Special Event: The Graduate Film/Book! - East Bay Classic Fiction Book Club (Oakland, CA) | Meetup East Bay Classic Fiction Book Club Special Event: The Graduate Film/Book! Jun 21, 2013 · 6:45 PM The Paramount Theatre Hello my Classic Fiction Enthusiasts- The Graduate will be playing at the Paramount on 6/21 for one evening and for a mere $5.00! If you like, feel free to join me in reading Charles Webb's novel. We will meet at the Paramount where I will be standing in line. The day before we meet, I will send an e-mail with my phone number and description of what I'm wearing so you can find me. We will enter the theatre to get seats at 7:00 sharp. We will have about 30 minutes (festivities begin at 7:30, curtain goes up at 8 p.m.) to have a drink and discuss the novel. Reading the book is not required if you'd like to join us for the film only. If you've never been to the Paramount in Oakland, you're in for a real treat!

It's like stepping back into the past, into one of those glorious movie palaces of a bygone era! And all for a five-dollar admission.Film showings at the Paramount include a half-hour organ concert of classic songs (starting at 7:30), followed by cartoons, newsreels, clips of coming attractions, and even a raffle drawing with prizes such as dinners for two at some of the area's finest restaurants! Winner of the East Bay Express's "Best Movie-Going Experience" and voted "Best Deal in the Bay Area," it's a wonderful night out on the town! I recommend taking BART, which stops right underneath the theater at the 19th street station (20th street exit). #parking The Graduate is a 1967 American comedy-drama film directed by Mike Nichols. It is based on the 1963 novel The Graduate by Charles Webb, who wrote it shortly after graduating from Williams College. The screenplay was by Buck Henry, who makes a cameo appearance as a hotel clerk, and Calder Willingham.

The film tells the story of Benjamin Braddock (played by Dustin Hoffman), a recent university graduate with no well-defined aim in life, who is seduced by an older woman, Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft), and then proceeds to fall in love with her daughter Elaine (Katharine Ross). In 1996, The Graduate was selected for preservation in the U.S. National Film Registry as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". Initially, the film was placed at #7 on AFI's 100 Years... 100 Movies list in 1998. When AFI revised the list in 2007, the film was moved to #17. Adjusted for inflation, the film is #21 on the list of highest-grossing films in the United States and Canada. Critical response A.D. Murphy of Variety and Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times praised the film upon its release, with Murphy describing it as a "delightful satirical comedy-drama" and Ebert claiming it was the "funniest American comedy of the year".

For the film's thirtieth anniversary reissue, Roger Ebert retracted some of his previous praise for the film, noting that he now felt its time has passed and he now had more sympathy for Mrs. Robinson than Benjamin, whom he considered "an insufferable creep." He, along with Gene Siskel, gave the film a mediocre review on the television programSiskel & Ebert. Accolades Anne Bancroft, Dustin Hoffman, and Katharine Ross earned Oscar nominations for their performances. Along with the acting nominations, the film received nominations for BestCinematography, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Picture. Mike Nichols won the Academy Award for Best Director. The film won the BAFTA Award for Best Film, as well as the BAFTA Award for Best Editing (to Sam O'Steen). In 1996, The Graduate was selected for preservation in the U.S. National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant", and placed #21 on the list of highest-grossing films in the United States and Canada, adjusted for inflation. Years later in interviews, Anne Bancroft conceded that, much to her surprise, Mrs.

Robinson was the role with which she was most identified, and added "Men still come up to me and tell me 'You were my first sexual fantasy.'" American Film Institute recognition 1998: AFI's 100 Years... 100 Movies - #7 2000: AFI's 100 Years... 100 Laughs - #9 2002: AFI's 100 Years... 100 Passions - #52 2004: AFI's 100 Years... 100 Songs: "Mrs. Robinson" - #6 2005: AFI's 100 Years... 100 Movie Quotes: "Plastics." - #42 "Mrs. Robinson, you're trying to seduce me. Aren't you?" - #63 2007: AFI's 100 Years... 100 Movies (10th Anniversary Edition) - #17 The film is listed in the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die book.

Alfa Romeo produced a "Graduate" edition Alfa Romeo Spider, the car Benjamin drives in the film. The Graduate is a 1963 novel by Charles Webb, who wrote it shortly after graduating from Williams College. It tells the story of Benjamin Braddock, who, while pondering his future after his graduation, has an affair with the older Mrs. Robinson, the wife of his father's business partner. It was adapted into the highly successful 1967 movie The Graduate, directed by Mike Nichols and with Dustin Hoffman in the title role. Webb has stated he never felt comfortable with the attention the movie brought him because he felt it distracted from his status as a serious artist. He did not receive any royalties from the film and has stated he is glad it happened that way. On the episode of the AMC television show Movies That Shook the World devoted to the film adaptation, Webb revealed the identity of the real-life inspiration for Mrs. Robinson: Jane Erickson (exact spelling unknown), the wife of an associate of Webb's father. However, that was the extent of any similarity with the novel; Webb denied having a relationship with her.

Charles Richard Webb (born on June 9, 1939 in San Francisco, California) is the author of several novels, mainly known for his most famous work, The Graduate (1963), which was made into the enormously successful film of the same name (1967). Webb's first and most famous novel was published in 1963, prefiguring many of the social tensions of the 1960s which the book would come to represent. As with much of Webb's work, it was immediately notable for its flawlessly pitched dialogue, wry humor, and evocative use of understatement. Through this novel, the character of "archetypal seductive older woman" Mrs. Robinson has found a permanent niche in American cultural history. Webb sold the film rights for a one-off payment reported to be $20,000. He was rarely associated with the movie's publicity and not particularly with the growth of its reputation. Buck Henry and Calder Willingham, the script writers, assumed much of the credit for the work despite taking most of the dialogue directly from the book. During the movie's enormous success, the producer, Joseph E.

Levine, offered Webb token recognition by an additional compensation of $10,000. As of 2006, Webb has been with his long-term partner Eve for more than 40 years. Eve shaves her head and calls herself "Fred" in solidarity with a Californian support group called Fred, for men who have low self-esteem. Fred is an artist and her work includes illustrations for Webb's 2002 novel New Cardiff. The couple have two sons, one of whom is now a performance artist who once cooked and ate a copy of The Graduate with cranberry sauce. The Webbs removed their children from school so that they could tutor them at home. This was an illegal act in California at the time, and to evade the authorities they fled the state; at one point they managed a nudist camp in New Jersey. They also divorced - accounts vary as to why (it was not due to personal differences), either in protest against the institution of marriage, or against the US's lack of marriage rights for gays.

They sold their wedding presents back to their guests, and having given away four houses in succession, lived on the breadline, taking menial jobs as cleaners, cooks and fruit-pickers, working at K-Mart and living in a shack. They currently live in Hove, East Sussex,England. The Graduate (1967) by Mike Nichols - Unsung Films Unsung Films By Angeliki Coconi in Movie Reviews No Comments “Mrs. Robinson, if you don’t mind my saying so, this conversation is getting a little strange.” Based on Charles Webb’s 1963 somewhat autobiographical novel, The Graduate is directed by Mike Nichols and the screenplay is written by Calder Willingham and Buck Henry , with the latter even appearing in the film briefly as the room clerk, during one of the times that Benjamin meets Mrs. Robinson in the Taft Hotel. Released on the 21st of December 1967, the movie tells the story of Benjamin Braddock, who is a little worried about his future. And the story is told so brilliantly, that The Graduate was selected in 1996 for preservation in the United States National Film Registry, as being extremely significant – culturally, historically and aesthetically.

Just after his recent graduation from university, the 21-year-old Benjamin Braddock (played by Dustin Hoffman ) realises he has no real purpose in life and is greatly preoccupied with what he is going to do in the future. His worrying changes course when he is seduced by an older woman, and close friend of his parents’, Mrs. Robinson (portrayed by Anne Bancroft ). After a short-lived affair, his worrying takes yet another unexpected turn, when he falls in love with Mrs. Robinson’s daughter, Elaine (played by Katharine Ross ). With Mike Nichols wanting Doris Day in the role of Mrs. Robinson, Gene Hackman as Mr. Robinson, and young Robert Redford to be Benjamin Braddock, everything seems to have turned out quite a bit differently. Dustin Hoffman was thirty years old at the time, portraying a 21-year-old man, and Anne Bancroft was only thirty-six, claiming to be almost twice his age, and closer to his parents than she should ever be to him. Katharine Ross, on the other hand, who plays Elaine, was twenty-seven at the time, pretending to be just nineteen in the film.

With age discrepancies like these, Mike Nichols was, understandably, a bit unsure of whether this particular cast could work. But it did, and it turned out to be one of the most successful and well-put-together groups of actors in cinema history. With a slow, awkward and purposefully stressful performance by Dustin Hoffman and a smooth, sensual, but highly intimidating Mrs. Robinson created by Anne Bancroft, the duo’s chemistry and comical timing has never been matched by any of the other very talented actors that later tried to take on their characters on stage. Calder Willingham and Buck Henry’s screenplay is excellent in every way. Weird, uncomfortable, guilty, honest, sexy, cringe-worthy, and utterly hilarious, the characters are particularly relatable, the situations a bit too believable, and the dialogue painfully awkward. Mike Nichols’ direction gives a dry, slow, tired and hopeless environment for the story and its lost characters to act, beautifully and realistically matching the stress of the overall plot. It was also thanks to the director that Simon & Garfunkel composed the original for the film soundtrack.

Mike Nichols had become obsessed with the music of the famous duo while shooting the film and so he approached them, asking Simon to write a few tracks specifically for the movie. Flawless and a perfect suit for the film, the soundtrack features songs such as Mrs. Robinson, The Sound of Silence and Scarborough Fair/Canticle. Described by most as one of the funniest American comedies of all time, The Graduate asks a very important question: “What were those four years of college for? What was the point of all that hard work?” And it succeeds in answering it better than any other film: “You got me.” Mike Nichols, acclaimed director of 'The Graduate,' dies at 83 - LA Times Mike Nichols, acclaimed director of 'The Graduate,' dies at 83 Celebrities remember director Mike Nichols Celebrities remember director Mike Nichols Celebrities remember director Mike Nichols Dennis McLellan Mike Nichols, who directed 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' and 'The Graduate,' has died Mike Nichols had reasons to fear he would always be the hapless outsider. He had fled Hitler's Germany as a child and landed in New York knowing only two English phrases.

(“Please don't kiss me” was one of them.) Then he struggled through his school years as “that little bald kid” after losing all his body hair in a medical mishap. From those shaky beginnings, however, Nichols sailed into a remarkable showbiz career. He broke new ground in comedy in the late 1950s as half of the satirical duo Nichols and May before finding his most enduring success as a director of Hollywood and Broadway hits, including classic Neil Simon comedies such as “Barefoot in the Park” and the landmark films “Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” and “The Graduate.” “On the first day of rehearsal,” he once recalled in the Washington Post about his directing debut with the Simon comedy, “I thought, ‘Well, look at this. Here is what I was meant to do.' I knew instantly that I was home.” Nichols, whose talents put him in a rarefied group of artists who won all four of the entertainment world's top honors — the Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony — died after a heart attack Wednesday night at the New York home he shared with his wife, ABC News' Diane Sawyer. He was 83.

His death was announced by James Goldston, president of ABC News. With May, Nichols created two-person character sketches that deftly ridiculed the neuroses and pretensions of American life during the Eisenhower and Kennedy eras. After their Grammy Award-winning partnership peaked in a 1960-61 Broadway run of “An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May,” the duo parted ways and he changed course. The Simon comedy “Barefoot in the Park,” with Robert Redford and Elizabeth Ashley as the newlyweds, was a long-running smash hit and earned Nichols his first Tony Award as a director in 1964. Mike Nichols Getty Images Mike Nichols, circa 1967, was a childhood Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany. Nichols once said he didn't know what he'd leave behind for posterity as a filmmaker but that he was glad he had "connected with people, cheering them up in the dark." Mike Nichols, circa 1967, was a childhood Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany.

Nichols once said he didn't know what he'd leave behind for posterity as a filmmaker but that he was glad he had "connected with people, cheering them up in the dark." (Getty Images) Over the next five decades, he amassed awards, including an Oscar for “The Graduate” and eight Tonys, the last of which was for the 2012 revival of “Death of a Salesman” starring Philip Seymour Hoffman. Nichols' golden-boy status was assured when he made his filmmaking debut directing Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton as the tempestuous married couple in the 1966 screen adaptation of the Edward Albee play “Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” The critically acclaimed drama won five Academy Awards, including best actress for Taylor and best supporting actress for Sandy Dennis. His next film directing effort brought him his first Oscar. “The Graduate,” the 1967 adaptation of the Charles Webb novel, turned Dustin Hoffman into a star as the directionless upper-middle-class university graduate who has an affair with the unhappily married wife of his father's partner, then falls in love with her college-student daughter.

“Nichols had the smarts to cast Dustin Hoffman in a role that was really meant for Robert Redford, and that paved the way for the revolution in casting that occurred in the '70s whereby actors who were essentially character actors like Hoffman, [Al] Pacino and [Robert] De Niro — the ethnic actors —could become leading men and big movie stars,” said film historian Peter Biskind, whose books include “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-And-Rock ‘n' Roll Generation Saved Hollywood.” The blockbuster hit, which also starred Anne Bancroft as the predatory Mrs. Robinson and Katharine Ross as her daughter Elaine, memorably featured the music of Simon and Garfunkel and added the word “plastics” to the pop-culture lexicon. It also cemented Nichols' reputation as a movie director in the minds of many critics. “After ‘Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' even the Hollywood cynics needed relatively little convincing, but with his second film, ‘The Graduate,' Mike Nichols demolishes any lingering doubts that he is a brilliant, imaginative and freewheeling movie director,” the Los Angeles Times' Charles Champlin wrote in his review.

“I do think that Nichols is one of the best directors of that era,” Biskind told The Times in 2012. “He had a bit of an up-and-down movie career, but every director makes flops, and the films that did succeed were so brilliant and so pioneering.” Nichols' 22 films included “Carnal Knowledge” (1971), “Silkwood” (1983), “Working Girl” (1988) and “The Birdcage” (1996). Among his notable failures were “Catch-22” (1970), “The Fortune” (1975) and “What Planet Are You From?” (2000). His frequent returns to Broadway brought plaudits, including Tonys for Simon's “The Odd Couple” in 1965, “Plaza Suite” in 1968 and “The Prisoner of Second Avenue” in 1972; “The Real Thing” in 1984; and the musical “Spamalot” in 2005.

As a producer he shared a Tony in 1977 for best musical “Annie” and in 1984 for best play “The Real Thing.” In television, Nichols was an executive producer of the 1976-80 dramatic series “Family” and won directing Emmys for the 2001 HBO movie “Wit” and the 2004 HBO miniseries “Angels in America.” Nichols was born Michael Igor Peschkowsky in Berlin on Nov. 6, 1931. His physician father was a Russian Jewish emigre. His German Jewish mother was the daughter of Gustav Landauer, a leading theorist on anarchism in Germany, and the poet and translator Hedwig Lachmann. In 1938, Nichols' father came to the United States, where he planned to establish a new medical practice in New York before sending for his family. Four months before Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, 7-year-old Nichols and his 3-year-old brother, Robert, left their ailing mother behind and sailed to New York, where their father had assumed the name Nichols.

Nichols later remembered seeing a sign in a New York delicatessen in Hebrew and asking his father, “Is that allowed here?” At school, Nichols' outsider status was compounded by his wearing a cap to cover his bald head, the result of a rare reaction to a whooping cough vaccination that caused him to permanently lose all of his body hair when he was 4. “I was quietly unhappy,” Nichols, who later wore a wig, recalled of his school days in a 1984 New York Times interview. “I didn't fit.” Their mother remained in Germany about a year and a half before she escaped and was reunited with her family. Nichols' father died of leukemia a few years later and his mother had to take on a series of jobs to support them. He continued his education on scholarships and graduated from the Walden School in Manhattan in 1948. Two years later, he entered the University of Chicago with the intention of taking pre-med courses to become a psychiatrist. But Nichols, whose interest in theater had been sparked at 16 when he took a date to see Tennessee Williams' landmark “A Streetcar Named Desire” on Broadway, soon gave up the idea of going to medical school and began acting in campus theater productions.

He was appearing in a production of August Strindberg's “Miss Julie” when, as he recalled in a 2000 interview with the New Yorker magazine, he noticed “this evil, hostile girl in the front row staring at me throughout the performance.” The girl was Elaine May, who was unofficially auditing classes at the university. As a child, she had acted in a traveling Yiddish theater operated by her father, Jack Berlin. She was married for the first time at 16 and had a young daughter who was being raised by her mother in Los Angeles. Several weeks after Nichols saw May in the audience, their friendship was launched when he spotted her sitting in a Chicago train station waiting room. He later recalled approaching her and saying in a Central European accent, “May I seet down, plis?” “If you veesh,” she replied, as they proceeded to improvise a meeting between two spies. “We had instant rapport,” said Nichols, who had what the New Yorker article termed “a brief romance” with May after their train-station meeting. After dropping out of the university in 1953, Nichols returned to New York to study method acting with Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio.

Unable to land any acting jobs, he relocated to Chicago in 1955 and joined the newly formed Compass Players, whose charter members included May. With the Compass Players, a precursor to Second City, “Elaine and I found the whole world of comedy together. ... That is to say, our way of seeing things and doing things meshed,” he said in a 2010 interview with The Times. One of their memorable sketches , between a rocket scientist and his mother, who fills him with guilt for not calling her, grew out of a phone call Nichols received from his own mother. “My mother called and said, ‘Michael, this is your mother, do you remember me?'” Nichols recalled. “I said, ‘Mom, can I call you right back?' Then I called Elaine and said, ‘I have a piece for tonight.' I told her the line and she yelled with laughter. That is all we ever said. “Then we showed up that night and got on the stools and we did the scene as it was. ... That is what happened with Elaine and me.

We thought enough alike and differently to have these things happen.” After moving to New York in late 1957, Nichols and May became overnight sensations performing at the Village Vanguard and on TV's “Omnibus” and the Steve Allen and Jack Paar shows. Nichols' partnership with May, he later said, provided the foundation for becoming a director. “I was always saying, ‘Can't you do that faster?' and ‘You're taking too long over this,''' he told the New York Times Magazine in 1984. “She'd fill things. I'd shape them. She had endless capacity for invention. My invention was not endless. But it taught me about beginnings, middles and ends. I had to push the sketch ahead, because I couldn't invent as she could.” Despite his success, Nichols, prior to the opening of “Death of a Salesman” in 2012, said that he marveled at the assuredness he displayed directing his first plays but he felt “anything but confident” as a director in his 80s. Directing, he said, “is mystifying.

It's a long skid on an icy road, and you do the best you can to stay on the road. ... If you're still here when you come out of the spin, it's a relief. But you've got to have the terror if you're going to do anything worthwhile.” Nichols' first three wives were Chicago TV personality Patricia Scot , Margo Callas and novelist Annabel Davis-Goff. He is survived by Sawyer, his wife of 26 years; three children from his previous marriages; and four grandchildren. McLellan is a former Times staff writer. Times staff writers Steven Zeitchik and Elaine Woo contributed to this report. Greatest Films of 1967 Bonnie and Clyde (1967) , 111 minutes, D: Arthur Penn Groundbreaking, controversial, stylish crime drama/romance, and road film - about a 1930s bank-robbing couple and gang with easy-going, folksy flavor and bloody, graphically-violent shoot-outs. The saga was based on the true-life exploits of the notorious Depression-era bank robbers Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow.

Gun-toting, amoral, impotent drifter Clyde (Warren Beatty) rescues dreamer Bonnie (Faye Dunaway) from her drab existence by regaling her with colorful tales of the outlaw life. Joined by Clyde's brother (Gene Hackman), his wife Blanche (Estelle Parsons), and a gas-station attendant (Pollard), the gang goes on a bumbling crime spree through Texas and Oklahoma. Controversial when released because of its bullet-riddled ending, it marked the coming increase in visceral cinematic violence. Cool Hand Luke (1967) , 126 minutes, D: Stuart Rosenberg Based on Donn Pearce's novel and one of the great prison-chain-gang films. A spirited, irreverent, social misfit Luke (Paul Newman) is arrested for destroying parking meters and imprisoned in a tough Southern prison farm, commanded by a sadistic, prison officer Captain (Strother Martin). After boxing with the chain-gang boss Dragline (George Kennedy), he eventually becomes a hero to his fellow inmates, earning the title "Cool Hand Luke" because his will cannot be broken. A visit by Luke's dying mother (Jo Van Fleet) reveals facts about his past.

The stubborn, unruly and independent rebel refuses to submit and continually and cooly defies the authorities with repeated escape attempts. As the inmates start worshipping him as a folk hero, he risks everything in order to live up to their expectations, and is sacrificed in the tragic climax. With the memorable line of dialogue: "What we have here is failure to communicate," and the classic egg-eating scene. The Dirty Dozen (1967), 149 minutes, D: Robert Aldrich Far From the Madding Crowd (1967, UK), 168 minutes, D: John Schlesinger The Graduate (1967) , 106 minutes, D: Mike Nichols Acclaimed, satirical, ground-breaking, coming-of-age romantic drama/comedy about a shy, naive college graduate confronting the real world. In the late '60s, a confused, alienated, idealistic, and vulnerable college graduate Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman in a breakthrough performance) was uncertain about his future and struggling to find his future place in life, reacting with passive rebellion.

Without ambition or responsibility after a spoiled, upper-class upbringing, he received career advice from his overbearing suburban family's associates - "plastics" - a catchword for an entire generation, just days after receiving his diploma. While seduced by the wife of his father's business partner - a rapacious alcoholic named "Mrs. Robinson" (Anne Bancroft), he fell in love with her engaged daughter Elaine (Katharine Ross). Ultimately, he stole Elaine away from marriage to another man in the climactic finale. The influential and popular film, with a hit Simon and Garfunkel soundtrack, became an emotional touchstone for an entire generation. This film established Mike Nichols as a major director and was Hoffman's first major role. Buck Henry, appearing in the film as a hotel clerk, co-wrote the influential screenplay, based on the novel by Charles Webb.

Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967), 108 minutes, D: Stanley Kramer Hombre (1967), 111 minutes, D: Martin Ritt How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (1967), 121 minutes, D: David Swift This musical comedy film version (with Bob Fosse choreography) virtually duplicated Frank Loesser's Tony Award-winning Broadway musical from 1961 - it included two stars reprising their roles from the stage: Robert Morse (as boyish, gap-toothed ex-window washer and ambitious, up-and-coming corporate executive J. Pierpont "Ponty" Finch), and Rudy Vallee (as pompous boss Jasper B. Biggley). In this cynical and satirical look at corporate America in the mid-1960s, with all its corporate chicanery, gray flannel suits, executive washrooms, and office sexism, the strongly-ambitious 27 year-old Finch bought a self-help guidebook titled: "How to Succeed in Business..." to begin his ascent up the corporate ladder, using mostly devious and sneaky methods.

He took a job in the NY offices of the World Wide Wicket Company, working under eccentric boss Biggley and ingratiating himself by posing as a graduate of Grand Old Ivy, Biggley's alma mater. Soon, he became VP of Advertising, and began a romance with cute secretary Rosemary Pilkington (Michele Lee in her film debut). At the same time, Biggley was having an affair with hip-swiveling, curvaceous, high-pitch voiced, but incompetent office worker Hedy LaRue (Maureen Arthur), his secret live-in girlfriend. Finch arranged a tryst between rival Bud Frump (Anthony Teague), Biggley's bratty, whiny and nepharious nephew and Hedy, thereby eliminating the co-worker. He also disposed of troublesome Mr. Ovington (Murray Matheson) by exposing that his alma mater was Biggley's rival college. His successful advancement eventually brought him to the position of Chairman of the Board.

In Cold Blood (1967), 134 minutes, D: Richard Brooks In the Heat of the Night (1967) , 109 minutes, D: Norman Jewison An intense whodunit detective story thriller, and Best Picture-winning film, set in the little town of Sparta, Mississippi during a hot summer, with an innovative score by Quincy Jones and title song sung by Ray Charles. Norman Jewison masterfully directed this murder melodrama from a screenplay by Stirling Silliphant that was based on John Ball's novel. The film's posters proclaimed: "They got a murder on their hands. They don't know what to do with it." The liberal-minded film, realistically-filmed by cinematographer Haskell Wexler (who had just filmed Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

(1966) and would later go on to Coming Home (1978)), was a milestone for the racially-divided mid-60s because it forced the odd-couple collaboration of a bigoted but shrewd, redneck Southern sheriff named Bill Gillespie (Rod Steiger) and a lone, intelligently-clever black homicide expert from Philadelphia named Virgil Tibbs (Sidney Poitier). The film, with a non-white actor in a lead acting role, was so controversial that it couldn't be filmed in the Deep South, so the sets were recreated in various small towns in two states: Sparta, Freeburg, and Belleville, Illinois, and Dyersburg, Tennessee. The Jungle Book (1967), 78 minutes, D: Disney Studio Playtime (1967, Fr./It.), 124 minutes, D: Jacques Tati Point Blank (1967), 92 minutes, D: John Boorman A dreamy, non-linear thriller plot, with flashbacks, time lapses, and bold surrealistic colors. Left for dead before the opening credits, Walker (Lee Marvin) then seeks revenge against a Los Angeles crime syndicate.

Two for the Road (1967, UK), 112 minutes, D: Stanley Donen Valley of the Dolls (1967), 123 minutes, D: Mark Robson Based upon Jacqueline Susann's 1966 best-selling book, this trashy, 'it's-so-bad-it's-good' soap-opera feature-length film became Fox Studios' top money-maker hit for 1968, although it was severely criticized by most film critics. The title of the trashy melodramatic film referred to 'uppers' and 'downers' - barbiturate pills. Three fame-seeking, aspiring starlets who became 'corrupted' by Hollywood were bitchy Neely O'Hara (Patty Duke), Anne Welles (Barbara Parkins), and Jennifer North (Sharon Tate). The campy classic included scenes of their sexual dalliances (never very explicit) and their failings due to pill-popping (pills=dolls) and drinking. Most of the sex (filmed in silhouette), scandal, and drug abuse now seem tame by today's standards, although appropriate for the 1960s.

Wait Until Dark (1967), 108 minutes, D: Terence Young Week End (1967, Fr./It.), 105 minutes, D: Jean-Luc Godard The Graduate (1967) - IMDb IMDb 29 December 2016 2:33 AM, UTC NEWS There was an error trying to load your rating for this title. Some parts of this page won't work property. Please reload or try later. X Beta I'm Watching This! Keep track of everything you watch; tell your friends. Error From $2.99 (SD) on Amazon Video ON DISC A disillusioned college graduate finds himself torn between his older lover and her daughter.

Director: a list of 42 titles created 15 Nov 2011 a list of 30 titles created 08 Jul 2014 a list of 32 titles created 29 Mar 2015 a list of 25 titles created 09 Dec 2015 a list of 32 titles created 5 months ago Search for " The Graduate " on Amazon.com Connect with IMDb Want to share IMDb's rating on your own site? Use the HTML below. You must be a registered user to use the IMDb rating plugin. Won 1 Oscar. Another 20 wins & 16 nominations. See more awards » Videos Bonnie Parker, a bored waitress falls in love with an ex-con named Clyde Barrow and together they start a violent crime spree through the country, robbing cars and banks. Director: Arthur Penn Michael Dorsey, an unsuccessful actor, disguises himself as a woman in order to get a role on a trashy hospital soap. Director: Sydney Pollack A naive hustler travels from Texas to New York to seek personal fortune but, in the process, finds himself a new friend.

Director: John Schlesinger Ted Kramer's wife leaves her husband, allowing for a lost bond to be rediscovered between Ted and his son, Billy. But a heated custody battle ensues over the divorced couple's son, deepening the wounds left by the separation. Director: Robert Benton Two Western bank/train robbers flee to Bolivia when the law gets too close. Director: George Roy Hill Selfish yuppie Charlie Babbitt's father left a fortune to his savant brother Raymond and a pittance to Charlie; they travel cross-country. Director: Barry Levinson A man befriends a fellow criminal as the two of them begin serving their sentence on a dreadful prison island, which inspires the man to plot his escape. Director: Franklin J. Schaffner Following the death of a publishing tycoon, news reporters scramble to discover the meaning of his final utterance. Director: Orson Welles A pair of NYC cops in the Narcotics Bureau stumble onto a drug smuggling job with a French connection. Director: William Friedkin A hack screenwriter writes a screenplay for a former silent-film star who has faded into Hollywood obscurity.

Director: Billy Wilder A bitter, aging couple, with the help of alcohol, use a young couple to fuel anguish and emotional pain towards each other. Director: Mike Nichols Edit Storyline Ben has recently graduated from college, with his parents now expecting great things from him. At his "Homecoming" party, Mrs. Robinson, the wife of his father's business partner, has Ben drive her home, which leads to an affair between the two. The affair eventually ends, but comes back to haunt him when he finds himself falling for Elaine, Mrs. Robinson's daughter. Written by Zac Abrams This is Benjamin. He's a little worried about his future. See more » Genres: 22 December 1967 (USA) See more » Also Known As: $873 (USA) (18 May 2012) Gross: 4-Track Stereo (Westrex Recording System)| Mono (35 mm optical prints) Color: Did You Know? Trivia Dustin Hoffman was told before his test that all the other actors who tested had agreed to a six-picture contract, but he refused, telling his agent he would rather do it for free and not be obligated to appear in pictures he didn't like.

He ended up getting paid $17,000 without further contracted films. See more » Goofs In the first scene at the airport, Ben walks close towards the automatic door, past a pillar. In the next shot, he hasn't reached the pillar, and walks for a few second to reach where he was where the cut occurred. See more » Quotes [first lines] Pilot: Ladies and gentlemen, we are about to begin our descent into Los Angeles. The sound you just heard is the landing gear locking into place. Los Angeles weather is clear; temperature is 72. We expect to make our 4 hour and 18 minute flight on schedule. We have enjoyed having you on board, and look forward to seeing you again in the near future. Mike Nichols, groundbreaking director of The Graduate, dead at 83 Mike Nichols, groundbreaking director of The Graduate, dead at 83 Dennis McClellan Full movies coverage Mike Nichols, who emerged in the late 1950s as half of a groundbreaking satirical comedy team and found his true calling in the next decade as director of the landmark films Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Graduate, has died. He was 83.

Nichols, who was married to ABC News' Diane Sawyer, died Wednesday night, ABC News President James Goldston announced. His representative, Leslee Dart, said that Nichols suffered a cardiac arrest at his home in New York. Along with Elaine May, Nichols created two-person character sketches that deftly ridiculed the neuroses and pretensions of American life during the Eisenhower and Kennedy eras. Their Grammy Award-winning partnership peaked in a 1960-61 Broadway run of An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May, then the duo parted ways and he changed course. SHARE Pin to Pinterest PIN Link Film director Mike Nichols poses with wife television journalist Diane Sawyer at the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences' 13th Annual Hall of Fame induction ceremony in 1997. Photo: AP As a director over the next five decades, he won an Oscar and multiple Tony and Emmy awards while amassing a string of movie credits that includes Catch-22, Carnal Knowledge, Silkwood, Working Girl and The Birdcage.

A childhood Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany who went on to receive the American Film Institute's Life Achievement Award in 2010, Nichols once said he didn't know what he'd leave behind for posterity as a filmmaker but that he was glad he had "connected with people, cheering them up in the dark." Advertisement An alumnus of the Compass Players, the Chicago improvisational comedy group in which he and May created many of their classic routines, Nichols found his niche as a director after accepting an offer in 1963 to direct a Broadway-bound comedy written by Neil Simon. "On the first day of rehearsal, I thought, 'Well, look at this. Here is what I was meant to do.' I knew instantly that I was home," Nichols recalled in a 2003 interview with the Washington Post. SHARE Pin to Pinterest PIN Link German born US film director Mike Nichols (right) and actor Tom Hanks answer questions on French television as they promote Charlie Wilson's War in Paris in 2007. Photo: AFP The blockbuster hit, which also starred Anne Bancroft as the predatory Mrs Robinson and Katharine Ross as her daughter Elaine, cemented Nichols' reputation as a movie director in the minds of many critics.

"After Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? even the Hollywood cynics needed relatively little convincing, but with his second film, The Graduate, Mike Nichols demolishes any lingering doubts that he is a brilliant, imaginative and freewheeling movie director," the Los Angeles Times' Charles Champlin wrote in his review. SHARE Pin to Pinterest PIN Link Mike Nichols, Emma Thompson, novelist Joe Klein, Adrian Lester and John Travolta at the Palais des festivals in Cannes in 1988. Photo: AFP New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther called The Graduate, which memorably featured the music of Simon and Garfunkel and added the word "plastics" to the pop-culture lexicon, "one of the best seriocomic social satires we've had from Hollywood since Preston Sturges was making them." "The Graduate and Bonnie and Clyde, which both came out in 1967, were really the first two 'New Hollywood' movies," said film historian Peter Biskind, whose books include Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-And-Rock 'n' Roll Generation Saved Hollywood.

SHARE Pin to Pinterest Link French actress-dancer Leslie Caron presents the Oscar for best director for the movie The Graduate to director Mike Nichols at the 1967 Academy Awards. Photo: AP "I do think that Nichols is one of the best directors of that era," Biskind told The Times in 2012. "He had a bit of an up-and-down movie career, but every director makes flops, and the films that did succeed were so brilliant and so pioneering." One of the most important reasons The Graduate broke ground was because of the casting, Biskind said. "Nichols had the smarts to cast Dustin Hoffman in a role that was really meant for Robert Redford, and that paved the way for the revolution in casting that occurred in the '70s whereby actors who were essentially character actors like Hoffman, [Al] Pacino and [Robert] De Niro - the ethnic actors - could become leading men and big movie stars," Biskind said. Nichols, Biskind said, "is a very good director of actors.

Hoffman was a nobody and didn't know anything about movie acting, and Nichols took him and took Anne Bancroft and everyone else in the movie and got the best out of them." Of Nichols the director, Richard Burton once said, "He appears to defer to you, then in the end he gets exactly what he wants. He conspires with you rather than directs you, to get your best." Kurt Russell and Cher took to calling Nichols "Dad" during the filming of the 1983 biographical drama Silkwood. And Jeremy Irons, who was directed by Nichols in Tom Stoppard's Broadway drama The Real Thing, told the New York Times: "Mike creates a very protective environment. He's like the best of lovers; he makes you feel he's only for you." Throughout what has been called a roller-coaster career in films that included box-office failures such as Catch-22 (1970), The Fortune (1975) and What Planet Are You From? (2000), Nichols frequently returned to Broadway.

He won five more Tonys as a director - for Simon's Plaza Suite in 1968 and The Prisoner of Second Avenue in 1972, The Real Thing in 1984, the musical Spamalot in 2005 and a revival of Death of a Salesman in 2012. He also shared a 1977 Tony for best musical as a producer of Annie and shared a 1984 Tony for best play as a producer of The Real Thing. For television, Nichols was an executive producer of the 1976-80 dramatic series Family and won directing Emmys for the 2001 HBO movie Wit and for the 2004 HBO miniseries Angels in America. Nichols, whose later films included Primary Colors, Closer and Charlie Wilson's War, received the National Medal of Arts in 2001, a Kennedy Centre Honour in 2003 and the Directors Guild of America's Lifetime Achievement Award in 2004. "He's the smartest person I ever worked with," Neil Simon said in the 2010 AFI tribute. "He never demanded respect; he just gets it.

You're lucky you're in the same room with him." Nichols was born Michael Igor Peschkowsky in Berlin on November 6, 1931. His physician father was a Russian Jewish emigre. His German Jewish mother was the daughter of Gustav Landauer, a leading theorist on anarchism in Germany, and the poet and translator Hedwig Lachmann. In 1938, Nichols' father came to the United States, where he planned to establish a new medical practice in New York before sending for his family. Four months before Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, seven-year-old Nichols and his three-year-old brother, Robert, left their ailing mother behind and sailed to New York, where their father had assumed the name Nichols.

Nichols, who learned only two sentences in English for the voyage - "I do not speak English" and "Please, do not kiss me" - later remembered seeing a sign in a New York delicatessen in Hebrew and asking his father, "Is that allowed here?" At school, Nichols' outsider status was compounded by his wearing a cap to cover his bald head, the result of a rare reaction to a whooping cough vaccination that caused him to permanently lose all of his body hair when he was 4. "I was quietly unhappy," Nichols, who later wore a wig, recalled of his school days in a 1984 New York Times interview. "I didn't fit. ... I was that little bald kid." Their mother remained in Germany about a year and a half before she escaped and was reunited with her family. Nichols' father died of leukemia a few years later and his mother had to take on a series of jobs to support them. He continued his education on scholarships and graduated from the Walden School in Manhattan in 1948. Two years later, he entered the University of Chicago with the intention of taking pre-med courses to become a psychiatrist.

But Nichols, whose interest in theatre had been sparked at 16 when he took a date to see Tennessee Williams' landmark A Streetcar Named Desire on Broadway, soon gave up the idea of going to medical school and began acting in campus theatre productions. He was appearing in a production of August Strindberg's Miss Julie when, as he recalled in a 2000 interview with the New Yorker magazine, he noticed "this evil, hostile girl in the front row staring at me throughout the performance." The girl was Elaine May, who was unofficially auditing classes at the university. As a child, she had acted in a traveling Yiddish theatre operated by her father, Jack Berlin. She was married for the first time at 16 and now had a young daughter being raised by her mother in Los Angeles. Several weeks after Nichols saw May in the audience, their friendship was launched when he spotted her sitting in a Chicago train station waiting room. He later recalled approaching her and saying in a Central European accent, "May I seetdown, plis?" "If you veesh," she replied, as they proceeded to improvise a meeting between two spies. "We had instant rapport," Nichols once said.

Nichols and May had what the New Yorker article termed "a brief romance" after their train-station meeting. "Everybody wanted Elaine, and the people who got her couldn't keep her," Nichols told the magazine. He remembered feeling early on that "we were safe from everyone else when we were with each other." After dropping out of the university in 1953, Nichols returned to New York the next year to study method acting with Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio. Unable to land any acting jobs, he returned to Chicago in 1955 and joined the newly formed Compass Players, whose charter members included May. With the Compass Players, a precursor to Second City, "Elaine and I found the whole world of comedy together. ... That is to say, our way of seeing things and doing things meshed," he said in a 2010 interview with The Times. One of their memorable sketches, between a rocket scientist whose mother fills him with guilt for not calling her, grew out of a phone call Nichols received from his own mother. "My mother called and said, 'Michael, this is your mother, do you remember me?'" Nichols recalled in The Times interview.

"I said, 'Mum, can I call you right back?' Then I called Elaine and said, 'I have a piece for tonight.' I told her the line and she yelled with laughter. That is all we ever said. "Then we showed up that night and got on the stools and we did the scene as it was. ... That is what happened with Elaine and me. We thought enough alike and differently to have these things happen." After moving to New York in late 1957, Nichols and May became overnight sensations performing at the Village Vanguard and doing their act on TV's Omnibus and the Steve Allen and Jack Paar shows. Nichols' partnership with May, he later said, provided the foundation for his becoming a director. "I was always saying, 'Can't you do that faster?' and 'You're taking too long over this,"' he told the New York Times Magazine in 1984. "She'd fill things. I'd shape them. She had endless capacity for invention. My invention was not endless. But it taught me about beginnings, middles and ends.

I had to push the sketch ahead, because I couldn't invent as she could." In a 2012 interview with The Times prior to the opening of the Nichols-directed Broadway revival of Death of a Salesman, the director, then 80, said: "I look back at those first plays I did and the first movies I did, and I only have one question, which is, 'What was I so confident about? Where did I get that?' It scares me because I'm not [confident] now at all. I'm anything but confident." Directing, he said, "is mystifying. It's a long skid on an icy road, and you do the best you can to stay on the road. ... If you're still here when you come out of the spin, it's a relief. But you've got to have the terror if you're going to do anything worthwhile." Nichols was married four times, first to singer and Chicago TV personality Patricia Scot. He had a daughter, Daisy, with his second wife, Margo Callas. He had two children, Max and Jenny, with his third wife, novelist Annabel Davis-Goff.

He is survived by Sawyer, his wife of 26 years, his three children and four grandchildren. The life of Mike Nichols Few directors have moved between Broadway and Hollywood as easily as Mike Nichols. Here are six facts about Nichols, who died on Wednesday. A bad reaction to a whooping-cough vaccine at age 4 left Nichols permanently hairless, according to the New Yorker magazine. Later he would come to rely on wigs and fake eyebrows. Nichols told the New York Times that when he came to the United States from Germany in 1939 at age 7 as Michael Igor Peschkowsky, he knew only two English sentences: "I do not speak English" and "Please, do not kiss me." Nichols met ABC News anchor Diane Sawyer in 1986 in a Paris airport lounge as they waited for a Concorde flight to New York. He said he approached Sawyer and told her that she was his hero and she responded by saying he was her hero. In 1998 Sawyer became Nichols' fourth wife. Nichols and Buck Henry were boyhood schoolmates in New York.

Later Henry would write the screenplays for Nichols' movies "The Graduate," "Catch-22" and "The Day of the Dolphin." When not directing, Nichols often concentrated on breeding prize-winning Arabian horses. During a tribute to Nichols at the 2003 Kennedy Center Honours ceremony, Meryl Streep and Candice Bergen read Nichols' "Five Rules for Filmmaking": 1: The careful application of terror is an important form of communication. 2: Anything worth fighting for is worth fighting dirty for. 3: There's absolutely no substitute for genuine lack of preparation. 4: If you think there's good in everybody, you haven't met everybody. 5: Friends may come and go but enemies will certainly become studio heads. Los Angeles Times, Reuters Advertisement Most Popular

Question: Charles Webb wrote which book, made into a famous film directed by Mike Nichols, in 1967?
Answer: The Graduate