I had been studying acting in New York for many, many years, waiting on tables. [I'd gotten] some character work — finally! — Off Off Broadway, and then Off Broadway, and then was getting [stage] awards for the first time in my life. You know, Best Actor Obie. And that was it. I was content when The Graduate came along. I didn't need it. If [I could] do Off Broadway, that was it, man. Live on West End Avenue, nice apartment.The pay [on the movie] was $650 per week. No per diem. I had to pay for the hotel where I stayed in L.A. I remember $3,000 went in the bank. I went on unemployment, $45 a week, while they were cutting me into a star. I was still auditioning. Still the unknown, loser actor. I didn't do a movie for almost a year after that. I had ambivalence about being a ''star.''
MIDNIGHT COWBOY 1969
Opposite Jon Voight as a cockeyed Texan wannabe hustler beaten down by Manhattan's mean streets, Hoffman broke audiences' hearts as crippled Times Square drifter Enrico Salvatore Rizzo — a.k.a. Ratso, the saddest gay closet case in movie history. Despite an X rating, the film won Best Picture, and brought Hoffman Best Actor nomination No. 2.
After The Graduate, I read more than a few times that Mike Nichols [must have] just found this schlumpf. Rex Reed, I believe, called me a cretin in print. ''Where did he get this cretin?'' Adenoidal, big nose, beak nose. Much of [that] stuff I always thought was anti-Semitism in disguise. It almost sounded like phrases out of Nazi Germany. And I remember feeling, Oh, so the perception is I haven't paid my dues, I haven't struggled, I haven't learned my craft for 10 years. After that, there was this need to constantly prove that I was an actor. And Midnight Cowboy, there was a revenge in there. You want cretin? I'll give you cretin. I'll show the bastards.
LITTLE BIG MAN 1970
Director Arthur Penn's Wild West picaresque, adapted from Thomas Berger's novel, had Hoffman age from a young teen orphan to a middle-aged witness of Native American massacres to a grizzled 121-year-old. An indie in a studio-dominated era, the picture scored a supporting nomination for Chief Dan George as Old Lodge Skins, but not for Hoffman as Jack Crabb, nor Faye Dunaway as Mrs. Pendrake, a Bible-thumper who gives Hoffman's character a hypocritically erotic bathtub scrubbing.
When I'm dared, I do a dare. It's a compulsive need. And the crew dared me to take my jock off [for the bath scene] after the second or third take. So when Faye put her hand in the water, she'd be hittin' the goods. I think that's the take that's in the movie....We shot [the Little Big Horn scenes] in Billings, Mont. And they'd hire local guys to be the soldiers under Custer and Crow Indians, who I think were still on a reservation, to be the Indians. There was a lot of prejudice and animosity there. So once these people were fighting each other during a take, there was some bad s--- going on. There were rubber tips taken off arrows. One stuntman ended his career, because it cost him an eye.
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