Word: scripted
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...course, The Royal Family moments of emotional excess aren't its best, and the Loeb cast is strong precisely where the script is strong: situational comedy. The first act drags a bit, but both second and third build to those frenzied, crowded scenes into which Kaufman is always tossing one more character. Both Cantor and Sam Samuels as Wolfe, the family's agent, have a knack for comic timing, and Wilber drops off-hand insults like time-bombs. Jeffrey Horwitz and Mario Aieta, as the men in the actress's lives who are forever barred from understanding their calling, receive...
Director Garry could have taken some of the burden of enlivening slow patches of the script off the actors' hands, but chose not to, using dull blocking and an entirely static--though lavish--set. The only evidence of a director's hand in the production at all, in fact, is the presence of a pianist (Jeffrey Halpern) on stage before each act, playing show tunes and Gershwin with flair but without much point...
...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...
...They met in 1966 when Hoffman, then an unknown, was doing three of Schisgal's one-act plays in Stockbridge, Mass. The author liked to take early-morning walks, and every day when he left his hotel, Hoffman would be waiting for him. "He'd have the script and a million questions to ask: 'What's your thought here? What's your thought there?' I had never worked with an actor like that. He is eternally dissatisfied with what he has achieved. Right now he isn't negative about Kramer. But I have...
Instead of being given a script, Justin was told by Hoffman what a scene was about and then allowed to say whatever he wanted. "When kids learn lines," says Hoffman, "you can't cut them with an ice pick." Camera angles were kept simple so that father and son, who were expected to improvise, could move wherever they wanted. In one early scene Justin, who was supposed to be rebelling against Hoffman, showed his defiance by eating a bowl of ice cream after he had been told not to. But Justin, suddenly the improvisational actor, turned the battle into...