In Contention

Tag: Straight Time

  • INTERVIEW: Dustin Hoffman

    Dustin HoffmanHe doesn’t seem like Dustin Hoffman for some reason.  He sounds like Dustin Hoffman.  He looks like him.  But there aren’t really any traces of his decades-long assemblage of characters.  And he’s got an approachability that seems somehow uncommon for a star of his stature.

    But there he is, piecing together a sandwich with arugula, veggie cheese, spicy mustard and wheat bread as he recalls his first major interview with Studs Terkel over 40 years ago.  Terkel has passed recently, which brought the topic to the fore.

    “It was Chicago, right after ‘The Graduate,’” Hoffman says.  “I went into his office and he had floor-to-ceiling books and everything, you know.  The office looked like him.  He turns the tape recorder on and it was an intricate and intensive interview that probably went on for over two hours.  We shook hands and he said, ‘Let me just check’ — and the tape didn’t work.  It had been blanked for some reason.  So he says, ‘You wouldn’t mind doing it again?”

    So it was that we kicked off our own two-hour conversation, one steering in and out of his legendary career, briefly touching on the particulars of his latest film, “Last Chance Harvey” (now playing in limited release and for which Hoffman received a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actor), but mostly wandering from this mundane particular to that.

    He has a fondness for iron furniture, a number of antiques peppering his Brentwood offices.  A large Italian “Midnight Cowboy” poster hangs in the lobby, but I’m caught off guard by the food and drink spread in the hallway as we move into his personal office.  The dainty dishes and cutlery seem to clash with the casual air of the actor before me.

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  • The under-appreciated

    (from left) John Wayne and James Stewart in The ShootistWe all know that there are brilliant films that sometimes never find an audience, slipping out of theatres long before they should and often disappearing into the void of the home market.

    In fairness, the advent of VHS and now DVD has allowed for such films to be re-discovered by future generations, and VHS was easily responsible for saving “Blade Runner” in the 1980s.  But these types of films deserved beter in their initial runs. Perhaps the studios were not clear on how to release them (often the case).  Perhaps critics did not get the film.  Or perhaps audiences just stayed away despite strong reviews.  Whatever the reason, there are often times that a great film just doesn’t catch on.

    I am currently contracted to write a study of the films Steven Spielberg has directed, and following that, I will be writing a study of under-appreciated films from the 1970s and 1980s. This has now been expanded into a decade-by-decade series, beginning with the 1980s (to be released in 2010), then the 1970s, the 1990s and the current decade, each one a year apart.  For obvious reasons, I am quite excited about them.

    For me, some of the more under-appreciated gems from the 1970s and 1980s for me have been films like “Black Sunday,” featuring an Osca-caliber performance from Bruce Dern, and still the best film ever made about international terrorism; John Wayne’s last film, “The Shootist,” in which The Duke portrays an aging gunslinger dying of cancer when he himself was being ravaged by the disease; the odd little western “The Missouri Breaks,” with Brando and Nicholson going toe-to-toe; the sensational musical “Hair,” directed by Oscar winner Milos Forman, who really does recreate the summer of love.

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