THE NEWYORKER, FEBRUARY 8, 2021 63
need to declaim. They just need to talk
the way people in a room talk to one
another. If the play has been written
properly, the drama will take care of it-
self. Nichols was famous for the direc-
tion, after listening to a speech, “That
was wonderful. Now do it as you.”
Another thing Nichols believed in
was “business.” Don’t just talk; do some-
thing. In everyday life, people talk when
they are eating dinner, or folding clothes,
or getting dressed for work. Nichols
liked to find things for his actors to do.
The first act of “The Odd Couple” is a
poker game, not an exciting thing to
watch from fifty feet away. Nichols made
up all kinds of activity to give the scene
life. Frank Rich called it “the funniest
staging of anything I’ve ever seen in the
theatre.” In the opening scene in Nich-
ols’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ?,”
Taylor delivers her lines while eating a
chicken leg, and Burton delivers his
while sitting at the kitchen table doing
a crossword puzzle. Because that’s what
people do.
Later, Nichols signed on to direct
extravaganzas like “Catch-22” and the
television adaptation of “Angels in
America.” But his best work was people-
in-a-room scenes, such as the kitchen
scenes with Meryl Streep, Kurt Russell,
and Cher in “Silkwood.” The ending of
that movie is a mess, and it doesn’t re-
ally work as a “60 Minutes”-style ex-
posé of the nuclear-power industry,
which Nichols was probably not much
interested in anyway. But the kitchen
scenes are unforgettable.
Some of the language in Albee’s
play—“screw,” “monkey nipples,” “hump
the hostess,” and so on—was Code-
averse. Luckily for Warner Bros., Jack
Valenti had just become the president
of the Motion Picture Association of
America, and he was determined to re-
place the Code. So when the Produc-
tion Code Administration voted to
deny approval to “Virginia Woolf,” the
M.P.A.A. overruled it.
Another minefield that filmmakers
had to negotiate was the National Cath-
olic Office for Motion Pictures. The
bishops were not going to like “hump
the hostess.” Nichols arranged for his
friend Jackie Kennedy to be invited to
the screening. When the movie ended,
she was to lean over to the officials vet-
ting the picture and whisper, “What a
beautiful movie. Jack would have loved
it.” Apparently, she did this, and it
worked. “Virginia Woolf ” managed to
be both risqué and blessed by the Church.
Within two years, the Production Code
was replaced by the ratings system.
“Virginia Woolf ” received Academy
Award nominations in every category
for which it was eligible, thirteen in all,
one of only two movies to have swept
the nominations. Taylor won for Best
Actress, and Sandy Dennis for Sup-
porting Actress. Nichols lost Best Di-
rector to Zinnemann, who won for “A
Man for All Seasons”—Old Hollywood.
But New Hollywood was just around
the corner.“
T
he Graduate” is based on a novel
by Charles Webb, published in
1963, about a college graduate, named
Benjamin, who returns to his parents’
home in Southern California, inexplica-
bly loses his motivation, and gets seduced
into a loveless affair by the wife of his
father’s law partner. Nichols thought that
the story was trite. “Kid, older lady, that’s
how everyone got started,” as he put it.
But he wanted to direct the picture.
One of the things that made “The
Graduate” not just a hit movie but a
phenomenon was the decision to cast
Dustin Hoffman as Benjamin. Redford
had wanted the part, but Nichols knew
he was wrong for it. “When was the last
time you struck out with a girl?” he asked
him. Redford said, “What do you mean?”
Nichols said, “Exactly.”
Hoffman was then barely making a
living doing Off Broadway theatre. Nich-
ols had auditioned him for a musical
called “The Apple Tree,” and he stuck
in Nichols’s mind. So Hoffman was flown
out for a screen test. People who watched
Hoffman’s test were unimpressed. Then
they watched it on film. Nichols later
said that Elizabeth Taylor was the only
other actor he worked with who could
do what Hoffman did. He called it that
“deal where you do nothing and it turns
out you were doing everything. That’s
what a great movie actor does. They
don’t know how they do it, and I don’t
know how they do it.” The camera trans-
formed Hoffman into a star.
Nichols was listening to Simon and
Garfunkel’s album “Sounds of Silence”
while he was shooting “The Gradu-
ate,” and the duo reluctantly agreed toOR CALL 888.646.6466
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