Jewish as The Graduate

For my generation, the film "The Graduate" was a major element in our growing up, or what we thought was growing up or - better yet, what we thought growing up was about.

So when I read this article, I knew that this extracted section had to go here:-

When it came to casting, the problems really began...“I interviewed hundreds, maybe thousands, of men,” Nichols told an enthusiastic crowd at the Directors Guild of America Theatre in New York, in 2003, at a screening of The Graduate. He even discussed the role with his friend Robert Redford, who was eager for the part. “I said, ‘You can’t play it. You can never play a loser.’ And Redford said, ‘What do you mean? Of course I can play a loser.’ And I said, ‘O.K., have you ever struck out with a girl?’ and he said, ‘What do you mean?’ And he wasn’t joking.”

Shortly after hiring Nichols, Larry Turman started a wish list for the roles of Benjamin Braddock and Elaine Robinson. For “Elaine,” he wrote, “Natalie Wood, Ann-Margret, Jane Fonda, Tuesday Weld, Carroll Baker, Sue Lyon, Lee Remick, Suzanne Pleshette, Carol Lynley, Elizabeth Ashley, Yvette Mimieux, Pamela Tiffin, Patty Duke, Hayley Mills.” Under the “Ben” column, he listed “Warren Beatty, Steve McQueen, Bob Redford, [George] Peppard, George Hamilton, Tony Perkins, Keir Dullea, Brandon De Wilde, Michael Parks.”

“When we started talking about actors,” Buck Henry noticed, “they were tall and blond. We were talking Southern California.” Robert Redford, fresh from Barefoot in the Park, auditioned with Candice Bergen, and Charles Grodin, who had made his Broadway debut in 1962 opposite Anthony Quinn in Tchin-Tchin, also read for the part. Turman thought that Grodin “gave a wonderful reading,” and the actor was strongly considered. Nichols and Turman knew the casting of Benjamin was crucial: “Everything is story, everything is script,” Turman says, “but if you don’t have an appealing actor, you’re dead in the water.” He remembers Nichols finally turning to him and saying, “Turman, you S.O.B., you got me into a movie that can’t be cast!”
...
“When I was auditioning for this part,” Dustin Hoffman recalls for Vanity Fair, “I had finally made some inroads in my career.” After 10 years as a struggling actor in New York, Hoffman had won an Obie Award in 1966 for best Off Broadway actor, in Ronald Ribman’s The Journey of the Fifth Horse. He’d been supporting himself with a series of odd jobs—selling toys at Macy’s, working as an attendant at the New York Psychiatric Institute, on West 168th Street, waiting tables at the Village Gate—and sharing an apartment with Gene Hackman and his wife...So when the part came along, I read the book, I talked to Mike Nichols on the phone, and I said, ‘I’m not right for this part, sir. This is a Gentile. This is a Wasp. This is Robert Redford.’...I said, ‘Did you see this week’s Time magazine? That’s Benjamin Braddock!’ Nichols replied, ‘You mean he’s not Jewish?’ ‘Yes, this guy is a super-Wasp. Boston Brahmin.’ And Mike said, ‘Maybe he’s Jewish inside. Why don’t you come out and audition for us?’”

He took three days off from Eh? and flew to L.A. for the screen test, which took place at rented offices in the Paramount Studio lot on Melrose Avenue...“I just have bad feelings about the whole thing. This is not the part for me. I’m not supposed to be in movies. I’m supposed to be where I belong — an ethnic actor is supposed to be in ethnic New York, in an ethnic, Off Broadway show! I know my place.” (Harry Hoffman, Dustin’s father, of Russian-Jewish ancestry, worked as a set dresser for Columbia Studios before launching his own short-lived furniture company.)

...The audition seemed to go on for hours, and he felt that the takes they printed just weren’t any good. He knew he’d blown it. “I couldn’t wait to go back to New York,” he recalled. The final humiliation occurred when, saying good-bye to the crew, he pulled his hand out of his pocket and a fistful of subway tokens spilled to the floor. The propman picked them up and handed them back, saying, “Here, kid. You’re going to need these.”

Back in New York, Hoffman got word from his agent to call Mike Nichols. He reached Nichols on the phone, afraid he had woken him up. After a long pause, the director uttered the most beautiful words an actor can hear: “Well, you got it.” Those four words changed Dustin Hoffman’s life.

“We looked and looked and looked,” recalls Nichols, “and when we saw Dustin Hoffman on film, we said, ‘That’s it.’ And I had come all the way from seeing the character as a super-goy to being John Marcher in ‘The Beast in the Jungle.’ He had to be the dark, ungainly artist. He couldn’t be a blond, blue-eyed person, because then why is he having trouble in the country of the blond, blue-eyed people? It took me a long time to figure that out — it’s not in the material at all. And once I figured that out, and found Dustin, it began to form itself around that idea.”

It was a revolutionary about-face. For generations, Jewish moguls had created fantasies for and about Wasps. Jewish actors and directors routinely Anglicized their names — such as Julius Garfinkle and Bernie Schwartz becoming John Garfield and Tony Curtis [my aunt was given a ride in the basket that sat in the front of Bernie's bicycle which he used to deliver grocercies] — as a kind of camouflage that was especially useful during the McCarthy-era witch hunts, which targeted not just the motion-picture industry but Jewish writers, actors, and producers. Nichols himself was born Michael Igor Peschkowsky, in Berlin, to Russian-Jewish émigrés, in 1931. “When I was seven and my brother four,” recalls Nichols, “we came to the U.S. in ’39 without either parent, because our father, a doctor, had come the previous year to take his medical exams, as he had after going from Russia to study in Germany. Our mother at the time was still in Berlin, as she was sick and in the hospital. She came on an even later ship. Bob and I came on the Bremen from Hamburg, taken care of by a stewardess. As the Bremen landed in New York and we were re-united with our father on the dock, I noticed across the street a delicatessen with Hebrew letters in its neon sign. I said to my father, ‘Is that allowed?’ He said, ‘It is here.’ This was only the beginning of our excitement in the U.S. Next were Rice Krispies and Coca-Cola: we had never had food that made noise. It was great.”

Buck Henry — who had seen Hoffman in Eh? and had been duly impressed—embraced the idea of casting him. “You know my theory about California genetics?” he asks wryly. “Jews from New York came to the Land of Plenty, and within one generation the Malibu sand had gotten into their genes and turned them into tall, Nordic powerhouses. Walking surfboards. We were thinking about how these Nordic people have Dustin as a son, and it’s got to be a genetic throwback to some previous generation.”

What Nichols didn’t realize at the time were the parallels between Dustin Hoffman’s and Benjamin Braddock’s lives. Hoffman had grown up in Los Angeles, “always despising it,” he says. “And that’s not an overstatement. I lived in anti-Semitic neighborhoods, and I never felt a part of it, and I used to go to the Saturday-matinee movies to see the Dead End Kids jumping into the East River, and I wanted to be one of them.” When he turned 20 and left college, he moved to New York, a place imbued with the spirit of the Beat generation and coffeehouse intellectuals. “We thought of ourselves as artists, and that’s what we wanted. It was 180 degrees from today. I felt I was home. New York is Jewish, L.A. is not Jewish. L.A. called you a ‘kike’ in the 1940s and 50s.”

And, let's continue with the Jewishness of the film - it's music:-

About halfway through shooting, Nichols’s brother, a physician, sent him the 1966 Columbia LP Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, and Thyme. Nichols listened to it continuously for four weeks, then played a track for his actors. The New York actor William Daniels, who perfectly embodied Ben’s uptight father in the movie, recalls, “Mike Nichols said to us, ‘I have these two kids. One’s very tall and one’s sort of small. And I’m thinking of them to do the music for the picture.’ And so he played ‘The Sound of Silence.’ And I thought, Oh, wait a minute. That changed the whole idea of the picture for me.” For Daniels, who had originated the role of Peter in Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story, it was no longer just a comedy.

Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel had been together since 1957, when they called themselves Tom and Jerry, and had even appeared on ABC’s American Bandstand, fashioning themselves after the Everly Brothers. But when Nichols approached the musicians with his idea, they seemed uninterested, even blasé. This was the 60s, after all, and troubadours had better things to do than write for movies. Turman, however, made a deal with them to write three new songs, but they became so busy touring that Simon—a slow and careful composer—didn’t have the time to do it.

When Nichols began editing the film, he and Sam O’Steen, his film editor, began laying in songs that Nichols had already fallen in love with: “The Sound of Silence,” “Scarborough Fair,” “April Come She Will.”...but Nichols was intrigued when he heard a few chords of a new song Paul Simon was working on, a kind of nostalgia lyric called “Mrs. Roosevelt.” Nichols wanted it, so he suggested that he change the name to “Mrs. Robinson.” The rest is pop-music history...Nichols had them record half-written songs on a Hollywood soundstage. The missing verses for “Mrs. Robinson” would appear in April 1968 on Simon and Garfunkel’s Bookends, the LP with a striking Richard Avedon cover portrait of the two musicians.

Simon and Garfunkel’s lucid, poetic lyrics serve as Ben’s interior monologue as he makes his way through the empty opulence of his parents’ suburban paradise. The juxtaposition of “The Sound of Silence,” a deeply personal cri de coeur, against the Los Angeles airport terminal—as Ben is carried robotically along a moving walkway—is both touching and funny. Right away we know we’re in a fish-out-of-water story, and Ben’s inarticulate, deeply felt musings will suffocate in this environment.

In some ways, the ironic use of Simon and Garfunkel’s music—“April Come She Will” while Ben sits in bed in the Taft Hotel, drinking a can of soda, catatonically watching television while Mrs. Robinson flits back and forth in various stages of undress, or Paul Simon’s acoustic guitar slowing down and sputtering as Ben’s Alfa Romeo runs out of gas during his desperate race to the church—prefigured the music video. You might say MTV was born out of The Graduate.

and let's have some closure:-

Hoffman saw the film for the first time at a sneak preview on East 84th Street, in New York. “I was sitting in the balcony,” he recalls, “and suddenly it was like a train gaining momentum, and by the time we were halfway through, the film was having a wild response. By the time I’m running to the church [at the film’s climax], the audience was just standing up, screaming and yelling. It was a profound experience—I was literally shaking through the whole film.”

When the movie ended, Hoffman and Anne Byrne, his girlfriend, whom he would soon marry (and divorce from in 1980), waited until everybody had left. “The thought of being recognized? I was traumatized. Everyone left, and we went downstairs, and a woman walking with a cane, slower than everyone else, saw me. She pointed her cane at me and said, ‘You’re Dustin Hoffman, aren’t you? You’re the Graduate.’ I’d never been recognized in public before. She said, ‘Life is never going to be the same for you from this moment on.’”