist Church in La Verne, a small town in the San Gabriel Valley about thirty minutes east of L.A. That's where they shot the wedding at the end. As for Mrs. Robinson's house, that was actually someone's real house in Beverly Hills on North Palm Drive.
Most memorable of all, though, is that hotel where Ben and Mrs. Robinson carry on their affair. In the story, it's a fictional hotel called Taft. In real life? Mike Nichols shot all that at none other than the legendary Ambassador Hotel on Wilshire Boulevard. When it was demolished in 2006, many people wept. And I'm being literal. The Ambassador occupies an irreplaceable plot of L.A. history. It was built in the early twenties with designs from the same architect, Myron Hunt, who designed the Rose Bowl, Caltech, Occidental College, and the Huntington Hotel in Pasadena. The Ambassador was no ordinary hotel. Taking up twenty-four acres, it was a world unto itself. Whether you were staying there or just out for a night at its famous Cocoanut Grove, the Ambassador was just that: A dignitary from another land, in this case one of escapism, who knew what you wanted. The Cocoanut Grove was not only a hot spot on L.A.'s nightlife map, it was one of the most popular concert venues in the West. Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., Gene Kelly, Diana Ross, Judy Garland, Louis Armstrong, Nat King Cole, Julie Andrews, the list of legends who played at the Grove is endless. As for the hotel itself, presidents stayed there. Visiting leaders did the same. Marilyn Monroe got her start there, modeling with a poolside agency. Howard Hughes didn't just stay there, he lived there. Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated there (a year after The Graduate was filmed). Are you getting the picture? And as for Hollywood filming, The Graduate is, in fact, part of a long list of productions that found a use for the Ambassador. The Academy Awards were held there a few times early on, such as the 1940 ceremony when Gone with the Wind swept. So the next time you see The Graduate, you can appreciate those affair scenes, huh? Besides which, as I learned in film school, the Ambassador scenes are also awesome from a film geek standpoint. That one scene in particular where they're in bed and Mrs. Robinson spills the secret of Elaine being an accident in the back of a Ford, how that scene starts with Ben wanting to have a conversation for a change and ending with him not wanting to talk at all after Mrs. Robinson grabs him by the hair and makes him swear never to tell, they showed us that scene in film school I don't know how many times. It's a perfect scene. Well played. The beats are hit on schedule without making the whole thing seem artificial. No small feat.
So there you go. The Graduate, more than any other film in this year's Last Remaining Seats series, aligns with the Mod Com's Sixties Turn Fifty program. Watching this film means you're watching L.A. in the sixties.
Before Conservancy head Linda Dishman came out to give her welcome-and-thank-you spiel, they screened a short film by Mel Brooks called "The Critic." This marked Mel's first foray into film, and it's an awesome example of less is more. Made in 1963 with a running time of about five minutes, it's basically a series of abstract animations set to a harpsichord. Voiceover is provided by Mel as an old man who complains the whole time because he doesn't understand what the animation is supposed to be about. Mel was only in his thirties at the time, in fact about the same age as Anne Bancroft, whom he married the following year, but he totally sounds like a grouchy old geezer.
Tonight's host was Tony Valdez, a sixtysomething (there we go with the sixties again!) newscaster from L.A.'s local Fox affiliate, Fox 11. Like Charles Phoenix at last week's American Graffiti screening, Tony is a Last Remaining Seats regular. More than that, he's a Conservancy member and sometime volunteer docent for the Conservancy's downtown walking tours. Being a TV news guy, you won't be surprised to learn Tony's got a lot of charm. He's a little white-haired chubby guy who went to hell and back in Vietnam....and is probably the best, funniest, most personable host in the Conservancy's rotating lineup of LRS hosts.
Tony spent a few minutes before the movie interviewing the guy who produced The Graduate, Lawrence Turman. He's in his eighties now and has been teaching at USC since 1991. Among his former students are Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, creators of Smallville. Lawrence was in his forties when he produced The Graduate, easily the first notable thing he helmed. Since The Graduate, he's been working quite steadily. In terms of films I've heard of, Lawrence produced John Carpenter's remake of The Thing in the early eighties, starring Kurt Russell. And then he and Kurt teamed up a couple years later for The Mean Season. Lawrence was also the brain behind the two Short Circuit movies. That's especially awesome as those were definitely among my faves growing up. I still think about Number 5 sometimes. "Input! More input!" Love it. Other eighties and nineties flicks from his oeuvre include the buddy cop comedy Running Scared with Billy Crystal and Gregory Hines and an unknown Jimmy Smits playing the bad guy (I haven't seen that in ages), The Getaway, The River Wild, and American History X. So our man Lawrence has been around. And for someone in his eighties, he seems like he could still produce a movie today.
I've seen producers interviewed before, and they all seem to enjoy talking about how hard it is to be a producer, how tough it is to get people, namely studio suits, to believe in their projects. Lawrence was no exception. The first thing he talked about was how hard it was to get The Graduate made. The Charles Webb novel on which it's based was published in 1964. Now to me, three years doesn't seem like a very long time to make a feature. It's almost a matter of course now'days for a feature to consume at least two or three years from pre-production to red carpet premiere. But judging by how he went on and on about it, those must've been three very long years. It sounds like the instant the novel was published, he was all over it. He said he shopped it to every studio in town, and they all said no.
In yet another example of how the most precious irony occurs in real life, The Graduate's savior turned out to be a producer named Joseph Levine from a company called Embassy. Joseph was just north of sixty and had already accomplished quite a bit. The way he started out in the biz was to buy the distribution rights to foreign flicks on the cheap and then release them in the States and support them with advertising. In fact, Joseph and his Embassy became well known for their TV spots. His first fortune came from the distro rights to the original Godzilla movie from Japan. The Italian film Hercules and the Princess of Troy was another one he nabbed. As you might've deduced by those two titles, Joseph's forte was the low-budget stuff. Lawrence called him a "schlockmeister." Other pre-Graduate credits include Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, Morgan the Pirate, Where the Bullets Fly, Sands of the Kalahari, Mad Monster Party?, and The Tiger and the Pussycat. He made another fortune in the sixties with a sexploitation flick called The Carpetbaggers, which came from a novel that was a thinly disguised bio of Howard Hughes. I believe schlock is in the eye of the popcorn eater, so whatever you think of Hercules and Godzilla, Joseph certainly didn't mind the money. Nor the accolades. The same year he produced The Carpetbaggers, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (the folks behind the Golden Globes) honored him with their Cecil B. DeMille Award for lifetime achievement in motion pictures. Almost as if being jinxed by that recognition, Joseph's next movie was universally reviled: The Oscar, which unfortunately marked the movie debut of Tony Bennett, who was forty and already a name to conjure. Ol' Joseph was also known for being terrible with names. Check out how he butchered Dustin Hoffman and Simon and Garfunkel during an interview: "If Mike Nichols wants Dustin Farnum in The Graduate, I let Mike have him. Now for the music he wants Simon and Schuster." Pitching The Graduate to Joseph was a last-ditch effort. As you can now see from his resume, a guy like that is the last person you'd expect to have any interest in a movie like this. And yet he did. Joseph saved the day.
Lawrence said the screenplay by Buck Henry, who went on to do Catch-22 and stuff as recent as To Die For, one of my favorite Nicole Kidman movies, was very loyal to the novel. More than that, he said the script was all but a verbatim rewrite of the novel in screenplay format. A lot of the dialogue was reproduced "to the T," he said. And speaking of the novel, apparently Charles Webb based a lot of it on his own experiences. Charles was from Pasadena. He attended college at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Like Dustin Hoffman in the film, he moved back home after graduating and didn't know what to do. He ended up having an affair with a woman a lot like Mrs. Robinson. She was a socialite who was older, very beautiful, and very married. Pasadena was and still is a relatively conservative enclave so I can only imagine the hot water he got into. And just as Raymond Chandler wrote his first novel, The Big Sleep, at Musso & Frank in Hollywood, so Charles Webb found a public place to work on his debut opus: The Pasadena Huntington Hotel.
Lawrence didn't say how hard it was to find a director. Mike Nichols had done next to nothing at this point in terms of directing. He'd done a play on Broadway, which is awesome, but that was it. He certainly knew comedy, though. Have you heard of Nichols and May? Mike Nichols and Elaine May were quite the comedy duo in the fifties. They did live gigs in nightclubs and on the radio. And they made records. In fact, the two of them plus a few others were the ones who created Chicago's still famous Second City comedy troupe. And that one play he directed? Barefoot in the Park by Neil Simon. It was a smash. After that, Mike knew he wanted to direct. Lawrence could see it too. "I had a feeling about him," he said.
Finding an actor to play Ben was the hardest part. Their ideal candidate was Robert Redford, but he said no. And so came the auditions. Lawrence said they auditioned literally hundreds of guys before they found thirty-year-old Dustin Hoffman. Dustin had done a few things at this point, mostly TV stuff. It's safe to say he was still waiting for his big break when The Graduate came along. And speaking of his being thirty, that's something you forget when you watch the movie, how close in age the actors are. Dustin was thirty, and Anne Bancroft, the "older woman," was thirty-five. Katharine Ross, who played her daughter Elaine, was twenty-seven. Hilarious, huh? In terms of the audition process, Lawrence said they made up a fake scene with Ben and Mrs. Robinson that had nothing to do with the movie, but they didn't reveal that to the prospective Bens. Reading the Mrs. Robinson part was Joanne Linville, a forty-year-old actress already well established in the TV world. She's still alive today and has done tons of TV work and no mistake. Lawrence said they hadn't found their Mrs. Robinson yet. They never considered Joanne Linville for the part. It's just that she and Lawrence were pals, and she agreed to help him with the readings. When it was Dustin Hoffman's turn to read with her, he made her cry. That's when Lawrence and Joseph knew they had their Ben. As a side note, Joanne was married at this time to Mark Rydell. Also still alive today (they divorced in the early seventies), Mark did TV stuff in the sixties like The Fugitive and Gunsmoke and since then has done movies like On Golden Pond and Even Money.
As for Mrs. Robinson, the actress they were gunning for was Doris Day. She certainly was the ideal age for the part, early forties. After she said no, they went to Patricia Neal, but she was recovering from a stroke and wasn't ready for the rigors of film production. Meantime, other actresses were approaching them for the role. I guess the buzz was building. We're talking the likes of Ava Gardner and Joan Crawford. Wow, huh? As for Mr. Robinson, they wanted Gene Hackman, but Murray Hamilton had to suffice. It does make you wonder, doesn't it? If they'd gotten their dream cast of Robert Redford, Doris Day, and Gene Hackman? How awesome would that've been? Although, after having seen it so many times, it's almost impossible to imagine it without Dustin Hoffman and Anne Bancroft.
Lawrence had just done a film with a Simon & Garfunkel soundtrack before The Graduate: The Flim-Flam Man with George C. Scott. The future Patton plays a con man (the title character) who meets and befriends an Army deserter and recruits him (pun intended) to be his young apprentice. It's also got Slim Pickens in it, as well as Sue Lyon, who played Lolita in the Stanley Kubrick version of the Nabokov novel a few years earlier. Most interesting from my standpoint is that The Flim-Flam Man was directed by Irvin Kershner. Kersh, as his friends called him, directed The Empire Strikes Back, my favorite of all six Star Wars films. I was lucky enough to see a Q&A with him at a screening of Empire at the ArcLight Hollywood a few years ago. Pretty cool guy. Lots of energy for someone in his eighties.
But anyway, and ironically, even though Lawrence had just worked with Simon & Garfunkel, it never occurred to him to hire them for The Graduate. As I said about the cast, I can't imagine The Graduate without Simon & Garfunkel. Their music is one of my favorite things about the film. Lawrence said we should thank Mike Nichols for suggesting them. Now get this: The song "Mrs. Robinson" wasn't really about Anne Bancroft's Mrs. Robinson. It was about Eleanor Roosevelt. Did you know that? I didn't before tonight. Here's why, though. Originally Simon & Garfunkel were supposed to write three original songs for the film, but because they toured all the time and had other obligations, they only had time for one, "The Sounds of Silence." Mike Nichols didn't find this out until he was nearly done editing the piece. Naturally he became sort of stressed. In an attempt at mollification, Simon showed him this other song he was working on about the former First Lady which just happened to have the title "Mrs. Robinson." Mike took it. What a lucky break, huh? Indeed, Lawrence said The Graduate is a great example of the stars aligning.
When they had their final cut, they did two test screenings, one of them in the smallest movie theater in Chicago. Their editor, Sam O'Steen, attended that one. Afterward, he assured Lawrence and Mike they had a hit on their hands. The other screening was in New York City. Again, nothing but positive feedback. Lawrence said that, after the New York screening, he walked out into the lobby to find one of the studio moguls who'd turned down The Graduate. Apparently this particular mogul had claimed the story just wasn't funny. "Not funny, huh?" Lawrence said right in his face. That had to feel good.
You might say L.A. is the perfect place to celebrate sixties architecture. Seriously, if you have a minute, head over to laconservancy.org and click through to their Sixties Turn Fifty site (yes, they built a whole site for this) and check out some of the landmarks. We're talking an awesome mix of styles. It's funny. When I go to Opera League seminars, sometimes they talk about these top notch European composers who moved to L.A. for the great weather and the lucrative work in the movie industry. Well, it was sort of like that with architecture. Some of the most awesome architects from around the world came to L.A. for the work and the weather. The result? While Hollywood movies were being made with some of the best soundtracks ever, some of the most awesome and unique residences and office buildings and churches and hotels were being designed and built right here. L.A. sounds like a fun place to be in the sixties, doesn't it? Folks who were around at that time, the more discerning folks at least, were getting to see the modern L.A., the L.A. we all know and love, the L.A. Randy Newman sings about, being born.
Whereas the Modesto-set American Graffiti was filmed in Northern California and How to Succeed was made in New York (or at least takes place in New York, I'm not sure where the interior sets were), The Graduate has an extra dimension of relevance to the Sixties Turn Fifty because a lot of it was filmed on location in L.A. It's not set here, mind you. Like American Graffiti, the story takes place up in the Bay area. George Lucas actually did shoot American Graffiti in the Bay area since that was his home. The Graduate director Mike Nichols, on the other hand, stayed close to the studio, and perhaps close to where most of the cast lived. As a result, the UC Berkley scenes were actually shot at USC. That hits home for me since I was a student there in the late nineties. Doheny Library really stands out, as does Von KleinSmid Hall, where the business school is based. The program I attended, Masters of Professional Writing, was based on the fourth floor of Waite Phillips Hall, next door to Von KleinSmid (since then it's moved across the way to Taper Hall). You can see the phys ed building at one point as well. Other L.A. spots used in the film include the United Methodist Church in La Verne, a small town in the San Gabriel Valley about thirty minutes east of L.A. That's where they shot the wedding at the end. As for Mrs. Robinson's house, that was actually someone's real house in Beverly Hills on North Palm Drive.
Most memorable of all, though, is that hotel where Ben and Mrs. Robinson carry on their affair. In the story, it's a fictional hotel called Taft. In real life? Mike Nichols shot all that at none other than the legendary Ambassador Hotel on Wilshire Boulevard. When it was demolished in 2006, many people wept. And I'm being literal. The Ambassador occupies an irreplaceable plot of L.A. history. It was built in the early twenties with designs from the same architect, Myron Hunt, who designed the Rose Bowl, Caltech, Occidental College, and the Huntington Hotel in Pasadena. The Ambassador was no ordinary hotel. Taking up twenty-four acres, it was a world unto itself. Whether you were staying there or just out for a night at its famous Cocoanut Grove, the Ambassador was just that: A dignitary from another land, in this case one of escapism, who knew what you wanted. The Cocoanut Grove was not only a hot spot on L.A.'s nightlife map, it was one of the most popular concert venues in the West. Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., Gene Kelly, Diana Ross, Judy Garland, Louis Armstrong, Nat King Cole, Julie Andrews, the list of legends who played at the Grove is endless. As for the hotel itself, presidents stayed there. Visiting leaders did the same. Marilyn Monroe got her start there, modeling with a poolside agency. Howard Hughes didn't just stay there, he lived there. Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated there (a year after The Graduate was filmed). Are you getting the picture? And as for Hollywood filming, The Graduate is, in fact, part of a long list of productions that found a use for the Ambassador. The Academy Awards were held there a few times early on, such as the 1940 ceremony when Gone with the Wind swept. So the next time you see The Graduate, you can appreciate those affair scenes, huh? Besides which, as I learned in film school, the Ambassador scenes are also awesome from a film geek standpoint. That one scene in particular where they're in bed and Mrs. Robinson spills the secret of Elaine being an accident in the back of a Ford, how that scene starts with Ben wanting to have a conversation for a change and ending with him not wanting to talk at all after Mrs. Robinson grabs him by the hair and makes him swear never to tell, they showed us that scene in film school I don't know how many times. It's a perfect scene. Well played. The beats are hit on schedule without making the whole thing seem artificial. No small feat.
So there you go. The Graduate, more than any other film in this year's Last Remaining Seats series, aligns with the Mod Com's Sixties Turn Fifty program. Watching this film means you're watching L.A. in the sixties.
Before Conservancy head Linda Dishman came out to give her welcome-and-thank-you spiel, they screened a short film by Mel Brooks called "The Critic." This marked Mel's first foray into film, and it's an awesome example of less is more. Made in 1963 with a running time of about five minutes, it's basically a series of abstract animations set to a harpsichord. Voiceover is provided by Mel as an old man who complains the whole time because he doesn't understand what the animation is supposed to be about. Mel was only in his thirties at the time, in fact about the same age as Anne Bancroft, whom he married the following year, but he totally sounds like a grouchy old geezer.
Tonight's host was Tony Valdez, a sixtysomething (there we go with the sixties again!) newscaster from L.A.'s local Fox affiliate, Fox 11. Like Charles Phoenix at last week's American Graffiti screening, Tony is a Last Remaining Seats regular. More than that, he's a Conservancy member and sometime volunteer docent for the Conservancy's downtown walking tours. Being a TV news guy, you won't be surprised to learn Tony's got a lot of charm. He's a little white-haired chubby guy who went to hell and back in Vietnam....and is probably the best, funniest, most personable host in the Conservancy's rotating lineup of LRS hosts.
Tony spent a few minutes before the movie interviewing the guy who produced The Graduate, Lawrence Turman. He's in his eighties now and has been teaching at USC since 1991. Among his former students are Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, creators of Smallville. Lawrence was in his forties when he produced The Graduate, easily the first notable thing he helmed. Since The Graduate, he's been working quite steadily. In terms of films I've heard of, Lawrence produced John Carpenter's remake of The Thing in the early eighties, starring Kurt Russell. And then he and Kurt teamed up a couple years later for The Mean Season. Lawrence was also the brain behind the two Short Circuit movies. That's especially awesome as those were definitely among my faves growing up. I still think about Number 5 sometimes. "Input! More input!" Love it. Other eighties and nineties flicks from his oeuvre include the buddy cop comedy Running Scared with Billy Crystal and Gregory Hines and an unknown Jimmy Smits playing the bad guy (I haven't seen that in ages), The Getaway, The River Wild, and American History X. So our man Lawrence has been around. And for someone in his eighties, he seems like he could still produce a movie today.
I've seen producers interviewed before, and they all seem to enjoy talking about how hard it is to be a producer, how tough it is to get people, namely studio suits, to believe in their projects. Lawrence was no exception. The first thing he talked about was how hard it was to get The Graduate made. The Charles Webb novel on which it's based was published in 1964. Now to me, three years doesn't seem like a very long time to make a feature. It's almost a matter of course now'days for a feature to consume at least two or three years from pre-production to red carpet premiere. But judging by how he went on and on about it, those must've been three very long years. It sounds like the instant the novel was published, he was all over it. He said he shopped it to every studio in town, and they all said no.
In yet another example of how the most precious irony occurs in real life, The Graduate's savior turned out to be a producer named Joseph Levine from a company called Embassy. Joseph was just north of sixty and had already accomplished quite a bit. The way he started out in the biz was to buy the distribution rights to foreign flicks on the cheap and then release them in the States and support them with advertising. In fact, Joseph and his Embassy became well known for their TV spots. His first fortune came from the distro rights to the original Godzilla movie from Japan. The Italian film Hercules and the Princess of Troy was another one he nabbed. As you might've deduced by those two titles, Joseph's forte was the low-budget stuff. Lawrence called him a "schlockmeister." Other pre-Graduate credits include Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, Morgan the Pirate, Where the Bullets Fly, Sands of the Kalahari, Mad Monster Party?, and The Tiger and the Pussycat. He made another fortune in the sixties with a sexploitation flick called The Carpetbaggers, which came from a novel that was a thinly disguised bio of Howard Hughes. I believe schlock is in the eye of the popcorn eater, so whatever you think of Hercules and Godzilla, Joseph certainly didn't mind the money. Nor the accolades. The same year he produced The Carpetbaggers, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (the folks behind the Golden Globes) honored him with their Cecil B. DeMille Award for lifetime achievement in motion pictures. Almost as if being jinxed by that recognition, Joseph's next movie was universally reviled: The Oscar, which unfortunately marked the movie debut of Tony Bennett, who was forty and already a name to conjure. Ol' Joseph was also known for being terrible with names. Check out how he butchered Dustin Hoffman and Simon and Garfunkel during an interview: "If Mike Nichols wants Dustin Farnum in The Graduate, I let Mike have him. Now for the music he wants Simon and Schuster." Pitching The Graduate to Joseph was a last-ditch effort. As you can now see from his resume, a guy like that is the last person you'd expect to have any interest in a movie like this. And yet he did. Joseph saved the day.
Lawrence said the screenplay by Buck Henry, who went on to do Catch-22 and stuff as recent as To Die For, one of my favorite Nicole Kidman movies, was very loyal to the novel. More than that, he said the script was all but a verbatim rewrite of the novel in screenplay format. A lot of the dialogue was reproduced "to the T," he said. And speaking of the novel, apparently Charles Webb based a lot of it on his own experiences. Charles was from Pasadena. He attended college at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Like Dustin Hoffman in the film, he moved back home after graduating and didn't know what to do. He ended up having an affair with a woman a lot like Mrs. Robinson. She was a socialite who was older, very beautiful, and very married. Pasadena was and still is a relatively conservative enclave so I can only imagine the hot water he got into. And just as Raymond Chandler wrote his first novel, The Big Sleep, at Musso & Frank in Hollywood, so Charles Webb found a public place to work on his debut opus: The Pasadena Huntington Hotel.
Lawrence didn't say how hard it was to find a director. Mike Nichols had done next to nothing at this point in terms of directing. He'd done a play on Broadway, which is awesome, but that was it. He certainly knew comedy, though. Have you heard of Nichols and May? Mike Nichols and Elaine May were quite the comedy duo in the fifties. They did live gigs in nightclubs and on the radio. And they made records. In fact, the two of them plus a few others were the ones who created Chicago's still famous Second City comedy troupe. And that one play he directed? Barefoot in the Park by Neil Simon. It was a smash. After that, Mike knew he wanted to direct. Lawrence could see it too. "I had a feeling about him," he said.
Finding an actor to play Ben was the hardest part. Their ideal candidate was Robert Redford, but he said no. And so came the auditions. Lawrence said they auditioned literally hundreds of guys before they found thirty-year-old Dustin Hoffman. Dustin had done a few things at this point, mostly TV stuff. It's safe to say he was still waiting for his big break when The Graduate came along. And speaking of his being thirty, that's something you forget when you watch the movie, how close in age the actors are. Dustin was thirty, and Anne Bancroft, the "older woman," was thirty-five. Katharine Ross, who played her daughter Elaine, was twenty-seven. Hilarious, huh? In terms of the audition process, Lawrence said they made up a fake scene with Ben and Mrs. Robinson that had nothing to do with the movie, but they didn't reveal that to the prospective Bens. Reading the Mrs. Robinson part was Joanne Linville, a forty-year-old actress already well established in the TV world. She's still alive today and has done tons of TV work and no mistake. Lawrence said they hadn't found their Mrs. Robinson yet. They never considered Joanne Linville for the part. It's just that she and Lawrence were pals, and she agreed to help him with the readings. When it was Dustin Hoffman's turn to read with her, he made her cry. That's when Lawrence and Joseph knew they had their Ben. As a side note, Joanne was married at this time to Mark Rydell. Also still alive today (they divorced in the early seventies), Mark did TV stuff in the sixties like The Fugitive and Gunsmoke and since then has done movies like On Golden Pond and Even Money.
As for Mrs. Robinson, the actress they were gunning for was Doris Day. She certainly was the ideal age for the part, early forties. After she said no, they went to Patricia Neal, but she was recovering from a stroke and wasn't ready for the rigors of film production. Meantime, other actresses were approaching them for the role. I guess the buzz was building. We're talking the likes of Ava Gardner and Joan Crawford. Wow, huh? As for Mr. Robinson, they wanted Gene Hackman, but Murray Hamilton had to suffice. It does make you wonder, doesn't it? If they'd gotten their dream cast of Robert Redford, Doris Day, and Gene Hackman? How awesome would that've been? Although, after having seen it so many times, it's almost impossible to imagine it without Dustin Hoffman and Anne Bancroft.
Lawrence had just done a film with a Simon & Garfunkel soundtrack before The Graduate: The Flim-Flam Man with George C. Scott. The future Patton plays a con man (the title character) who meets and befriends an Army deserter and recruits him (pun intended) to be his young apprentice. It's also got Slim Pickens in it, as well as Sue Lyon, who played Lolita in the Stanley Kubrick version of the Nabokov novel a few years earlier. Most interesting from my standpoint is that The Flim-Flam Man was directed by Irvin Kershner. Kersh, as his friends called him, directed The Empire Strikes Back, my favorite of all six Star Wars films. I was lucky enough to see a Q&A with him at a screening of Empire at the ArcLight Hollywood a few years ago. Pretty cool guy. Lots of energy for someone in his eighties.
But anyway, and ironically, even though Lawrence had just worked with Simon & Garfunkel, it never occurred to him to hire them for The Graduate. As I said about the cast, I can't imagine The Graduate without Simon & Garfunkel. Their music is one of my favorite things about the film. Lawrence said we should thank Mike Nichols for suggesting them. Now get this: The song "Mrs. Robinson" wasn't really about Anne Bancroft's Mrs. Robinson. It was about Eleanor Roosevelt. Did you know that? I didn't before tonight. Here's why, though. Originally Simon & Garfunkel were supposed to write three original songs for the film, but because they toured all the time and had other obligations, they only had time for one, "The Sounds of Silence." Mike Nichols didn't find this out until he was nearly done editing the piece. Naturally he became sort of stressed. In an attempt at mollification, Simon showed him this other song he was working on about the former First Lady which just happened to have the title "Mrs. Robinson." Mike took it. What a lucky break, huh? Indeed, Lawrence said The Graduate is a great example of the stars aligning.
When they had their final cut, they did two test screenings, one of them in the smallest movie theater in Chicago. Their editor, Sam O'Steen, attended that one. Afterward, he assured Lawrence and Mike they had a hit on their hands. The other screening was in New York City. Again, nothing but positive feedback. Lawrence said that, after the New York screening, he walked out into the lobby to find one of the studio moguls who'd turned down The Graduate. Apparently this particular mogul had claimed the story just wasn't funny. "Not funny, huh?" Lawrence said right in his face. That had to feel good.
