Improv Nation

by Sam Wasson

Hoffman returned to his place beside Ross, Nichols took some more film, and at last, released the actors (“I was so happy it was over,” Hoffman remembered). Before he could flee, Hoffman approached the crew for a round of handshakes. Removing a fist from his pocket, he accidently scattered a cluster of New York subway tokens on the floor. The prop man bent over to pick them up. “Hey, kid,” he said. “You’re going to need these.”

  Hoffman returned to New York, to Eh? “Don’t worry,” he told a couple of actors in their shared dressing room. “I’m not going to get this one.” Meaning, they wouldn’t be closing.

  A few days later, Hoffman was instructed to call Mike Nichols at nine o’clock on a Sunday morning.

  “Hello?” It was Nichols. He didn’t sound happy. He sounded like he had just woken up.

  “Hi. Mr. Nichols, this is Dustin Hoffman. I was supposed to call? At nine o’clock?”

  “No, nine o’clock L.A. time.”

  “I’m sorry—”

  “No, no. It’s all right.”

  For what seemed like an eternity, neither spoke. “Well,” Nichols said, “you got it.”

  “Oh.”

  “You don’t sound very excited.”

  “No, it’s just—I just thought—”

  What he thought was that Nichols had cast him because he had seen everyone else and was out of options.

  Bernie Sahlins knew he’d made a mistake. From New York, he and Sheldon Patinkin had brought J. J. Barry and Martin Harvey Friedberg and Burt Heyman—stand-up comedians—to Second City. “We were losing big to television,” Patinkin said, “and needed laughs.” Burly, urban tough guys, the new crop earned their keep in prostate and gay jokes, and J. J. Barry made a convincing Mayor Daley, but their common denominatorism shifted Second City’s center of gravity one notch farther from the intellectual domain Sahlins had once so zealously guarded. Still, these were desperate times. Many years of poor box office had backed Second City, clumsily, into vaudeville shtick.

  “I want everyone to bring in some jokes,” he ordered the company one evening. “We’ll add the satire later.”

  The next day, when asked to deliver, Friedberg dropped his pants and made a fart sound. “You wanted a joke, Bernie? That’s my joke.”

  The first time social worker Gary Austin saw an improvisation, in the spring of 1968, he was sitting a few seats down from Carl Reiner in the front row of the Tiffany, a converted movie theater off Sunset Boulevard. It was the Committee’s opening night in Los Angeles, and Austin thought he’d like to see his pal, Committee member Christopher Ross, do his thing. Reiner’s son Rob—a veteran of his own improv group, the Session, which he’d formed as a student at UCLA—was onstage, along with an ensemble that included Peter Bonerz, Nancy Fish, Jessica Myerson, Howard Hesseman, Carl Gottlieb, Chris Ross, Mel Stewart, Garry Goodrow, and Lewis Arquette. For Austin, their work, reverberant with that late 1960s sound of indignation and hope, and lifted high on the communal spirit of the Harold, shot an arrow through his heart. This wasn’t ha-ha sketch comedy; this was oh-my, the theater of real life.

  Backstage after the show, Austin approached John Brent. “How do I do this? Is there a workshop?”

  “Yes. Every Saturday for one dollar.”

  Austin went habitually, joining as many as fifty other nonprofessional improvisers, “anyone off the street,” Austin said, for workshops, each led by a different Committee member.

  Del appeared to them a six-foot brick of black—black pants, black work boots, black turtleneck, glasses, and slicked black hair pulled to a ponytail—sucking down whole cigarettes, it seemed, in single draws.

  “Hello, my name is Del Close,” he boomed over them as he took the stage. “If any one of you thinks you can run this workshop better than me, then I want you to come up and lead it and I’ll be your student. If I think I’m a better teacher than you, I’ll get back up, and I’ll continue to run the workshop. If you break one of my rules, and it works, I will applaud you. If you break one of my rules and it doesn’t work, I’ll castigate you. Let’s begin.”

  Thus commenced Del’s prescription of trust games, verbal abuse, chair throwing (inherited from Paul Sills), brilliant insight, and miscellaneous acts of violence, alternately engineered to prompt spontaneous responses and cause pain. Both, to Del, qualified as shows of truth, and therefore, art. There was talk of Del and improvisation’s supple days in the St. Louis Compass. “You know that when Del and Elaine lived together,” Austin was told, “she decided to become a dog for a number of days. She decided to do everything a dog does, so she crawled on all fours, she ate dog food, she drank out of water bowls, she shit on the floor and barked.”

  From those workshops, Close handpicked a company, which included Austin, to play the Tiffany on Monday nights, the Committee’s night off. Soon Austin was inducted into the main company and shuttled up to San Francisco, where he learned, by the example of improvisers Howard Hesseman and David Ogden Stiers, to divest the ego of wants and simply “not give a fuck.” “If [Johnny] Carson was in the audience,” Austin said, “no one [in the Committee] cared. People would walk out of the audience on a Saturday night going, ‘Fuck you! We paid money for this shit!’ and no one onstage gave a shit.” It was their composure onstage, their faces. In the storm of failure, Austin could see that they, by their own estimation, hadn’t failed at all. “One time,” Austin said, “I was with the Committee and we were flying somewhere and it got turbulent. It freaked me out. What I did to calm myself was I looked at the faces of the Committee sitting in their seats and saw they weren’t scared and there went my fear. Gone.” Austin was hooked.

  Nichols originally conceived of The Graduate as partially improvised, and did in fact have the actors improvise on a Paramount sound stage for three weeks—an unusually long time for a Hollywood movie—inventing and playing with character backstories, including scenes from childhood, family get-togethers, and even an off-script affair between Benjamin’s father and Mrs. Robinson. But by the end of the rehearsal period  Nichols’s company was so certain of their every move, Hoffman joked that they could take The Graduate on the road. Nichols had allowed them to play their way to there, to certainty.

  “Benjamin’s twenty-one years old,” he said to Hoffman early in rehearsal. “Do you think he’s a virgin?”

  “If I had to guess, I’d say no. But I don’t think he’s had anything that was meaningful, like a girlfriend or anything.”

  “I agree. But I think with Mrs. Robinson he’s as close to a virgin as you can get.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Well, I don’t think he ever fucked his mother before.”

  That became Hoffman’s starting point. The tension around sleeping with his mother’s friend, a woman he’d known since he was a kid. Hoffman could run with Benjamin from there.

  Using Nichols’s suggestion, Hoffman and Anne Bancroft ran the scene. Then Nichols called Hoffman over for a private conference. “Did you have any movie stars that you looked up to when you were a kid?”

  “I don’t think so. But I remember I saw The Yearling and I wanted Gregory Peck to be my father.”

  “Aside from that.”

  “Yeah. My brother was the only sibling I had. He was older, but he had little to do with me so any time he paid me any attention at all, I took it all in. At times, the phone would ring and some girl on the other end would say, ‘Is this Ronny?’ And I could imitate him. Yeah, he was my hero.”

  “Did you ever see him when he was uptight?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What was he like?”

  “I remember he would sort of stop breathing and exhale and . . .” Hoffman squeaked nervously. Nichols laughed at that; he loved it. Hoffman didn’t know Nichols had made almost the same squeak playing terrified, put-upon young men in his improvisations with Elaine. (“I found out later,” Hoffman would say, “that I was becoming a sort of alter ego for Mike. I don’t think either of us knew it was happening.”)

  “Let’s do the scene
again,” Nichols suggested. “Why don’t you do it as if you’re your older brother?”

  They did. Then:

  “Let’s improvise the scene now. Don’t be tied to the words. Just try to do the essence of your brother.”

  When they had played First Line/Last Line in the style of whatever literary figure the audience had suggested, Nichols and May used the author’s essence as a shortcut to perceived notions, to improvise, seemingly, in their language and style. To them, Ibsen was as much a feeling as he was a writer.

  “Remember the first time you touched a girl’s breast?” Nichols asked.

  “Yeah, I do.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “I used to play ‘Bumble Boogie’ when we had assemblies in junior high school. I didn’t know what else to play. And I was waiting in the basement for my turn to go on and this girl arrived and was sitting there and she was in blackface because she was going to do ‘Mammy.’ We were sitting there a long time and for some reason I had enough courage to put my arm around her and then put my hand on her breast, but I couldn’t get too close because she was in blackface.”

  “Let’s do the scene again, and this time, take Mrs. Robinson’s sweater off. And I want you to hold her breast.”

  “When?”

  “Whenever you want.”

  They tried it. As directed, Hoffman removed Anne Bancroft’s sweater. Hardly turned on, her attention snapped to a stain in the sweater. She rubbed at it. Hoffman studied her a moment before landing a hand on her breast. Utterly invested in the cleaning, Bancroft proceeded as if he wasn’t even touching her. “I thought this was so hilarious,” Hoffman said, “that I started to laugh.” To shield himself from Nichols, Hoffman simply turned and walked to the wall, certain that he was going to be fired for breaking up in the middle of the scene. But Nichols was laughing. He put the improvisation, as is, into the movie.

  “That rehearsal was a magical time for me,” Hoffman reflected. “It was the best rehearsal time of my life.”

  But once shooting began, the air of fun and discovery ended. Nichols, exuding worry, grew tense, and Hoffman, who still wasn’t convinced he was right for the part, could sense why. “It’s not that I felt the acting was so bad,” he explained. “It’s just that it was such a bold piece of casting. Benjamin Braddock, this little five-foot-six Jewboy? Nobody could understand it.”

  Halfway through production, the director Ulu Grosbard, a friend of Hoffman’s, mentioned he had planned a lunch with Nichols.

  “You gotta ask Mike if he thinks he made a mistake,” Hoffman pleaded. “I just gotta know if I’m crazy. Please.”

  Grosbard agreed, and after lunch, returned to Dustin with the verdict. “You have to promise not to say a word to anybody.”

  “Of course not.”

  “He thinks he made a mistake.”

  “Now listen,” Nichols barked at Hoffman and Katharine Ross at the end of an exhausting day, “you’re going to get on that bus and you’re going to laugh, because we’ve stopped traffic for twenty blocks and I can’t do this over and over, so get on there and laugh.”

  It was to be the last shot of the film: Benjamin and Elaine, having fled the church, hail down a passing school bus and ride off, presumably, to the rest of their happy ending.

  On the day, Hoffman and Ross did as they were told. Exhausted, they ran onto the bus, squeezed out a laugh, and waited for the director to yell cut. But for some reason, he didn’t know why, Nichols didn’t yell cut.

  It wasn’t until he reviewed the footage in dailies that he fell in love with it, with the air of distant preoccupation that had creeped into the actors’ expressions. It was one hell of an ending. “That’s usually the best work,” Nichols said, “when you’re not exactly sure neither what you’re going to do nor why you did what you did.”

  He was working from his unconscious, like a Compass player. The scenes of Benjamin and Mrs. Robinson in particular borrow the rhythm and pathology of Nichols and May. (One actually lifts the cigarette gag from “Teenagers.”) Indeed, the film is the very first direct descendant of Compass naturalism. The Graduate offers few “jokes,” never panders to situational humor or embellishes for maximum impact. In keeping with Nichols’s work on Barefoot in the Park, the film’s humor emerges at its own pace, the pace of real life, and from character. “I got my feeling for people from working in comedy,” Nichols said of his Compass years. “I approach comedy as if it were reality.”

  The Graduate was so good because it was so real. In the spring of 1968, in the middle of the student revolt at Columbia University, members of the Students for a Democratic Society arranged their protest so that every young revolutionary, by turns, had their chance to sneak out of the president’s office, which they were occupying, to go see the movie. Benjamin, in slothful protest of his parents’ plastic generation, embodied their dissatisfaction as none before him had, but it was his clumsily Jewish, normal-guy package that conveyed their alienation most powerfully.

  In anger and solidarity, Alan Myerson listened to Howard Hesseman’s tale of the night before, January 17, 1968. He and Committee members Garry Goodrow and Mimi Fariña were watching Johnson’s State of the Union Address, surging with rage at the president’s hypocritical profession of peace advocacy concomitant with sustained force in Vietnam, and his similar pledge to defend the home front with “more vigorous enforcement of all of our drug laws by increasing the number of federal drug and narcotics control officials by more than—” which so infuriated Hesseman, he leapt up and would have kicked in the television, if Goodrow and Fariña had not restrained him.

  Hesseman, in that moment, was acting for millions, not only in San Francisco, but Chicago, Hollywood, New York, wherever impotent rage was breaking from the medium cool of nonviolence. He had improvised himself into a powerful metaphor, and it needed to be shared. “We’re going to do what happened last night,” Myerson told him. With the audience. Tonight. “Because this is why we are improvisers,” he said. Activism—another word for audience participation—was the sole province of their theater. Action was up to them.

  Myerson outlined a rough scenario—a longform cousin of the Harold—beginning with Hesseman, Goodrow, and Fariña watching TV as they had the night before. But Hesseman and the group resisted. No, they said, they would not perform it.

  “If you don’t do this scene,” Myerson announced, “I’m out of here. I’m done.”

  Autocracy was not his style—giving decrees ran counter to their mission of personal authenticity—but he meant it. “We had to do this,” Myerson said. “I knew it with every part of me.”

  The Committee agreed, “under duress,” Myerson said, to improvise the scene that night. It would constitute the entire second act.

  When the moment came, the improvisation began, per Myerson’s suggestion, exactly as Hesseman had described the incident, with the trio watching Johnson, played by improviser Peter Bonerz in a cowboy hat. Immediately, the audience recognized the night before; they were, emotionally, on both sides of the stage now, through the looking glass, and looking back. In that fusion, the Committee became a community, and over the loudspeaker, improviser Jim Cranna read the salient parts of Johnson’s speech, as Bonerz, gesticulating “on TV,” grew adamant, and Hesseman, inflamed, ran over to kick his face in, and Goodrow and Fariña restrained him, as scripted. What followed, Myerson later said, “was the apex of improvisational theater in my experience.”

  Hesseman freed himself from his friends and mimed turning off the TV. But Bonerz did not turn off. He continued to gesticulate, and in response, Cranna, into the loudspeaker, said, and kept saying, like a mantra, “You can’t turn me off; I’m you. You can’t turn me off; I’m you. You can’t turn me off; I’m you . . .”

  Powerless, Hesseman turned his energy to the audience, and over the chanting, spoke. “This is actually what happened last night. I went to kick in the television and Garry and Mimi had to stop me. And standing here, part of me is deeply ashamed becau
se I don’t believe in violence. I grew up in a violent household. This isn’t what I want to be. But do you know something? When I went to kick that thing in, I felt good. You get me? Anger felt good”—the room warmed—“I suspect you are all angry at Johnson for something.” Throughout, the mantra persisted—you can’t turn me off; I’m you—and in musical alignment with Hesseman’s address, as Bill Mathieu, in workshops, had rehearsed them. Everyone synchronized. Every dissonance in rhythm.

  “It’s fun to hate,” Hesseman continued. You can’t turn me off; I’m you . . . “If you get really angry, I bet it will feel good.” You can’t turn me off . . . On piano, Mathieu joined in with ugly, atonal mud, and all grew louder together.

  Myerson watched from the back of the house as Hesseman, letting loose, exhorted the audience to action. “It’s fun to hate . . .” he repeated. Some gave it back. “It’s fun to hate . . .” It spread. The full Committee took the stage to form a line behind Hesseman and picked up the refrain. “It’s fun to hate,” they chanted. You can’t turn me off; I’m you. “It’s fun to hate . . .” You can’t . . . “It’s fun . . .” As Hesseman got hotter, the audience became citizens, shouting the refrain back at him, with him, and momentum built. “It’s fun to hate! It’s fun to hate!” Then Hesseman released himself: “Let’s kill this fucker!” he shouted, and the full audience leapt up from their tables, spewing filth and heartache out of their guts and onto the stage. Chairs were thrown.

  Before it went too far, Myerson, offstage, caught Hesseman’s attention and gave him the signal—a sign to change direction. “Okay,” Hesseman said, and the room froze. “Okay, that didn’t work.” The hate chanting stopped, but You can’t turn me off held. “We can’t kill him,” Hesseman continued. “Let’s see if we can love him to death.”

  Mathieu first: the music turned joyous.

  The improvisers embraced one another, in individuals and groups. You can’t turn me off; I’m you. Real lovers kissed, friends held one another, “and because authenticity is contagious,” Myerson said, the audience caught the feeling, and improvisers stepped off the stage and flooded the house and the Committee detonated in love—You can’t turn me off; I’m you. You can’t turn me off; I’m you—but the room did not listen; they had disappeared from Johnson into each other. Myerson and Hesseman too. Across the room, they caught eyes, Myerson gave the signal again, and on his cue, another change, this time: total blackout. “It was like cold water,” Myerson remembered. Exact and sudden stillness. No sound. No movement.