Word: schisgal
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...perhaps predictable. Ever since he finished Kramer vs. Kramer in 1979, Hoffman had been looking for a script that would permit him to explore the questions "What makes someone a man? What makes someone a woman?" He batted the theme around with a friend, Playwright Murray Schisgal. By the time he and Pollack (who followed Dick Richards and Hal Ashby as director) joined forces, he had acquired not only various draft scripts but a ferocious proprietary interest in the film. Says Hoffman: "The great scripts don't drop out of the sky; you have to invent them...
...hard to say where all these inventions, and the wit with which they are stated, first appeared. There was an original script by Don McGuire (Bad Day at Black Rock), rewritten by Robert Kaufman (Love at First Bite). Thereafter, Schisgal and Larry Gelbart, of Movie Movie and TV's MASH, each did new versions. A large contribution was made by Elaine May and smaller ones by Valerie Curtin (Inside Moves), Barry Levinson (Diner) and Robert Garland (The Electric Horseman). After arbitration, screen credit finally went to Gelbart and Schisgal. But it was Pollack who "sat in a room with...
...late mother, who died a few months before filming began, in the nurturing side of Dorothy. Some of her ferocious integrity as an actress comes from a friend of Hoffman's, Actress Polly Holliday (Flo on TV's Alice until 1980). He had directed her in a Schisgal play, All over Town. When he and Pollack decided that Dorothy could have a Southern accent like Holliday's, Hoffman got in touch with her and she coached him. Says Hoffman: "It wasn't just the dialect, it was this other thing she has: she is a very...