The method, p.40
The Method, page 40
That, after all, was the lesson of Rod Steiger’s career, the lesson of all the “ugly little men” who strutted and fretted onstage only to be ignored by Hollywood. If you were a good-looking gentile like Brando, Clift, Dean, or Robert Redford, you could make a career in film. You might even be able to manage it if you were Jewish but could pass, like Paul Newman. But Hoffman’s height and features and marble-mouthed diction didn’t stand a chance. When Nichols brought Katharine Ross in so they could read together, Hoffman’s dread only churned with more force. “The idea that the director was connecting me with someone as beautiful as her—it became an even uglier joke,” he said. “It was like a Jewish nightmare.”
The nightmare continued. As Hoffman sat in the makeup chair before his screen test, Nichols walked in, flummoxed at the challenge of making the actor’s face more appealing for the camera. Could they do something about his unibrow? They could, plucking away until one eyebrow became two. But what, Nichols said, about his nose? Hoffman didn’t get it. Had he been brought out to Los Angeles only to be tortured and sent packing?
Much to his surprise, soon after, he landed the role.
The choice of Hoffman for the role of Benjamin Braddock defined Nichols’s take on the material. In both The Graduate’s screenplay and the novel on which it is based, Benjamin Braddock is rich, popular, a star athlete, and a Big Man on Campus. He’s not one of the Method’s grubby ethnics. But after auditioning actor after actor who beamed Kennedyesque certainty that the world belonged to him, Nichols realized the straightforward approach to the material would never work. Benjamin Braddock might be a WASP, but, as Nichols told Hoffman, “Maybe he’s Jewish inside.” The Graduate needed a lead performance that captured how Benjamin and his generation saw themselves—as misfits who, to paraphrase a song the Beach Boys had sung a year earlier, just weren’t made for these times.
The Graduate is a textbook example of what Stella Adler dubbed “Modern Drama,” a work in which a conflicted, pained protagonist rebels against an expiring social order but cannot escape modernity, which is the real source of his problems. It needed the conflicted and tormented modern style at which Strasberg’s students excelled. To Nichols, it also needed a leading man in the Marty mold, someone who understood rejection in his bones.
It is impossible to imagine The Graduate without the Method. Hoffman was a former student of Strasberg’s. Anne Bancroft presented work at the Studio so frequently in the 1950s that Shelley Winters once groused that “it should have been called the goddamn Anne Bancroft Studio in those days.” Nichols had by then developed an analytical approach to scripts that owed a great deal to both the “system” and Strasberg. “The thing about something that’s made right—whether it’s a novel, or an opera, or a film—has to do with being hung on a spine,” he said, sounding much like one of Boley’s lectures. “When you work on a play you discover that every choice you make, every costume, every radiator on the set, the placement of everything, has to do with the spine that you’ve chosen.” When asked if he charted an emotional arc for his characters, he replied as Strasberg would in the Directors Unit: “When I work on a play or a picture, I divide it into events, things that happen.” It’s important, he maintained, that actors know where these events—what Stanislavski might have called the large units of action—have their beginnings, middles, and ends.
Nichols’s process combined elements of Kazan and Strasberg. He wasn’t above using Strasberg’s imperiousness and cruelty to keep his actors off balance, but like Kazan, he stoked their affective memory using manipulation instead of exercises. He got to know Hoffman as well as he could, learned the details of his private humiliations and embarrassments, and then coaxed the memories out of him on set. According to Hoffman, in the scene in The Graduate in which Mrs. Robinson removes her blouse in the hotel room, Nichols asked Hoffman about his first sexual experiences, and Hoffman told him a story of trying to feel up a ninth grade girl when he was in the seventh grade. The story, of course, ended in humiliation. Hoffman missed her breast, grabbed her face instead, and she started laughing at him. Nichols said “Let’s try that.”
The end result of Hoffman “trying that” is in the final film: Bancroft removes her blouse and Hoffman grabs her breast but, having laid a hand on her, has no idea what to do. He leaves his hand there, as if glued to her, unmoving. Bancroft, displaying the aptitude for improvisation that made Actors Studio members so good at live TV, responded in character, ignoring the hand and fiddling with her sweater. Hoffman, to avoid cracking up, moved to a wall and began banging his head against it. Nichols also used Strasberg’s technique of “adjustment”: In a scene where Braddock checks into a hotel for an assignation with Mrs. Robinson, Nichols told Hoffman to imagine the desk clerk as a female pharmacist from whom he is trying to buy condoms.
Bonnie and Clyde’s ties to the Method were even more direct than The Graduate’s. Its director, Arthur Penn, had been part of the Studio since the early 1950s. Its stars, Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, had studied with Stella Adler and Bobby Lewis, respectively. Dunaway had additionally worked with Strasberg, and called herself a Method actor. “You draw on personal experiences,” she told the New York Times in 1974. “You use parts of yourself.” Gene Hackman—Dustin Hoffman’s classmate at the Pasadena Playhouse—studied off and on for eight years with Alvina Krause and Lee Strasberg’s former student George Morrison in New York City. Morrison trained Hackman in much of the “system,” including Stanislavski’s relaxation exercises, which he used for the rest of his career. Hackman auditioned for the Actors Studio several times. “I got to the final audition twice with Lee,” he recalled. “And I remember Lee asked me what I had worked on, and I said ‘I was trying to be charming’ and he said, ‘we don’t do that.’ ” The rest of the cast included Estelle Parsons and Gene Wilder, both members since the early 1960s.
Parsons had worked with Arthur Penn before, on a production of The Skin of Our Teeth in the Berkshires. There, Penn’s rehearsal process had been iterative, heavy on improvisation, and indebted to Stanislavski’s late-career way of putting a play together. On a film set, however, Penn’s technique was different. As Parsons explained, “film scripts are totally different from good plays. You don’t need the time. All you need to do is learn the lines. You don’t really do a film that you’re not right for.” Without enough rehearsal time to accrete the characters through improvisation, Penn focused most of his energy on earning the actors’ trust and creating an environment in which they could do their best work. “To get a great performance, the director has to create an atmosphere that you can work in,” Gene Hackman, who worked with Penn on several films, explained. With Penn at the helm, “It doesn’t feel like direction. It feels like your uncle is there to support you … people have an idea that actors need a lot of direction … I tend to go the other way. If I get too much direction I’m thinking only of that and nothing about this affective memory that I’m gonna do.”
Penn’s approach was particularly useful for dealing with Warren Beatty, whose perfectionism had, if anything, only become more relentless now that he was both producing and starring in a movie. Beatty fought with Penn daily about nearly every aspect of the film, and as an actor, needed reassurance that Penn wouldn’t make him look like an idiot. “[Beatty] builds up to it,” Penn explained. Much like Marlon Brando in Truckline Café, Beatty had “a natural fear of exposure. He underplays terribly to begin with. And if you know him, you know it’s there and you say: ‘Come on, come on.’ ”
Beatty had good reason to feel nervous. Despite his fame and looks, he was in real danger of passing into the Tartarus of the has-been, and Clyde Barrows was his most significant pushback yet against his public image. Beatty was at least as famous as a ladies’ man as he was as an actor, Clyde was impotent; Beatty was quick-witted, Clyde a dolt; Beatty was tall and graceful, Clyde had a pronounced limp. “I thought Warren’s limp was a very important factor in forming Clyde’s character,” Penn said. “The dialect, the whole gait. I think these things have peripheral benefits that we may not be conscious of, but they do help convey character.”
While audiences knew nothing about either Nichols’s or Penn’s on-set techniques, the resulting films beat with a pulse of the new. Bonnie and Clyde’s editing rhythms, juxtaposition of contemporary fashion with period costume, and nonjudgmental view of its criminal subjects translated the breakthroughs of the French New Wave into an American idiom. The Graduate delved deep enough into Benjamin’s alienated subjectivity that at times it felt as if the character had made the film himself. The performances that undergirded both movies felt deeply lived in, always alive, and just the right amount of neurotic.
The success of the two movies—The Graduate’s was overnight, while Bonnie and Clyde, originally dumped in theaters by Warner Bros., became a cause célèbre—helped make the 1967–68 movie season the first to see a significant rise in attendance in over twenty years. The films were sensations, bringing Hoffman instant fame and rehabilitating Beatty in Hollywood. Both movies (and their leading men) lost out at the Academy Awards to In The Heat of the Night, a more old-fashioned Hollywood portrait of liberal values triumphing in the segregated South. Even that film, however, relied on the Method. One of its leads was Sidney Poitier; the other, who finally won an Oscar for his performance, was Rod Steiger.
Studios began to realize that America’s youth audience would determine their fate. In 1968, the market research firm Yankelovich conducted a study proving it, finding that people between the ages of sixteen and twenty-four bought almost half of America’s movie tickets. As Twentieth Century–Fox’s vice president Jonas Rosenfield Jr. put it, “We are tied to the youthful market of the future [and] we have to keep up with the rhythm of young people.”
In 1969, that rhythm drove Easy Rider to make more than twenty-five times its $400,000 budget at the box office. A biker movie chronicling the misadventures of two deadbeats as they crossed America with a stash of cocaine they’re hoping to sell, Easy Rider was yet another film made by a Method devotee to find massive success through courting America’s youth. But while Nichols knew how to gently goad an actor, and Arthur Penn knew how to create a comfortable environment for them, there was nothing gentle or comfortable about the approach of Dennis Hopper, Easy Rider’s co-star and director. A serious drug addict with a well-deserved reputation for mania, Hopper’s way of working with actors was at times indistinguishable from abuse. For the film’s centerpiece, a lengthy acid trip in a cemetery in New Orleans, Hopper, drunk and high on both speed and marijuana, tried to cajole co-star Peter Fonda into going deep into the pain he still held over his mother’s suicide. Pointing to a statue of the Madonna, Hopper said, “I want you to get up there, man, I want you to go up and sit on her lap, man, I want you to ask your mother why she copped out on you.” Fonda protested. It was an invasion of his privacy and had nothing to do with the character. Hopper insisted, and Fonda complied, climbing into the statue’s arms and whispering, “You’re such a fool, Mother, I hate you so much.” At the end of the take, both men were sobbing. The resulting footage is in the film but is so buried within the lengthy drug trip montage that it barely registers. Fonda and Hopper had co-written Easy Rider, but after that day of shooting neither their creative collaboration nor their friendship was the same.
As Easy Rider conquered the box office, a recession hit America. Hollywood lost hundreds of millions of dollars between 1969 and 1972, and the movie industry effectively collapsed. Conglomerates gobbled up the studios. Gulf and Western ate Paramount in 1966, Transamerica swallowed United Artists in 1967; in 1969, the real estate magnate Kirk Kerkorian devoured MGM, while Kinney National Services, a company that began as a merger between a parking lot and a cleaning service, absorbed Warner Bros. To these companies, young ticket buyers were an untapped resource, the best educated, richest, and most liberal audience in the history of film. Flush with cash from new tax subsidies, they inflated a speculative bubble around this new resource and invested in an up-and-coming group of young American filmmakers like Francis Ford Coppola and Peter Bogdanovich, and a previous generation of iconoclasts like Hal Ashby and Bob Rafelson. The era known as New Hollywood, or the Hollywood Renaissance, was born. It would last until 1980. Rising alongside these newly empowered directors was the idea, first floated by François Truffaut in 1954, that a film—or, really, a body of work—could be read as flowing from the particular sensibility, concerns, and aesthetic preoccupations of its auteur, or (writer-)director. Truffaut championed directors like Howard Hawks, Orson Welles, and Alfred Hitchcock as examples of the auteur at work. American film critic Andrew Sarris, building off Truffaut, coined the term “auteur theory.” His landmark book, The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1928–1968, helped establish a new directorcentric way of thinking about film. It was soon joined by books like The Director’s Event and The Film Director as Superstar, both collections of interviews with important directors.
America’s newfound enthusiasm for directors masked the extent to which this period was also a renaissance for American acting. New Hollywood films relied on a generation of actors who brought to their performances an intensity, peculiarity, and realism that had rarely been seen before. Most of them had studied with at least one of the big-name acting teachers. By then, Stella Adler, Sanford Meisner, Bobby Lewis, and Lee Strasberg were all in their fourth decade of teaching. Former students including Martin Landau and William Esper had begun teaching on their own. Additional teachers drawing on Stanislavski, like Uta Hagen at HB Studios or Alvina Krause at Northwestern University, had spread the ideas of the “system” even further. In 1966, Bruce Dern, Lee Grant, Jack Garfein, Mark Rydell, and Peggy Feury co-founded the Actors Studio West, creating a home for Strasberg’s Method right in the heart of Hollywood. Strasberg, initially skeptical of the idea, began spending his summers in Los Angeles moderating there. Once students of the Method found fame, they shaped the films in which they appeared, rewriting scripts, weighing in on casting decisions, producing the films themselves, and even, at times, originating projects and hiring their directors.
It wasn’t only the actors who were products of the Method. Many directors beyond Penn, Lumet, and Nichols had been steeped in it as well. Sydney Pollack, director of the revisionist western Jeremiah Johnson and the paranoid thriller Three Days of the Condor, studied with both Strasberg and Meisner, preferring the latter’s approach. Peter Bogdanovich, whose film The Last Picture Show rocketed him into the A-list of filmmakers of the period, studied with Stella Adler, whom he called one of the best directors of actors he’d ever seen. The Last Picture Show’s cast included Uta Hagen’s former student Jeff Bridges; Cloris Leachman, who had been in Kazan’s novice class at the Studio in its first year; and Ellen Burstyn, who called Lee Strasberg “the most important influence in my life.” Even newcomer Randy Quaid, a student at the University of Houston, was steeped in Stanislavski, courtesy of the school’s acting teacher Cecil Pickett.
The Method and its values were so omnipresent that even directors indifferent—or hostile—to the art of acting leaned on its actors. Stanley Kubrick worked with Actors Studio regular Keir Dullea in 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Jack Nicholson, star of The Shining, studied the Method with Martin Landau. Nicholson’s frequent collaborator, Bob Rafelson, was openly disdainful of Strasberg and the Studio but kept using students of both, like Nicholson, Bruce Dern, and Ellen Burstyn, in his films. Robert Altman rarely cast prominent Method actors, but his techniques strove for similar results, taking full advantage of new filmmaking technologies that made smaller, more internal performances register on camera. Better microphone and mixing technology enabled Altman’s hyperreal overlapping dialogue, while new zoom lenses allowed him to film from farther away, which in turn meant that actors in a scene stayed in character at all times, unsure whether a shot included them or not. His famed improvisatory approach also echoed Ouspenskaya’s one-minute plays, turning the First Studio’s études into source material for his films.
As the decade progressed, the Method’s story no longer belonged to just a few individuals. It was instead the story of Hollywood itself. Whether an actor was trained by Strasberg, or Meisner, or Adler, or Krause, or Hagen, or any other Stanislavski disciple, the stylistic goal was the same, and that style’s underlying ideology was uniquely suited to the films of its time. It is not simply auteurist innovation that binds such disparate movies as The Last Detail, Mean Streets, The Last Picture Show, Midnight Cowboy, Nashville, and Five Easy Pieces. Running through them all is a conviction that there was a truth about American life, a protean muck that had previously been buried deep underground. American acting could help excavate America’s soul. This project seemed to grow more and more necessary as we wandered through what the New Yorker’s Jonathan Schell called “the Time of Illusion,” a time when what the public was told and their day-to-day reality could not have been farther apart. “When President Nixon escalated the war,” Schell wrote in 1975, “the public, owing to his assurances, believed that the war was coming to an end. In the United States in which the public lived, the war was almost over … In the United States in which President Nixon lived, however, the war was growing, tension was building, and the level of suspicion had become so intense that he felt driven to spy on his own subordinates.” When Watergate finally arrived, “no crisis in American history came more unexpectedly … and no crisis was more baffling to those who were caught up in it.” But the deeper crisis was there to see every week, as film after film brought us the corrupt institutions of American life, rotting from the inside, alienating and destroying the people within them. Aided by more advanced microphones and cameras, the Method could bring audiences closer than ever to the internal conflicts and pains of living in Nixon’s America.
