Making Tootsie
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Making Tootsie

Susan Dworkin

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eBook - ePub

Making Tootsie

Susan Dworkin

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About This Book

"A perceptive and provocative work."
— Los Angeles Times

"A stunning job of research, observation and reporting."
—Larry Gelbart, co-writer of Tootsie and writer on TV's "M*A*S*H*"

"This fluid, marvelously detailed book goes a long way toward explaining why Tootsie has already achieved a reputation as a classic film comedy."
— People

Making Tootsie is back, three decades after the creation of the blockbuster Hollywood motion picture that the American Film Institute rated as #2 on its list of the 100 Best Comedies of All Time (second only to Some Like it Hot ). Playwright, author, and Ms. magazine contributing writer Susan Dworkin was granted unprecedented access to the film set, the cast, and the crew during the filming and through post-production of the 1982 classic, and her riveting, detailed chronicle offers a fascinating window into the art of movie making—as well as painting indelible portraits of the two main men who made Tootsie happen: director Sidney Pollack and star Dustin Hoffman. No movie buff, film historian, student, or fan will want to miss Making Tootsie.

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CHAPTER I
The whole trick with Tootsie was to get Dustin Hoffman to look like a real woman, so that the characters around him in the movie could believe he was a woman and not appear ridiculous for doing so. In Hoffman’s contract, there was actually a clause stipulating that reality had to be achieved before shooting could begin.
This meant that Tootsie differed in comic intent from Some Like It Hot, the Billy Wilder classic in which Marilyn Monroe and Joe E. Brown had so engagingly been duped by two hairy “girls,” Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon. Hoffman would not be hairy. His muscles wouldn’t show. Nor would his Adam’s apple. A vibrant, wiry man with burning brown eyes and the nervous energy of a prizefighter, he intended to bury himself in Tootsie, to disappear into her disguises.
Tootsie joined a cluster of gender-switch comedies that included La Cage Aux Folles I and II, Victor, Victoria and The World According to Garp, which featured John Lithgow’s transsexual Roberta. (When Tootsie began shooting in April 1982, Barbra Streisand’s Yentl was still in preparation.)
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The theatre, which always has a way of being first, had begun the recent trend two years earlier with Caryl Churchill’s Cloud 9, directed by Tommy Tune. In this send-up of both sexism and imperialism, men played Victorian matrons, women played Victorian boys, and white men played black men as well as little girls in contemporary London. In The Singular Life of Albert Nobbs, by Simone Benmussa, Glenn Close played a woman who spent her entire adult life impersonating an Irish waiter. This play was on at the Manhattan Theatre Club uptown while Tootsie was shooting in New York, and Hoffman questioned any colleague who went to see it about the details of Close’s highly realistic performance.
Although filming lasted 98 days, Hoffman, now 45, invested almost four years of his life in Tootsie, a Columbia Pictures comedy about a down-and-out actor who gets his big break by impersonating an actress. Four years is a long time for a star performer to voluntarily absent himself from the screen—all the more so since Hoffman’s last performance in Kramer vs. Kramer had won him an Academy Award and a secure reputation as one of our finest actors.
His willingness to devote so much time to Tootsie stemmed from his interest in taking that range of journeys which justifies the madness and hassle of the acting profession. In The Graduate, his hilarious portrayal of a young man seduced by an older woman won him an Oscar nomination. He was nominated again when he played the seedy derelict Ratzo Rizzo in Midnight Cowboy and again for his portrayal of the doomed comedian Lenny Bruce in Lenny. Range was Hoffman’s passion. In Papillon he played a French counterfeiter; in All the President’s Men, an indefatigable journalist; in Straw Dogs, an avenging intellectual. His desire to play a woman in Tootsie may have appeared political in the context of the times, but in fact, it was overwhelmingly artistic. Hoffman was not looking for the truth about women. He was looking for the woman in himself.
The man who finally directed and produced Tootsie was Sydney Pollack. Pollack had not worked with Hoffman before, nor had he ever directed an out-and-out bare-faced comedy. His forte was grown-up, rational romance. His hallmark was melancholy. There were deep creases in his face. A tall, 48 year old man with curly, greying hair and large, expressive hands, he was known in the trade as a “lion-tamer,” because of his excellent track record in handling big stars like Barbra Streisand (The Way We Were), Robert Redford (This Property is Condemned, Jeremiah Johnson, The Way We Were, Three Days of the Condor, The Electric Horseman), Paul Newman and Sally Field (Absence of Malice), Faye Dunaway (Three Days of the Condor), Jane Fonda (They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, The Electric Horseman) and Al Pacino (Bobby Deerfield). He was trusted by Columbia Pictures because of his extraordinary success at bringing in Absence of Malice $1 million under budget (a Hollywood rarity) and because six of his eight last movies had made money.
From the earliest make-up tests in Los Angeles, all through the arduous shoot in the dead heat of a New York summer, Sydney Pollack and Dustin Hoffman never gave Tootsie a rest. They never gave each other a rest. To keep themselves going, they ate like lab animals. Sydney stopped smoking. He went on the Pritikin diet and took a substantial segment of the company with him. Long after many others had reverted to red meat, he was still incessantly chewing celery and gum and peaches.
Dustin got Vitamin B12 shots. He kept a jump rope on hand at the set and between takes he would skip at it in short bursts of awesome speed.
Sydney hired a U.S.C. coach to teach him aerobic swimming because when he ran, his back went out.
Dustin, who is devoted to the chicken fat saturated fare at Sammy’s Rumanian downtown, dutifully ate lentil soup.
They were so concentrated on Tootsie, with that bunker mentality peculiar to movie sets, that they could pay little attention to the war in Lebanon which occupied the summer of their fellow-Jews everywhere.
They listened so hard to each other, during long arguments about text and subtext, that after a while, they began to talk alike.
“The truth of the matter is . . .” they’d say.
“In other words . . .” they’d re-explain.
The intercoastal rumor mills processed their conflicts with delighted zeal all the way through the shoot. Their fights made the trade papers. Their reconciliations did not. Even people only remotely associated with the film had to constantly reassert that the collaboration had not dissolved.
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No, Sydney and Dustin had not come to blows.
No, Dustin’s hand injury had not kept him off the set for a week. More like two hours.
No, the budget wasn’t already up to $32 million.
“We’ve made Hollywood the happiest bunch of people in the world by our problems here,” Sydney said. “Because everybody’s had something to talk about at a cocktail party. Their eyes light up at the next disaster.”
The affection for “disaster stories” was caused by the hot combination of jealousy and guilt that characterized Hollywood. Jealousy because you thought you were just as good as Dustin Hoffman or Sydney Pollack, but they had the picture and its millions and oh, it would be so wonderful to see them fall on their faces. Guilt because many individuals in the movie business were overpaid, and out there in America, where more and more people were wandering jobless, class anger at the film industry in general was always a possibility.
If the industry thrived on disaster stories, it was not really to hurt people like Sydney and Dustin, but to keep alive the idea that the risks were so high, the pressures so unbearable, the fall from grace so imminent and terrifying, that the money so many were making might actually be justified.
But the worst of the pressure did not come from anticipation of disaster; both men had lived through that. It was the expectation of success that worried them; the idea—firmly held by studio executives and Wall Street analysts—that if Dustin Hoffman was going to dress up like a girl in a comedy written by Larry (M*A*S*H) Gelbart and Murray Schisgal and produced and directed by Sydney Pollack for release in December of 1982, it was going to be a very merry Christmas for all.
And although it is rare that two men so unsuited by taste, temperament and inner music should collaborate on a major motion picture . . .
And although the tension between them was sometimes so powerful that the set seemed to be on the verge of emotional meltdown . . .
They did do quite a job together on Tootsie, which would strike millions of Americans as the funniest movie in years.
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The hero of Tootsie is Michael Dorsey, an out-of-work actor pushing forty and getting nowhere in the New York theatre. Despite the fact that he is renowned for his talent, he loses jobs because he is considered temperamental and difficult; he works as a waiter, teaches acting, auditions constantly but with little success, and shares a loft in Chelsea with Jeff, a flaky playwright (Bill Murray).
Michael’s fondest hope is to raise enough money to produce Jeff ’s play so he can perform in it with his friend and longtime acting student, Sandy (Teri Garr). Michael coaches Sandy for an audition for the role of the tough-cookie hospital administrator on a popular television soap opera. But Sandy doesn’t even get a chance to read. She’s rejected because she’s not a tough cookie. Michael finds out that an ex-friend who has less talent than he has landed a big role in The Iceman Cometh on Broadway and, furious, he storms into his agent’s office demanding to know why he wasn’t sent to audition. The agent (Sydney Pollack), a slick show business power with all lines open to “the Coast,” declares that Michael is so difficult, no one will hire him.
To show up his unsympathetic agent, Michael puts on make-up, a wig and women’s clothes, tries out for the role that Sandy didn’t get to read for, and becomes in a flash the hospital administrator of Southwest General, Ms. Emily Kimberly.
Assuming the name of Dorothy Michaels, Michael settles in at the soap, where he meets a beautiful co-worker, Julie (Jessica Lange). A close friendship develops between Dorothy and Julie.
This is a new experience for Michael. Being trusted by a woman. Having innocent fun with a woman. Being friends with a woman. He even gets to babysit for Amy, Julie’s beautiful blonde baby. Julie invites Dorothy up to her father’s farm for the weekend. They have a wonderful time. They talk wallpaper and milk cows. Julie’s widowed father, Les (Charles Durning), promptly falls in love with Dorothy.
And Dorothy, who is—after all—Michael Dorsey, falls in love with Julie.
In his other life as a man, Michael seduces Sandy one night, kind of by mistake. When he subsequently neglects her, she concludes he’s gay. When Michael, in the guise of Dorothy, allows some of his passion for Julie to surface, she concludes that Dorothy’s a lesbian. Les, on the other hand, proposes marriage.
What started out as contemporary situation comedy has turned into classical farce. Quick changes. Multiple identities. Wild confusion. Michael finally confesses during a live broadcast of the soap that in fact he is not Emily Kimberly, that he is not even female, and strips off his wig and his eyelashes to prove it.
Richer for his experience—both figuratively, since he has learned how it feels to be a woman—and literally, since he now has enough money to produce Jeff ’s play, Michael manages to secure both the forgiveness and friendship of Les and the forgiveness and love of Julie. “I was a better man with you, as a woman,” he tells her, “than I ever was with a woman as a man . . . I’ve just got to do it without the dress.”
This happy ending took place after innumerable takes on the recently revitalized section of West 42nd Street known as Theatre Row. It was one of the shoot’s many 90 degree days. Dustin was in pain from an injured hand, which had been caught under a door in a freak accident; between takes, he slipped his arm into a sling. David McGiffert, the first assistant director, was deploying Tootsie staff to manage the crowds of New Yorkers who gaped and gawked and had to be held in friendly check lest they wander into the movie. Owen Roizman, the laid-back, athletic director of photography, scowled at the passing clouds, waiting for them to release the sun so he could finish filming the outdoor scene. The movie was costing $80,000 a day. If you figure twelve hours in the working day, that’s $110 a minute. Waiting was expensive.
Sydney Pollack, beset by unavoidable delays, beset by script problems and wounded star problems, got so hot and sweaty that he hung out his shirt to dry.
And Mikhail Baryshnikov, the father of Jessica Lange’s real beautiful blonde baby, sat in Jessica’s chair and watched and smiled the calm smile of the non-involved.
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Although the storyline of Tootsie was simple and straightforward enough, the script history of the film was anything but. “You can’t write a party,” Sydney Pollack said when he was trying to stage one in the loft on 18th Street where Michael and Jeff lived. Too many people. Too much action. Too much background. That was just what writing Tootsie was like. Such a big party, so many people, so much action, that it’s a miracle it got written at all.
The script started roughly with Charles Evans, a busy, businesslike man with a beautiful office. Modern sculpture reflected in a wall of mirrors. A mottled green marble floor. An incidental curved wall of opaque glass bricks (like the one in It’s My Turn).
Evans, the executive producer of Tootsie, was the man who owned the script when it first came to the attention of Dustin Hoffman. It had come to Evans’ attention in 1978 through Buddy Hackett, the comedian, who wanted to play the role of the agent. The script Hackett showed his friend Charles Evans was called Would I Lie to You?, and it had been written by Don McGuire.
“When Buddy Hackett sent me the script,” Evans recalled, “I called him and said: ‘This is terrific.’ I didn’t know Henry Plitt (of the Plitt Theatre Chain) who owned the McGuire script. But I called Henry Plitt. Told him I liked the script. Would he like to sell it? And he said yes. Two days later I went to California. Went right to Henry’s office. Told him I’d like to buy it. So we started talking price. Plitt owned the script with two other people. He needed their permission. And McGuire had a piece of whatever would happen to the picture if it got made. So when I bought the property, Plitt had to negotiate with his other partners, and I had to negotiate with McGuire and make a different deal with him.”
Evans realized he was coming into a property that had switched owners and been turned down a few times. But he characterizes himself as a man unimpressed by prior opinions. “I thought it was funny. And no one could tell me it wasn’t. In talking with McGuire, I knew that he’d gone about as far as he could with it. I knew it needed a rewrite desperately. I knew I had to pay for a new script. I met a lot of comedy writers. Met Bob Kaufman. His ideas coincided with mine.”
Bob Kaufman was retained by Evans in 1979. According to Kaufman, his rewrite of Would I Lie to You? was to be “a $4½ million extended sitcom.” George Hamilton, who had starred in another Kaufman comedy, Love at First Bite, was to play the lead. He and Kaufman were to be executive producers. Charles Evans was to be producer.
During the period that Kaufman was on retainer to Evans, Evans showed the property to a friend, director Dick...

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