Late in the shoot, Hoffman was ragged, wiped out, short-tempered. ''It was rough going,'' he says. ''It was long and it got much longer. I don't think I ever went out. I came home, and I'd study for the next day.'' His misery was manifest when he walked onto the set.
''What's the matter?'' said Nichols, taking him aside.
''I'm tired,'' said Hoffman.
Nichols didn't say anything for a moment, then replied in a quiet, explanatory tone. ''Well,'' he said, ''this is the only chance you're ever going to have to do this scene for the rest of your life. When you look back on it, do you really want to say, 'I was tired'?''
Nichols might as well have been talking to himself. ''There's no question I was in the grip of some thing,'' he says. ''Part of me knew what I was doing in terms of the outsider and so forth, but another part of me, a part that I had no inkling of, must have known I would never get material so suited to me again. Without even knowing I knew.''
That fall, Joe Levine started to screen the movie for his friends and people in the industry. The first showings didn't go well. ''I particularly remember a screening at the Directors Guild,'' says Nichols. ''I was sitting behind Elia Kazan, who may have been with Budd Schulberg. Kazan was the reason I was in theater — I saw Streetcar when I was in high school, and I never got over it. And I sat behind them, and there was a lot of rolling of eyes. He was obviously not liking it. I was so sad.''
For the first time, Nichols's calmness and composure began to fail him a little, as the single biggest gamble he had taken in casting the movie seemed to have fallen flat. ''The first of the people who saw the movie would go up to him,'' says Henry, ''and say, 'Oh, it's wonderful, Mike, so, uh, beautiful to look at — it's just a shame about the boy.' They had only derogatory things to say about Hoffman.''
Hoffman hadn't been invited to any of the early private screenings of The Graduate. After the movie wrapped, he had returned to New York City and the cocoon of his former anonymous life. He survived for a few months on the $4,000 he had saved while working on the picture and then registered for unemployment, lining up on East 13th Street every week to pick up a $55 check while he looked for acting jobs. He had little idea what to expect when he heard the movie had been booked into a theater on East 86th Street for its first sneak preview before a paying New York audience. He and his wife-to-be, Anne Byrne, went in just before the film started and sat in the back of the balcony.
The house wasn't sold out, but it was pretty full. ''I had no sense of whether it was working or not,'' says Hoffman. ''I think there are laughs, but mainly I'm looking at scenes and thinking, 'I should have done that better.' And then it gets to the church, and what got me out of my self-flagellation is that I looked down, over the edge of the balcony, and these kids were on their feet, cheering for me to get away. They had gone wild.''
But whatever confidence the reaction at the sneak preview might have instilled in Hoffman was erased by the movie's New York premiere. ''That night, the suits, the tuxedos, I can't remember a single laugh,'' says Hoffman. ''It was disastrous. I saw a lot of Levine's friends there, and they all looked like, what is he doing on the screen? It should be Redford!''
Excerpted from PICTURES AT A REVOLUTION, by Mark Harris. Published by the Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Copyright 2008 by Mark Harris.
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