Word: pakula
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Moving to the big screen, Mulligan found a happy partnership with producer Alan J. Pakula. Together they made seven films, most of them centered on young people with the will to rebel but not always the means. In Love with the Proper Stranger (1964), Natalie Wood is an Italian Catholic shopgirl who becomes pregnant in the one-night-stand immaculate conceptions familiar in movies of the '60s (and today; see Knocked Up). But since she had the good fortune to be impregnated by McQueen, true love is assured. The plot is Hollywood hokum with a patina of New Yawk grit...
...Once Mulligan and Pakula found a congenial performer, they wanted to do it again. They reunited with McQueen for a Horton Foote drama, Baby the Rain Must Fall (1965), about an ex-con singer who has problems staying out of criminal or domestic trouble. And in Inside Daisy Clover (1966), Wood is a thornier soul: a '30s waif who becomes a movie star. (The young man in her grim life was played by Robert Redford, again at the beginning of a big career...
...Pakula-Mulligan tandem's biggest hit was the 1967 Up the Down Staircase, based on the Bel Kaufman book about a New York City teacher's attempts to connect with her hard-hided students. The movie landed its leading lady, Sandy Dennis, on the covers of TIME and Newsweek the same week. After a Gregory Peck Western, The Stalking Moon, the producer-director team split. As it happened, Pakula became a director with a broader, deeper palette and somewhat greater success than his old partner (Klute, The Parallax View, All the President's Men, Sophie's Choice, Presumed Innocent...
...Universal Pictures, the sponsor of To Kill a Mockingbird, wanted the role of Atticus to go to its top star, Rock Hudson, whom Mulligan had directed the year before in the romantic comedy Come September. But Pakula and Mulligan held out for Peck, the screen's flintiest rock of movie rectitude. Lee was in enthusiastic agreement, for she had based Atticus on her lawyer father and saw a kinship between him and Peck. On the first day of shooting she told him, "Gregory, you've got a little potbelly just like my daddy," and Peck replied, "Harper, that's great...
...give him a Robert Mitchum air, which was surely not something we would now impute to Felt. But Hal Holbrook gives a gnomic, cranky performance as Deep Throat. (Shouldn't there be an Oscar for best performance by an actor you can barely see?) And director Alan Pakula added menacing off-camera sound effects to Holbrook's scenes--a mysterious bump, the sudden squeal of tires as a car departs. Finally, chillingly, Holbrook tells the reporter that his investigative zeal is now placing his life in danger...