The third innovatory movie in the quintet of contenders was Mike Nichols’ The Graduate. Knowing nothing about it, we walked into a movie house in Chicago and were almost immediately doubled up with laughter at the freshness of the debutant Dustin Hoffman. Nichols had already directed his first movie, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (surely one of the most over-rated texts of modern theatre), and had the nifty insolence of a boxer on whom no one had yet laid a critical glove. Who else could have cast an unknown Jewish dwarf (Bob Evans’ description, the dwarf-part, after Marathon Man) in the part of what Charles Webb’s novel depicted as an ur-Gentile jock? The Graduate made no big statement about capitalism or Vietnam or race or any of the things for which revolutionaries clench their fists. Nor, finally, did it win any prizes, unless cinematic immortality is a prize. A joke that stays funny is some classic: who will ever forget Benjamin banging his head carefully against the wall after putting his hand ineptly on Ann Bancroft’s breast? Harris says it was an improvised gesture of frustration, which Nichols had the smartness to incorporate in the next take.
The fifth movie up for ‘Best Film’, Doctor Dolittle, was not only never going to win, but would never have been nominated if it were not for the PR expertise of its producer, Arthur Jacobs, and the desperate lobbying of Dick Zanuck, head of production at Fox, who had okayed the multi-million dollar dog’s dinner, and giraffe’s breakfast. Dick Zanuck and his colleague David Brown survived, easily, to become the producer of Jaws and The Sting and what all else along the banks of the mainstream. I shall always be grateful to them, for having okayed a 1967 movie I wrote called Two for the Road. If only Stanley Donen had gone wildly over budget, we too might have been eligible to be exhumed by Nick Harris. As it is, if you don’t remember, you have probably guessed: In the Heat of the Night won Best Picture; Katie Hepburn won Best Actress and Bill Rose won Best Original Screenplay for the dullest, most old-fashioned screenplay in contention, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. Mark Harris would have it that the movies changed utterly, and presumably for the better, since the birth of the New Hollywood. Think so?
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