Dustin Hoffman: Inside the Lenny Bruce Biopic
In April the ugliness was beginning to sprout like warts on a cover girl’s nose. At 2:30 in the morning, after 16 straight hours of work, Dustin Hoffman loses his temper. Out on a wet, chilly Brooklyn street, he finds himself shouting at the associate producer. Where the hell is the food? Who works for 16 hours without food? The crew and equipment are due at Brown’s Hotel in the Catskills that evening and nothing is packed, nothing is ready to go.
Hoffman is working on Lenny, a film about the life of Lenny Bruce. He started in late fall of 1973 with eight weeks of rehearsal. Filming began January 21st. Now it is the last week in April and the shooting is more than a week behind schedule. For Hoffman, playing the part of Lenny Bruce is the most difficult thing he has ever done. It rips at him and tears at him and eats up the bulk of his humor, leaving him edgy and obsessive about his work. There are moments when he looks a decade older than his 36 years. Sometimes the cameras have to be halted — entire seconds when he drifts out of Lenny and into Dustin, when his eyes go wild with confusion and fatigue and bitterness.
The first filming in Miami was pleasant enough. There were high spirits then: a lot of dirtymouth antics and the practice of mooning over Miami. Pull down the slacks and bend over. Gotcha, ha ha.
Valerie Perrine, the actress playing Lenny’s wife in the film, Honey Harlowe, realizing she was going to have to shave for the stripper scenes in which she would wear a G-string, sculpted out a neat little pubic heart and told director Bob Fosse it was his Valentine’s Day card. Then there was the time she was at the motel pool with only her robe on. A crew member stood a few feet away with his back turned. Yoo-hoo, mister. Flash. Total exposure. Except that the observer turned out to be a complete stranger. “I exposed my entire body to that unfortunate man,” Valerie admits. The consensus was that the unfortunate man would live. However, “someone very important in the picture” advised against her or anyone else doing any more mooning.
The movie kept dropping behind schedule and the crew worked six and seven days a week, 10 to 16 hours a day. The antics and high spirits gave way to an unceasing general depression. Lesser members of the crew focused their resentment on Robert Fosse’s demands, on his persistent coldness. “He’ll do 25 takes,” one crew member says, “then walk over and move a glass on the table — move it half an inch — and do it all over again.” At first the Lenny people didn’t mind the double time and triple time, but now it is wearing on them. A general below-the-surface Fosse Bitch has developed. In outline, the Bitch goes like this:
Lenny is the first film Fosse has done since 1973, the year he swept America’s most prestigious directors’ awards for film, television and stage: an Oscar for Cabaret, an Emmy for Liza with a ‘Z’ and a Tony for Pippin. “The guy is overrated and he knows it,” one disgruntled crew member is saying in April. “He knows the critics will be gunning for him, so he’s trying to cover his ass. He’s already shot 750,000 feet of film. He’ll do a master shot and 30 different angles with 30 different takes per angle. He wants it all. And he’s hard on the actors and the people behind the camera. It’s like he’s always saying, ‘I don’t think you have it. I think you’re shit. Show me what you can do, but I don’t expect much.’ “
After the Brooklyn scenes, Dustin Hoffman rides up to the Catskills in a limo, arriving at Brown’s resort in a cold, gray, false dawn. His room faces the resort pool, and a couple of hours after he gets to bed, the pool’s public-address system begins pumping out calls for Mr. and Mrs. Bloom, for Dr. Swartz, for Mr. Levine. At 9:30 a cheerful voice booms out something about “teaching you all Greek dancing, like we promised yesterday, so all please link arms …” This followed by the hotel band blasting an interminable and grating version of “Zorba the Greek.” At 11:00 it is the maids. Unaware that the movie people got in at dawn, and anxious to finish their work, they take up Gestapo tactics.
Bam, bam, bam on the doors. The key in the lock.
“He still sleepin’?”
With contempt: “Maybe he daid.”
“No, I seen him move. He still … sleepin’.”
Hoffman is up at noon for six hours of interior shooting, then has dinner in the mammoth dining room. He orders “garden fresh sautéed vegetables.” What he gets are ugly wet little cubes fresh from a can.
Enter a cheerful elderly widow from an adjoining table. She’s got the rhinestone cat’s eyeglasses and the white shawl opened down the front but buttoned at the neck. “Mr. Hoffman, may I have your autograph?” She’s holding out a soggy napkin and a ballpoint pen. “It’s not for me, it’s for my daughter.”
Hoffman doesn’t look up. “Can’t you see I’m eating?” The woman thrusts the napkin in his face. Hoffman picks up the vegetables in both hands and stuffs them into his empty water glass. Next he pours his wine into that glass, then dumps it all on his plate.
“I’m eating,” he shouts, and several people at other tables turn to watch the little drama.
“Oh, I see,” the woman says, smiling uncertainly, “you’re acting for me.”
Hoffman splashes his right palm into the mess on his plate. “I’m eating. Can’t you see I want to be left in peace?”
“Well,” she says, “I’ll come to see your movie anyway.” Exit the old woman, limping slightly.
There is a leaden silence at the table, then the tired sad truth from Hoffman’s own lips. “She’ll never see any movie I ever make.”
The next night there is an outdoor rain scene to be shot. Hoffman sits in his trailer between takes. It starts with jokes — the thermal underwear makes it hard for him to use the toilet. Somehow the conversation gets serious. “The pollution,” Hoffman mutters. “I think we’ve got ten years to clean up or the human race just isn’t going to make it.”
I had been with the Lenny crew since Brooklyn — long enough to fall into the general malaise of exhaustion and edginess. Somehow Hoffman’s prediction of ecological disaster strikes me as both inane and galling. I mention that the Lenny death scenes were shot not long ago and that there may be a bit of psychic dead weight from that work contributing to Dustin’s sudden sense of apocalypse.
“That’s not it,” Hoffman says with what I take to be false conviction. “I think we’ve got about ten more years unless we clean up our act.”
“I don’t believe you,” I say more sharply than I intended. “I don’t believe you really mean what you’re saying.”
Hoffman terminates the conversation by turning his back on me. He appears to be controlling his temper.
Later, while the rest of the crew eat at Brown’s again, Hoffman is a few miles down the road at a Chinese/American-food truck stop. There is a bit of standard interview talk before the food arrives. Hoffman was born in Los Angeles, studied piano at the L.A. Conservatory of Music before taking up acting at the Pasadena Playhouse. He moved to New York and shared an apartment with Gene Hackman. He supported himself with odd jobs: He waited on tables, checked coats, sold soft drinks, demonstrated toys at Macy’s and worked for six months as an attendant at the New York Psychiatric Institute. He also acted.
There were small parts, larger parts, then, suddenly, rave reviews and recognition for an astounding variety of stage roles: for the hunchbacked Nazi homosexual in Harry, Noon and Night; for the pinched-faced Russian clerk in Journey of the Fifth Horse; for the Cockney plumber in Eh?
Director Mike Nichols was impressed and invited Hoffman to try out for The Graduate. The story goes that just before his ten-minute reading with Katharine Ross, Hoffman gave her an empathetic pat on the butt. A warmup gesture. Ross whirled on him and gritted, “Don’t you ever touch me.” Dustin blew most of his lines and left the audition in defeat. Nichols, however, loved the test. Hoffman projected just the sense of confused earnestness he wanted. Dustin began work on The Graduate in his 29th year. By the middle of his 30th year he was a film star.
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