by Dave Itzkoff
But other reviewers were aghast at what they felt was Robin’s lack of respect for Beckett’s masterpiece. In the New York Times, Frank Rich chided Robin for his “frenetic horseplay”: “A brilliant mimic, the actor never runs out of wacky voices, but where is his own voice?” he asked. “As Good Morning, Vietnam seemed to evaporate whenever Mr. Williams had to forsake comedy routines for love scenes, so his Estragon vanishes whenever he has to convey genuine panic or loneliness or despair. There’s more humor (and heartfelt agony) in the famous Richard Avedon photographic portrait of Bert Lahr’s Estragon than there is in a whole night of Mr. Williams’s sweaty efforts to keep us in stitches.”
Steve Martin felt that theatergoers lost their appetite for the production after a series of negative critiques were published. “Before the show opened, during previews, everybody loved us. Ate us up. Cheers, bravos, the whole bit,” Martin said. “Then as soon as the reviews came out, the audiences started sitting there without reacting—no laughter—nothing. It was chilling.
“I thought I had had every kind of experience on stage,” he added, “but this was sheer torture. And yes, you might say we hadn’t expected this. To put it mildly, we were surprised.”
Waiting for Godot played its final performance on November 27, after just six weeks, and Robin regarded the production as an instructive failure. “We were a little shell-shocked when we were finished,” he said. “What was that? Very strange sensation.” Describing the process as “painful,” he said: “We put our ass out and got kicked for it.”
That experience was further marred when details of Michelle Tish Carter’s lawsuit began to seep out into public view. Carter had originally filed her suit in 1986, in Modesto, California, hoping that the matter would stay quiet while her lawyers and Robin’s tried to reach a settlement. But in April 1988, her counsel moved the case to San Francisco Superior Court and it was discovered by the news media. The first reports about their two-year relationship, their breakup, and Carter’s claim that Robin had given her herpes—she alleged that he had known since high school that he was infected with the virus—were published soon after.
That October, Robin filed a legal cross-claim of his own, contending that Carter had used “duress, coercion and fraud” to try to obtain money from him. His suit said that Carter had demanded $20,000 and a new car from him when she believed he had gotten her pregnant, and it stated that medical tests had shown that Robin did not have a sexually transmitted disease. His complaint charged her with extortion, conspiracy, and intentional infliction of emotional distress, and it asked for an unspecified amount of damages.
Robin knew that fighting for his name and reputation would grow ugly and uncomfortable, and that there would not be an immediate or speedy resolution. And then, just when he needed some uplift and inspiration in his life, he found it.
It was delivered to him by a screenwriter named Tom Schulman. As a teenager growing up in the South in the 1960s, Schulman had attended Montgomery Bell Academy, a prep school in Nashville that was rigidly formal in its values; its all-male student body was taught to aspire to four pillars of conduct: to be a gentleman, a scholar, an athlete, and a Christian. (This despite the fact that Schulman was Jewish.) There he studied with a literature teacher named Sam Pickering, who was known for his unorthodox approach to classroom instruction: antic, adoring of his students, teasing them constantly but filling them full of great, lively stories and fundamental information for adulthood.
Then, one year, Pickering did not return to the school, leading his former pupils to spin all sorts of absurd and scurrilous rumors about what might have led to his departure. “Nobody ever bothered to ask,” Schulman said, “because if we had, we would have found out that he just got a better job.” (Pickering eventually became an assistant professor at Dartmouth College, and then a professor at the University of Connecticut.) “If I had known what happened to him,” said Schulman, “I might have never written this thing. But not knowing allowed my imagination to go to work.”
The screenplay that Schulman wrote was about a group of students—some based on friends, others invented from his imagination, and one who wanted, as he did, to grow up to be an actor—and about John Keating, the unconventional teacher who steers them toward a life of individualism and self-reliance with his exuberant lessons about Shakespeare, Byron, Tennyson, and Thoreau. Keating stirs the boys’ souls with an apt citation from Whitman’s Leaves of Grass:
Oh me! Oh life! of the questions of these recurring,
Of the endless trains of the faithless, of cities fill’d with the foolish …
What good amid these, O me, O life?
Answer.
That you are here—that life exists and identity,
That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.
In the film’s final act, Keating disappears—at which point the boys learn he has been hospitalized. “It turns out he has non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma,” Schulman explained, “which you can live with for twenty, thirty years. So he’s in the hospital to get some kind of infusion, and basically says, ‘I’ll be back tomorrow, so don’t worry about it.’ For me, that was the explanation of why he had this carpe diem—this extra kick about living to the fullest.”
After Schulman wrote the script in the mid-1980s and found an agent who would represent it, The Dead Poets Society was picked up by a series of producers, each of whom shopped it to various Hollywood studios, all of whom passed on it. It then landed with Steven Haft, a novice producer who was inspired by it and determined to get it made. “It did more than it was supposed to do,” Haft said. “It not only impressed me with the writing, but caused me to lose sleep.”
When Haft was at last able to get Disney’s Jeffrey Katzenberg to commit to the film for the studio’s Touchstone Pictures division, it was with a catch: Katzenberg wanted to add some comedy shtick and have it directed by Jeff Kanew, who had made the bawdy college fraternity farce Revenge of the Nerds. In other words, as Haft called it, he wanted to make Dead Funny Poet Guy.
The filmmakers spent several months trying to assemble a cast and ran a nationwide search for the rebellious young clan of students known as the Poets, but they found it difficult to land the right star to play the all-important role of Mr. Keating. “It takes a Peter O’Toole in Goodbye, Mr. Chips—it takes a terrific actor to pull this off,” Haft said. “And unfortunately, the Nerds director can’t get a great actor.” With just days before filming was scheduled to begin in Georgia, the few leading men willing to commit to the part included Alec Baldwin and Liam Neeson, who were considered too unknown at the time to carry the film, and Christopher Reeve, who was regarded as a risk outside of the flagging Superman franchise.
Robin was also approached, but he was ambivalent about the project. He sought advice from Dana Carvey, who had worked with Kanew on the comedy caper Tough Guys, and found little clarity. “I don’t know, I might wait on that one,” Carvey told him.
Disney persisted, with calamitous results. “Robin wouldn’t say no, but he wouldn’t say yes,” Schulman said. Nevertheless, preproduction continued, sets were built, and a first day of filming was scheduled at which it was hoped Robin might appear. He did not. “He never said he would,” Schulman said, “but Disney kept trying to pressure him by moving forward. After the first day he didn’t show up, they canceled the production and burned the sets.” Kanew and the actors he had recruited were let go.
The film started to regain momentum when Disney offered it to Peter Weir, the Australian director of haunting and abstract films like Picnic at Hanging Rock and The Last Wave, and who’d recently had his first American hit with the Harrison Ford thriller Witness. While growing up in Sydney, Weir had attended the Scots College, a boarding school not unlike the one in Schulman’s script, which permitted corporal punishment and bore the Latin motto Utinam Patribus Nostris Digni Simus (“May we be worthy of our forefathers”). It was not an experience he romanticized: “As soon as the gates were open in the l
ast year, I just ran out,” Weir said. “I was glad to get out of it.” Later, at the University of Sydney, he’d had a formative, negative experience in a literature class, where a lecturer dismissed one of his favorite poems, William Blake’s “The Sick Rose,” as “inferior.”
“That’s how bad school can be,” Weir said. “The joy of education is surely to give you the tools to communicate, to handle yourself in the world, and read on so you go into your life.” On a plane ride back to Australia, Weir thumbed through a script that Katzenberg had given him, with its intriguing title. “The Dead Poets Society,” he said. “What is it? What are they? Who are they? I have to read it to find out.”
With a highly regarded director now interested in the film, Robin saw it in a new light. It evoked his own time as a high school student at the conservative Detroit Country Day School and called to mind freethinking teachers like John Campbell, his history teacher and wrestling coach. It touched on themes of innocence and experience, and the power of art to break through the barricade of tradition. “It talks about something of the heart and of pursuing that which is a dream—and in some cases, to a tragic end,” Robin said. And, though he did not explicitly acknowledge this, it also told the story of a young man who yearns to become an actor, and the stern father who wants him to pursue a more reliable career.
Now he wanted to make the movie, but just when all the pieces seemed to be in place again, Haft said, “It all started going wobbly.” Dustin Hoffman became interested in the John Keating role—but only if he could also direct the film, a momentary crisis that resolved itself when the actor instead signed on to make Rain Man with Barry Levinson and Tom Cruise. There was uncertainty as well about whether Weir could tolerate Robin’s well-established preference for creative wanderlust. “If you gave Peter a choice between being president of any country in the world, or being pope, he’d pick being pope,” Haft explained. “Peter was a spiritual leader on his sets. Robin, in his view, had too much business—too many things going on, other than delivering the scene. Robin talked to outer beings, in Peter’s mind. And the idea that you weren’t just channeling Peter’s inner thoughts made it very challenging for him to work with that actor.”
Mark Johnson, who had produced Good Morning, Vietnam for Touchstone, had advice for Weir on how best to work with Robin. “The first thing you do is, you shoot the script,” he said. “Word for word. Then, once you have the script, you just let the shackles off and say, ‘Just go do it.’ And you let him go do it. And then you sit with him, and you craft it from the material that you never saw but he found, and the stuff that you may have known was there but that he raised to a level you never imagined.”
With Robin now on board, Weir worked with Schulman to fit the script to the strengths of their leading man, and to the director’s own tastes. The time frame of the story was moved to the late 1950s, when Weir was in school, and the plot point about Keating’s illness was removed. “Peter Weir said to me, ‘That’s got to go,’” Schulman said. “He said it’s easy for the boys, at the end, to stand up for someone who’s dying. But if he’s not dying, then they’re standing up for what he taught them, and that’s much more powerful. And I went, eh, okay, you’re right. But I still harbored the hope that somehow we were going to keep it.” When Schulman and Weir had their first script meeting with Robin, the director told him that only one major change was coming. “‘We’re going to take out the dying scene,’” Schulman recalled. “And Robin went: ‘Good idea.’ So out it went. And I’m glad it was out.”
The casting of the Poets was started over from scratch, although some performers who had been seen for Kanew’s canceled version of the film were revisited, including Ethan Hawke, who would play the painfully shy new pupil, Todd Anderson; and Josh Charles, as the love-struck Knox Overstreet. Robert Sean Leonard would play Neil Perry, the student driven to suicide by his father’s denial of his artistic fantasies; Dylan Kussman, a high school senior, was chosen as the turncoat Richard Cameron; and Gale Hansen, a baby-faced twenty-eight-year-old who was asked to keep his age a secret from his costars, would play the reckless Charlie Dalton (who redubs himself Nuwanda). Filming was set for the late fall in Delaware, principally around the campus of St. Andrew’s School in Wilmington, which would stand in for the fictional Welton Academy.
Robin was playing his final performances of Waiting for Godot in New York, which meant that he would not be available to start shooting his scenes until December. There was only time for him to participate in a quick table read of the Dead Poets script before the rest of the cast went to Delaware to begin filming. The young Poets were largely newcomers to film acting who admired Robin’s work—this was their introduction to him, and many of them were intimidated, until he made individual efforts to put them at ease. Hansen, who had studied acting at some of New York’s prestigious studio schools, recalled that when the reading was over, Robin strode right up to him and shook his hand “even though clearly he didn’t need to.”
“He was like, ‘We have a lot in common,’” Hansen said. “I was like, ‘There’s no way we have anything in common’—I didn’t say that, but that’s what I’m thinking. I was serving hot meals yesterday. And he was like, ‘You studied with Sandy Meisner, I studied with John Houseman at Juilliard. We both come from the same background.’ He did that with each boy. He had that one thing to make you identify with him. It was so smart to go, ‘You can trust me. We can play.’”
In Robin’s absence, the Poets spent their first days in Delaware in mid-November getting close-cropped, Eisenhower-era haircuts and breaking in their student uniforms. Weir encouraged them to spend time with each other, to form friendships and imagine backstories for their characters; he forbade them from using contemporary slang words—“cool,” “wow,” “man,” “shit”—and instructed them to use period-appropriate lingo. For a couple of days, Weir himself played the role of a teacher he called Mr. Quern, requiring the boys to report, in costume, to his classroom (a rehearsal space that had been outfitted with desks), where he addressed them as their characters and instructed them to organize a school play. “It was a way of deconstructing my own position as director, to relax everything,” he said. “I made a fool of myself. I became an actor myself.”
Robin started filming on December 12, day 23 of the planned fifty-two-day production, and his scenes as Keating were shot largely in script order. The interior of his classroom was created on a soundstage installed at a former middle school in Wilmington, a few doors down from the ersatz cave where the boys would perform the late-night rites of their secret society. As a succinct set of stage directions describe the first classroom scene, “The boys take seats and settle in. Keating stares out the window a long time. The students start to shuffle uncomfortably. Finally Keating stands, picks up a yardstick, and begins slowly strolling the aisles. He stops and stares into the face of one of the boys.”
As written, the scene also called for Keating to jump up on his own desk and address the boys, and Robin performed it as directed. But both Weir and Schulman felt it did not work. “We looked at each other and just went, ‘Uh-uh, this is too much,’” Schulman said. (In a later scene, Keating would stand on his desk and invite his students to do the same, to “look at things in a different way.”) Instead, Weir and Schulman decided to have Keating make his entrance walking through the room, whistling Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture and striding out the door into the hallway, where the perplexed students would follow him. Robin rolled with these changes; he stuck to the script and knew every line of his dialogue. Yet to the filmmakers he appeared somewhat stiff. “We were going, ‘What the hell?’ here. How is this?” Schulman said. What they felt he needed was some space to improvise.
“We were able to get about a half day ahead of schedule, and one afternoon, we basically just let Robin do some ad-libs,” said Alan Curtiss, the film’s first assistant director. “Peter is very spontaneous. Not in an irresponsible way—within the day’s work. He would come in and change ou
r plans slightly. But Robin really trusted Peter, and they had a very good communication.” For an afternoon, the classroom and its students were turned over to Robin while two cameras rolled. Weir encouraged him to riff on the sorts of authors Keating would be teaching—Shakespeare, Dickens—knowing that Robin did not have any time to prepare material, but that this likely would not be a problem for him. “He’s a kind of writer, without a pen,” Weir said of Robin. “He just writes in the air.”
To Robin, the exercise was a brief, blunt lesson that his ad-libs were largely incompatible with the spirit of the film. “It just didn’t work,” he said. “It was teaching, teaching, teaching, shtick, teaching, teaching. It was like Saran Wrap on Velcro. Didn’t stick.… And it was sad. I got very hurt. It was a battle, sometimes, between the comedian and the actor. Dr. Jessel and Mr. Jolson. This strange thing of wanting it to be funny and realizing that this ain’t going to be that.”
In fact, only a couple of the bits that he whipped up in this session, some of which bore a passing resemblance to jokes that he told in his stand-up routine—Marlon Brando and John Wayne delivering lines from Julius Caesar and Macbeth; American Bandstand reviewing the poetry of Byron—would make it through to the completed movie. And Robin would have few other opportunities over the course of shooting to extemporize at length; even some of the more modest tweaks that he scrawled in his script—changing a phrase like “utter dreck which you must avoid like the plague” to “which you must wade through like a yak,” or trying to slip in a reference to the dirty limerick “There once was a man from Nantucket”—either never got performed or were left on the cutting room floor. But just an afternoon of free play seemed to loosen Robin up and helped set the tone for the days that followed.
In a scene shot soon after, Keating and his charges look at a trophy case filled with photographs of students from past generations—an authentic artifact found on the St. Andrew’s campus—and he urges his boys not to squander their potential.