Word: firstness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...last two movies, Straight Time and Agatha, Hoffman had bitter rights with the studio, First Artists, over the script and editing. In Kramer vs. Kramer, he made certain that he would be involved from the beginning. To find the right boy to play his son, he sat in on a hundred or more casting sessions, then did video tapes with 40 finalists before choosing Justin Henry. Together with Benton and Producer Stanley Jaffe, he worked and worried for months over the character of Kramer, trying to get him exactly right. "I've never seen anybody come to the party...
...spent a lot of time on this." When his own child Jenna was born, Hoffman did what little he could to make up for such obvious discrimination. He was there, helping, and he had a photographer stationed outside the delivery-room door, ready to capture the first moments of new life...
Director Robert Benton recalls her work that day on the set with amazement: "We must have shot that scene from seven in the morning until six at night, over and over again. First in closeup, then a medium shot, finally a long one. Later in the day, we shot only Dustin reacting to her on the stand. During this last take, all 30 people in the room were facing Dustin. I happened to be watching Meryl, as well. She had the same intensity as she had when she first did the scene...
...prettiest thing about Meryl in those days was her singing voice. A promising coloratura soprano, she began taking lessons in New York with Voice Coach Estelle Liebling. "The first opera I went to," recalls Meryl, "was Douglas Moore's The Wings of the Dove, with Beverly Sills. It was incredible to see her onstage. Until then, I thought she was just a nice lady who had the lesson before me." One morning Meryl got up, squashed her glasses underfoot, put peroxide and lemon juice on her hair and set out to be "the perfect Seventeen magazine knockout." Boys quickly...
Meryl had auditioned in New York occasionally while still at Yale. When she moved to the city, directors scrambled to use her. Her first professional appearance was at Lincoln Center in Joseph Papp's production of Trelawney of the Wells. Next she played in a program of two one-act plays and did the seemingly impossible: she became both a slovenly, bovine Southerner in Tennessee Williams' Twenty Seven Wagons Full of Cotton and a thin, sexy secretary in Arthur Miller's A Memory of Two Mondays. Says Director Arvin Brown: "The audience didn't realize that...