I’m recently back from
Berkeley, California, where (in the wake of the horrendous fires that destroyed
the town of Paradise) students were walking around the famous University of
California campus wearing surgical masks to protect themselves from breathing
dirty air. How times have changed! When I was of college age, student-activist
types didn’t seem to be worrying about the wear and tear on their bodies as
they let themselves be dragged through the streets in anti-Vietnam protests. And
I well remember one scruffy young woman boasting that she was newly able to
stomp out cigarettes with her bare feet.
I’m by no means making fun of
the Camp Fire and its victims (nor of student activists, for that matter). I’m
just waxing philosophical about the thought that colleges and movies don’t
always mix. Actually, I was in Berkeley at the invitation of Virginia Williams
of the newly re-named Graduate Hotel
(formerly the Durant). Berkeley has a featured role in The Graduate (it’s where Dustin Hoffman’s Benjamin Braddock goes in
pursuit of his dream girl, played by Katharine Ross). And so I was asked to
speak on The Graduate in the comfy
hotel lobby, after which the film would be screened. The best laid plans of
mice and men . . . . Because of the
smoky skies, the Big Game between Cal and Stanford was cancelled, and expected
hotel occupancy dropped from 80% to 30% for the weekend. So I delivered my talk
to two bartenders and a small handful of attentive guests.
The production team of The Graduate was equally disappointed
when they appealed to the university’s chancellor for permission to film on
campus. Trying to be persuasive, they got a studio executive who was active in
the Berkeley alumni organization to plead their case. He thought a reference to
the bad publicity generated by the raucous campus Free Speech Movement of
1964-65 would do the trick, suggesting in his letter that “the intended beauty
of color photography would place the University in a better light contrasted with
the hours of newsreels recording only Sather Gate Plaza. Berkeley would appear
as the stable, respectable, educational community it is.” This appeal didn’t
work, and so the filmmakers were forced to get creative. That’s why (with one
very small exception) the campus scenes in The
Graduate were all shot at a rival school, the University of Southern
California.
Which is not to say that Berkeley
doesn’t appear in The Graduate. Hoffman
was filmed roaming Berkeley’s famous Telegraph Avenue, spying Elaine emerging
from the legendary Moe’s Books, and rushing up the steps of an ivy-covered
Berkeley frat house. There was even a covert (or, in movie parlance, “stolen”) shot
of Katharine Ross, as Elaine Robinson, sauntering across the campus’s Sproul
Plaza.
Though The Graduate was filmed in the spring and summer of 1967, the film
contains barely a single glimpse of the sartorial style—or the political
angst—we associate with the late Sixties. Only a young couple emerging from a
Telegraph Avenue jewelry store (he with bushy hair and sideburns, she in
miniskirt, floppy hat, and carrying a small baby), seem part of the hang-loose generation
I associate with college life circa 1967. Katharine Ross would later marvel at
the ironic fact that, while filming a novel published in 1963, “we were still
in the fifties mentality.” At the very time that cast and crew were shooting in
Berkeley, said Ross, “the Summer of Love happened in San Francisco, and Vietnam
was about to blow the country apart and change us all forever.”
This post is for Virginia Williams of the
Graduate Hotel as well as Bel McNeill, bookseller extraordinaire at Bel and
Bunna’s of Lafayette, California. We sure had fun, didn't we?
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