Word: two
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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This is accomplished in a series of extraordinary scenes between Hoffman and Henry that form the entire middle stretch of the movie and well illustrate F. Scott Fitzgerald's dictum that "action is character." Together these two actors-one a movie star, the other a little boy with no previous acting experience-create what is probably the most credible father-son relationship ever seen in an American film. As Ted and Billy slowly come to terms with each other, there is none of the cuteness or sentimentality that so often clots movies about parents and children...
Truffaut was the director whom Producer Stanley Jaffe first hired for Kramer. When scheduling conflicts developed, Jaffe turned to Benton. Though he has directed only two previous movies, Bad Company (an antic western with Jeff Bridges) and The Late Show (an eccentric detective story with Art Carney and Lily Tomlin), Benton's career stretches back over a decade. With his longtime writing partner, David Newman, he co-authored the most influential film script of the '60s, Bonnie and Clyde, which, like Kramer, leavened conflict with smart wit. He and Newman also collaborated on such diverse '70s movies...
...trip to stardom began, though he did not know it at the time, about two years ago, when Kramer vs. Kramer scouts started looking at nonprofessionals to play the role of Billy, who is really the film's central character. They went to Justin's school in Rye, a suburb of New York City, to look around, and that night his principal called to say they wanted him to audition in Manhattan. "I wasn't so excited," he says, "but I went anyway. There were 200 of us in the first tryout. Mr. Benton called each...
...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...
Life has rarely failed to give Meryl, who is 30, what she wants. "Mine is a Cinderella story all right," she says with a trace of self-mockery. She and her two younger brothers grew up in the leafy and comfortable exurbs of central New Jersey; her father was a pharmaceutical-company executive and her mother a graphic artist who did most of her work at home. "I didn't have what you'd call a happy childhood," insists Streep. "For one thing, I thought no one liked me . . . Actually, I'd say I had pretty good...