Word: dustin
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...Warner Bros, spent $450,000 to recreate it, right down to the wastebaskets, on their Burbank, Calif., lot; then they had real Washington Post trash shipped west to fill those baskets. The stars were pretty stunning too. Bradlee's young charges were transformed into gorgeous Robert Redford and sexy Dustin Hoffman. Jason Robards, playing Bradlee, just about ran away with the movie. Robards played him larger-than-life, carrying the repute of his paper and the fate of the nation on his well-tailored shoulders with almost too much in the way of casual bravado; but then Bradlee plays himself...
Goldman's script did serve one important function. It was good enough to use as a recruiting device for Dustin Hoffman, whom Redford wanted to play Bernstein. Says Hoffman: "I was amazed. Goldman had cracked the narrative problem. I had doubts until then that you could make a movie out of the book." He saw that problems remained, especially in the characterizations. But he signed on, provided that he could share director approval with Redford...
Much as he respected Hoffman ("One of the joys of the movie was working with Dustin; he has one of the most wonderful acting minds I've ever worked with"), he disagreed with him about the advisability of fictionalizing the film. He and Pakula were convinced that documentary-like realism was essential to the picture, that they had to develop what Pakula calls "an immediacy, a sense of being there," that would replace conventional melodrama as a means of sustaining interest. He also felt this attention to workaday detail would protect against the picture's "overwhelming potential for pretentiousness...
...took more grief about Harvard in college leagues." Instead there are the skeptical reactions he has to face about baseball from the guardians of his old life. His parents have "gotten used to it," he says, but sometimes the old men sidle up to him like he was Dustin Hoffman, whispering, "plastics, plastics--there's a great future in plastics...
...Graduate will be filling Science Center B with Dustin Hoffman fans for a delightful time-trip through the sixties. Where have you gone Joe DiMaggio? Hoffman is brilliant as the shy, bumbling, confused Benjamin who finds himself involved with a married woman, and then (not much of a surprise, considering Katherine Ross is in the film) with her daughter. My favorite scene is Hoffman floating at the bottom of his parents' swimming pool in his brand new scuba outfit contemplating the absurdity of life. Or something like that. The ending is straight out of storybook land, but with Simon...