Word: sons
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...when Joanna finally reappears, it is hard to accept her. The woman who earned affection when she courageously walked out of her imprisoning marriage is now a villain: she wants to take Billy away from the father who sacrificed his work and restructured his life for his son. But again, Benton challenges the audience rather than let it leap to a pat moral position. As Joanna undergoes cross-examination at the custody trial, her virtues ever so slowly reappear. Because she has now regained her selfesteem, she seems better able than before to be a good mother to her child...
...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...
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...
...character of Joanna Kramer from a virtually no-win plot: bad enough that a mother should leave her young child and then disappear from the film for nearly an hour; worse still that she come back and try to break up the new life that her husband and son have painfully built. "If Joanna is a villain," Streep recently told TIME'S Elaine Dutka, "if there's a white hat-black hat situation, that doesn't make for an interesting courtroom scene, which I consider the climax of the film." Joanna's testimony at the custody...
During one, a Central Park production of Measure for Measure, she worked with John Cazale, a respected actor known to film audiences for his role as the cowardly son Fredo in The Godfather and The Godfather, Part II. They fell in love and began living together. Actor Joe Grifasi, a friend of both at the time, says: "Meryl admired his ability to cut through the crap and focus on the essentials. He was very careful to maintain his equilibrium." They spent as much time together as their careers permitted; the summer of 1977 found them in Steubenville, Ohio, working...