Pictures at a Revolution by Mark Harris

Tony Award. But when Turman sent him The Graduate and asked him to consider directing it, “I was really responding to the funny nervousness of his performances with Elaine May—I felt some connection there. When you read The Graduate , you feel the way I felt watching him: You laugh, but you’re nervous.” 11
    Nichols laughed when he read The Graduate and wasn’t nervous at all. He had loved The Catcher in the Rye , 12 and he saw Holden Caulfield’s literary descendant, slightly more grown-up but still utterly baffled, in the pages of Webb’s story. “I thought it was a good, old gag,” he says. “Kid, older lady—that’s how everybody got started back then. It was a good subject. And I thought, I know how to do this.” 13
    A few nights after he got the book, Nichols told Turman he was interested. The project and Nichols’s involvement were announced in The New York Times on March 15. Soon after, the two men had lunch at the Plaza Hotel with William Hanley, who had completed a draft of the screenplay for The Graduate , been paid his $500, and was now moving on to considerably more lucrative work on action films. “I thought the book was terrific,” says Hanley. “Charles Webb’s dialogue couldn’t be improved on—it was pointless to try. All the script needed was structure.” At the lunch, Nichols expressed his desire for changes in a new draft. “I didn’t want to make them,” says Hanley. “I just knew it wasn’t going to work with us, and I said to Larry Turman, ‘I’m gonna back out—you need Mike Nichols more than you need me.’” 14
    With Hanley gone, Turman needed a new screenwriter who would be willing to take Nichols’s notes, but Nichols was in no rush to find one. He was flooded with offers to direct plays; moreover, he told Turman, The Graduate would have to be his second movie, not his first. Nichols had no desire to make a film version of Barefoot in the Park or of anything else he went on to direct in New York. “I couldn’t! What would I do? They were dead for me,” he says of the first four plays he staged. “There was nothing to discover. Unless I can be terrified and mystified and feel, ‘I’m lost, this is the one that’s going to destroy me, how could I have made this mistake’…that terror is the life of it.” 15 But he did think that adapting a play to the screen might make for a logical first footstep into Hollywood, and he’d found a property he liked: The Public Eye , one-half of a pair of one-acts called The Private Ear and the Public Eye by British playwright Peter Shaffer that had opened on Broadway two weeks before Barefoot in the Park. Universal had announced that Nichols would direct the film, and Shaffer had recently begun to work with him on a screenplay for the three-character piece. 16 That bought Turman a little time, not only to get a viable screenplay drafted, but to use Nichols’s name to lure a studio. Given all the buzz around his director, The Graduate ’s future looked bright.
    Over the next six months, every studio in Hollywood turned the film down.
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    On April 13, 1964, Hollywood took its annual Monday off for the Academy Awards. There had been no frantic winter campaigning season; the Oscars, though they drew a reliably huge television audience, were in some years a take-it-or-leave-it affair, even for the nominees. This spring, studio traditionalists were in a particularly glum mood: Twelve of the twenty acting nominees were from the United Kingdom or Europe; one company, United Artists, had dominated the major nominations, just as it had done for the last several years; and it was becoming apparent that, for the first time since the 1940s, the Best Picture Oscar was not going to go to an American picture—the winner would be Tony Richardson’s raunchy smash Tom Jones.
    â€œWonder why we