Last week Ginny and I went to the Jacob Burns Center to see The Graduate, and also to hear Mark Harris discuss his book Pictures at a Revolution. The book focuses on the five films that were nominated for Best Picture in the watershed year of 1968–The Graduate, Bonnie and Clyde, In the Heat of the Night, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, and preposterously, Doctor Doolittle: two ground-breaking pictures, one awful retrograde picture, and two films that grappled with the most insistent question of the day. First, it was interesting to see The Graduate on a big screen. It was a fairly dirty print, and seeing all the squiggles and smudges put me back in the Earle Theater on Belair Road. It wasn’t hard 
to recognize many of Mike Nichols‘ innovations–the seeing-Ben-through-glass motiff, or long takes across various settings–which must have seen terrifically fresh at the time. It was interesting to see Ben come so alive with Elaine while eating burgers after the strip club debacle, but then to revert to haplessness in Berkeley, where she still found him so appealing (or at least more appealing than Carl.)
Mark, who I knew a little bit from when I worked at Entertaiment Weekly, was interviewed by Janet Maslin. Among the juicy bits he accumulated during the course of his research: that Simon & Garfunkel didn’t have the entire song `Mrs. Robinson’ ready for the movie, that the early fragment that appears in the film was all they had, and that two songs Paul Simon had written for the film, `Punky’s Dilemma’ and `Overs’ were rejected by Nichols, who then used 
`The Sounds of Silence’ and `April, Come She Will’; that most of the dialog in the film comes straight from Charles Webb‘s novel; that the bedroom scene between Ben and Mrs. Robinson (the one where he marvels that “Old Elaine Robinson got started in the back of a Ford” originally ran 27 minutes long, and that one reason Mrs. Robinson turns the lights on and off so much was to enable Nichols to cut out large chunks of the scene; that Robert Redford was seriously considered for the part of Ben but was rejected because Nichols didn’t think he looked like a loser (when Nichols explained this, a surprised Redford wondered why. “Have you ever struck out with a woman?” Nichols asked. Replied Redford, “What do you mean?”); that Nichols and Buck Henry changed the ending so that Ben makes his appearance in the church after Elaine has been officially married, not just before, and that Webb had serious objections to that switch on moral grounds; and that Anne Bancroft, who is so great in the film, had trouble finding her character until she tapped into her own anger. So illuminating was the evening that I bought and read Mark’s book, which I recommend highly.
