Dustin Hoffman and Tony Goldwyn Discuss "A Walk on the Moon."

Show: FRESH AIR
Date: APRIL 19, 1999
Time: 12:00
Tran: 041901np.217
Type: FEATURE
Head: Dustin Hoffman and Tony Goldwyn
Sect: Entertainment
Time: 12:06

TERRY GROSS, HOST: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

My guests are Dustin Hoffman and Tony Goldwyn. They produced the new movie "A Walk on the Moon," which Goldwyn also directed. This is the first time Hoffman has produced a movie that he hasn't also starred in. And it's the first time that Goldwyn, who has acted in several films, has directed one.

Goldwyn is the grandson of Samuel Goldwyn, the Goldwyn of Metro Goldwyn Meyer. Tony says he grew up shielded from lots of the glamour and hype.

"A Walk on the Moon" is set at Dr. Fogler's (ph) bungalow colony in the Catskills, a place where Jewish working people from New York City come for summer vacations. The year is 1969, the year of Woodstock and the first moon walk. Dr. Fogler's is located just a few miles from Woodstock, but in terms of lifestyle it's far away.

Diane Lane plays a mother of two in her early 30s who married young and has learned - and is yearning to be part of the cultural changes around her. While her husband, played by Liav Schreiber (ph), is working days in the city as a TV repairman she has an affair with a hippie who sells blouses at the bungalow colony.

They go to Woodstock together. In this scene, her husband has just found out.

(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP -- SCENE FROM THE FILM "A WALK ON THE MOON")

GROSS: Neither Dustin Hoffman nor Tony Goldwyn summered in the Catskills. I asked what they responded to in the screenplay. Tony Goldwyn answered first.

TONY GOLDWYN, ACTOR; FILM PRODUCER, "A WALK ON THE MOON": Well, I'll go first because I read it first, I guess. I knew nothing about the world of the Catskills, and I started to read the script and thought this world is fabulous could it possibly have existed like this. I heard of the Borscht Belt (ph), and knew vaguely about this world of bungalow colonies and this Mecca for New Yorkers and Brooklynites in the summers, was so colorful and wonderful.

I was immediately drawn to it.

GROSS: Dustin Hoffman, what about you?

DUSTIN HOFFMAN, ACTOR; FILM PRODUCER, "A WALK ON THE MOON": I grew up in Los Angeles. I never went anywhere.

LAUGHTER

I didn't get into an airplane until, I think, I was 18 or 19. I still haven't been to the Catskills. I think my real interest in the material started with Tony's take on the material.

Coupled with the material, which is a script by Pamela Gray (ph), and that was -- I guess, what I was going to say is that Tony's take on it was the color gray, which is Pamela's last name. Meaning that there were no black and white characters. That this wife was committing adultery and she was not in a bad marriage. She loved her husband. She loved her children.

That the man she was committing adultery with was not a villain -- was not any kind of an archetype in a genre sense, that he was just a human being.

That she actually had rather deep feelings for both men, and the story of adultery from centering -- focusing on a woman -- with that kind of humanism in the approach, I mean, Tony's take on it is what really drew me to it.

GROSS: Dustin Hoffman, Liav Schreiber plays the husband in this film. And it seems to me that his voice is very similar in timbre to your voice.

HOFFMAN: Well, you know, he told me that when I first met him. We were doing a film called "Sphere" when we first met. And then I got friendly with Liav and he made this comment, which he's made since then a few times, which I keep trying to stop him from saying.

He says, "you know, I've been ripping you off since the beginning."

LAUGHTER

And I still don't understand what he means, because, you know, when you hear your own voice on tape recorder you say, that's not -- I don't sound like that. We never really know what our own voice sounds like.

In fact, if I -- some people in a supermarket or drugstore something will say, "I knew it was you. I didn't see you but I could hear your voice. I knew by the sound of your -- I had no idea, as any of us do, what that means.

I mean, I haven't heard myself -- I haven't heard impersonations of me. So, I guess it would be helpful just to hear a caricature of it.

But I don't hear it with Liav. And I told -- I said, stop saying that. You're not ripping me off. You're a first-rate actor. You're really a bright young guy on the threshold probably of a wonderful career, and you are your own person. But I have heard people say it.

Tony, what do you think? I mean, I was never on the set. I didn't come -- I would talk to Tony on the phone and get tapes.

GOLDWYN: We used to joke about it.

HOFFMAN: Do the scene like Dustin.

GOLDWYN: Liav, it's really good, but if you could, just on this take just take, a little bit more like Dustin that would be great. I think what Dustin would do at this moment is...

HOFFMAN: ...that's all you have to do is tell an actor that.

GOLDWYN: We're looking for a Dustin Hoffman kind of thing here.

HOFFMAN: He's producing it, and we'll only let you play the part if you do him.

LAUGHTER

GROSS: Now the movie is set in 1969, and in a way it's about a cultural clash between life at this, you know, nuclear family oriented resort bungalow colony in the Catskills and life in this new kind of counterculture as is typified by Woodstock. And it's at the summer of Woodstock.

Where were you both in the summer of 1969? Well, Dustin Hoffman, that was a big year for you. It was the year of "Midnight Cowboy." The year after "The Graduate." What was that summer like for you?

HOFFMAN: I think I was doing "Little Bit Man," and we were in different locations. We were in -- on a site where Little Big Horn happened in Billings, Montana. We were also in Los Angeles and we were in Calgary, Canada. And I can't remember which location we were at when Woodstock happened.

I do remember at the conclusion of "Little Big Man" I flew to Chicago to catch another great event at that time which was the last week of the Chicago Seven trial. But I missed Woodstock. I was a little old for that.

You know, I was 30 when I did "The Graduate." And I was too old to be drafted and too old to be in college, and not old enough -- I mean, not too old enough to partake in a bit of the poppy seed of the day.

GROSS: Why did you want to go to the Chicago Seven trial?

HOFFMAN: I heard it was the best show in town, and it was. It was - ironically the judge's name was Judge Hoffman. I saw him in action. And he really was an actor. He was kind of a diminutive wizened little guy sitting in a big chair talking very softly so everybody had to lean forward to hear every word he said.

He knew how to command an audience. And I met Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman and Tom Hayden. And I had been following it. For some reason I was very attracted to it. I was reading the "Village Voice" that was being sent to me while I was in Canada and Montana. "The Daily News" and all -- there was many more New York papers then.

And what was aware of when I was there was that nothing - none of the journalists caught one specific reality which I caught, and that was I was in the men's room and I saw Abbie Hoffman in there talking really jocularly with the prosecutor.

"So what did you do over the weekend?" "Oh, I did this, I did this." They were all getting something out of it. And then suddenly they would get in front in the courtroom and the jury and the judge would be brought in, and then suddenly they would assume roles of hating each other.

GROSS: Interesting.

HOFFMAN: Yeah.

GROSS: Wow. Get a lot out of being in the men's room sometimes, huh?

LAUGHTER

HOFFMAN: And the ladies room.

LAUGHTER

GROSS: Only in "Tootsie."

HOFFMAN: Hopefully.

GROSS: Tony Goldwyn, what were you up to in 1969, the year that your movie is set?

GOLDWYN: Yeah, I was nine years old and I was at a summer camp in Oregon being a nine-year-old. I was very unaware, you know, the moon landing was a big deal. And there is no television at the camp I was at. It was pretty rustic.

And so I remember my mother saved me the newspaper - the front page of the newspaper for me. So that's what I was doing.

GROSS: Well, Dustin Hoffman, 1968 was the year of "The Graduate," and because of that movie I think you were probably seen in part as a representative of your generation. And I was wondering what that experience was like for you.

HOFFMAN: You know, I wanted to be honest in those days.

LAUGHTER

GOLDWYN: That's all changed now.

HOFFMAN: Yes. If I had to do it again I would have learned the art of selling out early. Because I was -- I was 29 going on 30, and I was -- I have a fixed memory of going -- being invited to some college because I went from an unemployed actor -- actually somebody on the unemployment line to doing "The Graduate."

And suddenly I'm thrust into stardom, and the next thing I know is I'm supporting McCarthy for president and flying around the country with one of his daughters in a little airplane to all these colleges trying to, you know, get goes for Eugene McCarthy. From an unemployment line to that in a few months.

And I remember being in a college somewhere in the country and the kids kind of having this glaze in their eye of, oh, the new icon has arrived. And I systematically set out to kind of dethrone myself. And I said, "guys, I just played a part, I'm an actor. And I'm not your age. I'm 30 years old, and that's just a guy I played and he has very little to do with me."

And I know I set off a bit of disappointment, and then I did "Midnight Cowboy" after that to further dispel it, I guess. I had a great desire to be known as an actor, and I think it's all changed now. I mean, in those days you didn't even admit it if you were on a soap opera. I mean, B movies were really C movies, and today B movies are legitimized.

GOLDWYN: And are A movies.

HOFFMAN: Yes, and the A movies really won't even get done, and no one went to the Academy Awards, the Goldwyn Globes. I think, when I showed up as the most promising newcomer, I was the only one that showed up there, that was a time when - we maybe going back to that now -- slowly. I mean, it was a whole antiestablishment.

Now we are so -- I think the kids embrace the establishment -- embrace fashion. Embrace making money. And I really wanted to overt the curse of being called a star. I forgot the question.

GROSS: Oh, about being seen as a, you know, being seen as a representative of your generation.

HOFFMAN: Oh, yeah, I didn't -- I just wanted to be this actor.

GROSS: Mmm-hmm.

HOFFMAN: I didn't want to -- I would've done it differently. I could've been -- I could've been a big star today.

LAUGHTER

I would have taken advantage of it.

GROSS: What might you have done differently?

HOFFMAN: Well, I probably would have done it differently if it had happened today. It just -- I wasn't brave, I was just being in vogue. It was the vogue to be antiestablishment. It was the vogue to be pure. I would probably, you know, lie about my age, if could, today. The first thing I'd do is tell them I was 22 and...

GROSS: ... and the second thing you'd do is tell them that you were better than they were.

LAUGHTER

HOFFMAN: Yes. And follow me, follow me.

GROSS: My guests are Dustin Hoffman and Tony Goldwyn. They produced the movie, "A Walk on the Moon" which Goldwyn also directed. We'll talk more after a break.

This is FRESH AIR.

BREAK

GROSS: My guests are Dustin Hoffman and Tony Goldwyn. They produced the new movie, "A Walk on the Moon" which Goldwyn also directed. We'll talk more about the film in a few minutes. First a question about a movie Hoffman recently starred in.

You know, in "Wag the Dog," Dustin Hoffman, you played a Hollywood producer who produces a fake war that's presented to the public as a real war in order to distract the American public's attention from the president's sex scandal.

HOFFMAN: You're reading this, I can tell.

LAUGHTER

GROSS: I am. That's great.

LAUGHTER

I actually wrote that down so I'd get it straight because I sometimes lose track of what I'm saying. That's great that you notice that.

HOFFMAN: Go ahead. Go ahead.

GROSS: You're good. So, OK. So, anyway, when the Clinton sex scandal broke and Clinton started bombing Iraq people started screaming "Wag the Dog." And then I read that when we started Serbia, Serbia -- Serb television started showing "Wag the Dog" over and over Again. I guess to try to discredit the Clinton Administration.

HOFFMAN: I think they did that in Iraq also.

GROSS: They did that in Iraq too. They did that in Iraq too. How did that make you feel?

HOFFMAN: It's funny, you don't have reactions like, I guess, other people have. Right after the film came out when it -- because we made the film thinking we were being satirical, thinking -- in fact, we were accused in a lot of reviews as, oh, come on that could never happen.

And then, you know, what happened in real-life in a sense made us look somewhat prosaic. I guess when you're doing it, and even afterwards, you don't have what one would expect you -- you don't have the reaction that one would expect you to have.

You don't say, oh my God, I can't believe this. Other people say it. You just kind of look at and say, oh, that's interesting.

Because what we were doing had nothing to do with the Clinton Administration. I mean, David Mamet wrote the script; Barry Levinson directed it. And the point - and they worked together on the script because Barry is also a writer. And what they were really talking about was the media and what Marshall Mcluen (ph) said years ago -- the brilliant statement that the medium is the message.

In other words, it's not what's happened that matters or that counts or that becomes the truth to us -- the public -- it's how the media interprets what happened that becomes the truth.

The truth has no meaning. It goes all the way back to when the Americans won a battle against the Native American Indians, it was a victory. And when the Native American Indians won a battle it was a massacre. You see it's the way it's -- from the very beginning of our culture it is the way it is spun.

And with the media, one can really spin in a very adept and all consuming way. So, that script was really pointing toward something that had happened before Clinton. It was simply dramatizing satirically what happened -- I think Bush was called -- what was it, the wimp factor?

GROSS: Mmm-hmm.

HOFFMAN: And then there was a war hopefully to remove and erase the wimp factor. Reagan had, politically, from his administrative point of view a terrible embarrassment because the army base's were not protected -- where was it?

GOLDWYN: Grenada. In Beirut.

HOFFMAN: In Beirut. And shortly after that, yes, he invaded Grenada. What never ceases -- I guess were my mind goes is not what do I think or locale close this is, my -- I just -- I was just an actor in the film and I knew that it was the truth. It felt like the truth. The fact that the truth happened again doesn't amaze me that much. It's happened before.

What never ceases to amaze me is all these stigmas that get put onto people and, I'm not even saying whether they deserve it or they don't deserve it, but what happens to it?

Tony used the word ephemeral before. Saddam Hussein is Hitler. He must be stopped. He has to be eliminated. Suddenly Hitler is still there. We don't hear the name anymore, what happened to Noriega? It's all you heard. Well, he had been put in jail but then we learned he worked for the CIA before that happened. What happened to Qaddafi? I mean, when they took out a couple blocks of apartment houses trying to get him. And suddenly he's still -- but suddenly they don't bear the stigma. It's a new one now, it's Milosevic.

And again, I'm sure that all of these people have certain things -- unattractive things to say the least - in common.

But this holds until the next one. And I think that's what "Wag the Dog" was talking about.

GROSS: I understand exactly what you're saying, but I'm wondering how you felt when you found out that people -- that the movie was being shown in Iraq and in Serbia?

HOFFMAN: It doesn't surprise me. I mean, I think when President Clinton -- I mean, I would tell you if it did surprise me. Why it makes sense to me from a dramatic point of view. When Clinton was vacationing in Martha's Vineyard and before he came out with a statement, I think, about the Lewinsky thing saying that he had -- he was now going to tell the truth.

I think while they were waiting for that statement all the reporters were in a tent watching "Wag the Dog." And when I heard about that I just said, oh, well, what do you know. That's the kind of reaction -- that's long winded. I should have said at the beginning, well, what do you know? Or as Vonnegut said in "Slaughterhouse Five" at the end of every chapter, "and so it goes."

GROSS: Dustin Hoffman Tony Goldwyn produced the new movie, "A Walk on the Moon" which Goldwyn also directed. They'll be back in the second half of the show.

I'm Terry Gross and this is FRESH AIR.

BREAK

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

Back with Dustin Hoffman and Tony Goldwyn. They produced the new movie, "A Walk on the Moon" which Goldwyn also directed. The movie is set at a bungalow colony in the Catskills in 1969, the summer of Woodstock and the first moon walk.

The bungalow colony is a summer get away for Jewish families from New York City, and although it's just a few miles from the Woodstock Festival, the cultural changes that Woodstock represents have made very little impact on the adults at the bungalow colony.

The Catskill culture was very much a kind of Jewish working-class and middle-class culture. And I know that you're both Jewish, and I'm curious how much Jewish has figured into your backgrounds. Tony Goldwyn, let's start with you.

I mean, your grandfather Samuel Goldwyn was a Jewish ÈmigrÈ from Poland whose real name was Smuel Geltfish (ph).

GOLDWYN: Right.

GROSS: He was the son of Hasidic Jews. His father had been a rabbinical student. As a boy he wore pais (ph), which is the long sideburns that the Orthodox Jews wear. Yiddish was his first language, and then he remade himself in Hollywood.

Was there anything left of Jewish background when you were growing up?

GOLDWYN: No. In a word. It was odd. He was of a sort of group that was really in flight from his roots and wanted to really reinvent itself. And be more American then, you know, Henry Ford. So, we celebrated Christmas. We really had no Jewish upbringing.

And I remember going to my grandfather's funeral at 13 years old and being shocked because there was a rabbi suddenly conducting the ceremony. And it just seems so out of keeping. And I was not raised religious at all. My parents were not religious, but my grandmother was Catholic and very religious.

And there was a rabbi who seemed to know my grandfather well, which puzzled me. And over the gravesite my brothers and my father were standing over the grave, and there my father was reciting the Kaddish (ph) over the grave. And it was surreal to me.

However, that said, I have always felt a real connection with my Jewish roots. And particularly doing this movie, although the Jewishness -- although the Jewish setting was not really at all part of the appeal other than it was a wonderful colorful world.

GROSS: Mmm-hmm.

GOLDWYN: But as I got into it, it was about of group of people who took an alternate path to him. I mean, this is a story about - and the Catskills is the story about Jews who came to New York from Eastern Europe and settled into the lower Eastside, and ultimately into Brooklyn. And lived a very tough life, and the Catskills - getting to the Skills -- I'm talking about in the '20s really -- was a break from the oppressive heat and poverty of the city.

So they would go, you know, flee to the mountains, and it was a kind of -- it was a sanctuary. And then it grew and grew and grew into this -- into what we know as the Borscht Belt in this fabulous vacation Mecca.

Anyway, I guess you can hear I got very -- I felt very connected suddenly to that world. I felt that I was in a sense discovering sort of cousins in a way. And that was a really beautiful thing.

GROSS: Dustin Hoffman, what role did Jewishness have in your family? Were you brought up observing any Jewish customs?

HOFFMAN: No. My father was an atheist. Not a professional a atheist, but when you asked him he just said kid, it's all - tell me the word I should say. It was one of the first and last things he said to me, I remember it when I was a little kid and then when he turned 80. Slightly before he died, on a walk on the beach, he reiterated it once again.

He said, let me tell you something kid it's all -- for the air, we can all say -- it's all horse puckey. Would be, I guess, the...

GROSS: ... the cleaned up way of doing it.

HOFFMAN: Yeah. But -- so we had no - it was my brother and myself. We were not bar mitzvahed. We were circumcised, but I'm sure that was the city.

LAUGHTER

There was -- my mother's mother did live with us and she spoke Yiddish. And when they didn't want us to understand what they were saying -- my mother, my father and my mother's mother -- my grandmother -- would speak Yiddish.

I was born in '37. I -- the war -- Second World War ended in '45, so in a sense I went through the Holocaust without knowing it was going on. I never got a chance to ask my parents if they consciously kept it from me.

I do know that I lived in an atmosphere, like Tony, of a family that desperately wanted to make it, to be successful, to be American. And what American meant was don't get stuck with an ethnicity that's going to hold you back. And I'm sure that's the way the Italians felt, and the Jews felt, and unfortunately the blacks couldn't deny what they were.

And sometimes I wished that I would have had some insignia on me which would have -- well, I guess I did. I mean, there was a kind of a virulent anti-Semitism in the part of Los Angeles I grew up in.

I remember the words "dirty Jew" and "kike." And for a long time, even as an adult, I would get a little pit in my stomach if someone -- I don't know about you Tony -- but if someone said, "so what are you?"

And you know what -- in my dialogue it's always "what do you mean? "Well, what are you?" And I would say, "what do you mean?" Well, they would say -- if they finally said religion, I would say, "I'm American." "No, what religion?"

And I would keep pretending like I didn't understand in my -- as a child.

GROSS: That's sad when you were earlier in your career casting for parts, did anyone ever tell you you looked too Jewish for a certain part?

HOFFMAN: They would never say it in those words. I think it still exists, if you turn on -- maybe not in film so much, but if you turn on the soap operas the look is still the same. And I'm sure Tony has seen it too, and those newspapers that the actors buy to look for work.

They have "available types." And it's "leading men." Now that automatically means non-Jewish and non-ethnic. It means white Anglo-Saxon Protestant, and in a sense it means all-Americans. Leading ladies, the same thing. If they wanted someone who looked ethnic they would say, "character leading man." "Character or character juvenile" as opposed to just juvenile, and as opposed to ingenue.

Ingenue was not Barbra Streisand. Ingenue is Gwyneth Paltrow. I don't think that's really changed yet.

GROSS: Well, how much do you feel like you were able to kind of make your own rules in a way, and much do you feel like you were restricted from certain parts because of your look?

HOFFMAN: I ran. It was my - I was 20 years old going on 21 I left Los Angeles and just ran to New York. New York meant, to me, the fantasy was -- it didn't pan out that way because basically I was unemployed for 10 years waiting on tables -- but that it meant for me a place where someone could get a job and look like the people on "Bonanza."

LAUGHTER

Which was a mean cast in those days. I mean, Mike Nichols, when he cast me in "The Graduate" was a really courageous thing on his part. And his friends did think he had really made the most self-destructive move of his life. He called them walking surf boards. And it was these guys who were getting all the work that had blond hair and blue eyes.

In fact, the guy at the end of the movie that I think Katherine Ross is supposed to marry, he purposely hired someone who looked like the actors who looked like the actors that got all those roles.

I mean, even Tony doesn't really look ethnic. Somehow, he's cast as the bad guy probably and has been because he doesn't look enough like the Redford look or even enough like -- or even ethnic enough to be the breakthrough like in between.

GOLDWYN: Right.

HOFFMAN: OK, villain.

LAUGHTER

GROSS: Is that something they you have tried to change at all as a producer?

HOFFMAN: Well, I mean -- this is the first thing I've ever -- "Walk on the Moon" is the first movie I've ever produced and I'm not in. And it was an early pleasure in talking with my director -- a producer can say that, "my director" -- Tony Goldwyn -- his ideas on casting, because he really was not looking to cast in any kind of stereotypical way.

And in the past, yes, I asked for Meryl Streep when, you know, at that they wanted someone from "Charlie's Angels." She was unknown. I asked for Kathy Bates when it was her first film in a film I did called "Straight Time." Bill Murray, I had to beg for to be in "Tootsie." He was not considered seriously in those days because he was doing those "Meatball" movies.

And actors know this, I guess, and Tony's an actor. I mean, actors know -- I mean, I still hear it, it is amazing in a community in a so-called artistic community -- that there is such a continuing naivete. If you bring a name up an executive or a director or even a producer, the first thing they say is, oh, no, no, no. I saw him in this and I saw him in that. And so many times I've said, and I'm sure Tony has experienced it and said it himself, have you met the person?

I mean, because this person is really a good actor. Maybe that actor hasn't been used right.

GROSS: My guests are Dustin Hoffman and Tony Goldwyn. They produced the new movie, "A Walk on the Moon" which Goldwyn also directed. We'll talk more after a break.

This is FRESH AIR.

BREAK

GROSS: My guests are Dustin Hoffman and Tony Goldwyn. They produced the new movie, "A Walk on the Moon" which Goldwyn also directed.

It strikes me that your backgrounds are really very different. Tony Goldwyn comes from one of Hollywood's first families, and Dustin Hoffman, I've read that your father wanted to be a movie producer but the closest he came was supervising props once at Columbia.

HOFFMAN: Yeah. He would have loved to have been Samuel Goldwyn.

GROSS: Mmm-hmm. But he made his living as a furniture salesman.

HOFFMAN: Well, he -- by the time I was born he was no longer working at Columbia. There was a recession and he got fired with a number of other people. Anyway, actually at Columbia he was head of -- he went from the prop assistant to head of props to head of the set dressing department.

He worked on -- I mean, I was told this. This was before I was born, but he worked on Frank Capra films -- "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington." He did some of the set dressing for that.

And then he was fired. And I was born. And I guess he took his expertise from set dressing to furniture. And I always thought of him as being a successful person all my life. And he did not. I think he thought of himself as not.

GROSS: And I think your mother once auditioned once auditioned to be a dancer, but her mother forbade her to take the job when she got it. Do I have that right?

HOFFMAN: Now that my parents have passed on I guess I have more freedom to talk about -- I won't get phone calls from them saying, how could you say that?

LAUGHTER

I -- there was a skeleton in my closet which I discovered not too many years ago. And that was my mother had been married before she was married to my father. And she was like 16 or 17 and she ran off with a jazz drummer.

And she did want to be a Zeigfield (ph) girl. And she did inspire a lot of "Tootsie," the film that I did. And in fact I was making it when she was ill and I was hoping that she would that she would survive long enough but she didn't.

But I think I had to bear a lot of her genetic heritage. But yes, she was - there's a flapper inside me.

LAUGHTER

GROSS: Well, I'm wondering with your parents both having been, or wanting to have been, in show business did you see that world as like, you know, the gated kingdom that you wanted to get into but you knew that was going to be really hard to get into?

HOFFMAN: No, I have an older brother -- just the two of us -- and he was pushed at being an extra. My mother was very much -- I think they were both Hollywood. My mother and my father came to L.A. from Chicago with fifty dollars in a Model A Ford.

My father worked as a laborer building the Hollywood Freeway. I have a wonderful photograph of him standing with a shovel. And I know that he loved George Raft (ph) and Edward G. Robinson, all these short guys. My father was only five foot two. And he emulated them.

And they smoked like they smoked in the movies. I think most of America smoked because of the movie stars smoked. It was a way of trying to look like the stars of the day. And before I was born, they -- because my father was working at Columbia -- they took my brother to tap dancing lessons and he was an extra in a couple of those Capra movies.

And he so shunned it, he hated it. I think at one recital he fell into the orchestra pit purposefully so he could end his career as an actor.

And by the time I was born they weren't about to repeat that mistake, so I never heard about acting. My father was already a furniture salesman by that point.

But they did stick a piano in front of me when I was five, and I was told I was going to be a pianist. And I grew up in Los Angeles studying a lot everyday and winding up enrolled at the Los Angeles Conservatory of Music and trying to do that and be a regular kid.

And trying to then break into jazz piano, and I just didn't have the talent. I didn't have an ear for it. I didn't read music easily. I didn't have that facility -- we had a little combo -- that other kids in the combo had were they could just pick something up.

It was laborious for me, and somehow I just took an acting class when I was about 18 or 19 simply to get through junior college because I was such a bad student. And for the -- I don't know - I never talked about it with Tony, but for the first time 10 hours past like it was 10 minutes, just working on a scene with somebody. You know?

GOLDWYN: Yeah.

HOFFMAN: That kind of, this is what I want to be because there's no work involved. This is not like working.

GROSS: So you knew you had found it.

HOFFMAN: I knew I found what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. Strongly believing that I would fail at it. I mean, I do -- I wish I didn't have such -- I wished that I could have kept my privacy as -- and as a celebrity you do give that up. You have to measure where you're going and how you're going to go, and when you walk out the door are you ready.

Do you have a pen so if someone that asks you for an autograph doesn't have to stand there for 10 minutes asking other people for it. And all these little things that, you know, you put up with in exchange for your stardom.

People videoing you and cameras and everything. And I think, in retrospect, had I known I was going to be a successful actor I never would have become an actor. I was sure I was going to fail at it.

LAUGHTER

And to fail at being an actor is a kind of romantic life when you're starting out, because it means you're just going to be in a community of actors and your going to hang out. You're going to be bohemian for the rest of your life.

GROSS: Hanging onto those ideals.

HOFFMAN: Yes. Yes. And then I thought, well, if this doesn't work I'll go back to college get a degree. And if worse comes to worse I'll teach acting at one of those colleges where the acting teacher has a lot of on-campus relationships.

LAUGHTER

It can't be all bad.

GOLDWYN: It sounds pretty good.

GROSS: Dustin Hoffman and Tony Goldwyn. They produced the new movie, "A Wall on the Moon," which Goldwyn also directed.

This is FRESH AIR.

BREAK

GROSS: My guests are Dustin Hoffman and Tony Goldwyn. They produced the new movie, "A Walk on the Moon" which Goldwyn also directed. When we left off Hoffman was saying he used to think that if he didn't make it as an actor he could always teach.

Did you think your technique oriented as opposed to intuitive oriented enough to teach?

HOFFMAN: Well, I did teach. I taught all through my early 20s. I was living with Bob Duval and he used to come home from the Post Office and complain that I didn't -- I had all these chairs -- these card table chairs I got from the Salvation Army. I got about 30 of them for $20.

And he says, "how many times do I have to tell you to clean up the chairs and put them back in the closet?" And I -- 'cause I made a classroom out of our living room. And with the coffee cans and the cigarette cans all over the place. But I always enjoyed teaching. It was -- I don't think it's -- I don't think it's difficult to teach well.

I think the trick is to not have a method, you can always study it -- to know that each actor has to find their center the way -- you know, it's not much different than parenting I think, or directing I guess. Tony can...

GOLDWYN: It's very very rare. I mean, Dustin is a wonderful teacher. I feel like, to me, in a lot of ways he helped perform the role of a teacher a lot in -- when we were cutting the film and helping to guide me through my creative process. Because what, as he just said, you know the bad kind of acting teacher is the one who says, OK, this is right. This is how you do it. This is the way to do it.

And every actor has had those kinds of teachers. And a good teacher is the one you can, you know, like a good director or -- lead you to your own instincts and sort of shine a light on where you as an individual need to in. Because ultimately everyone's method is only their own, wouldn't you say?

HOFFMAN: I think the striking thing in film acting, I don't think there is such a thing as a bad performance that should be laid at the actor's door. I really think it's the director and the editor's responsibility to make sure that there is not bad acting on that screen, because you really can get good performances out of actors, namely by giving them the freedom not to feel they have to make the scene work.

I know this is getting involved, but that's what Tony did. And to let them kind another way of getting to it. And another way is always their own way. And their own way means that it hasn't been done before. And many directors don't want to see what has not been done before.

GROSS: What's the best advice you were ever given for a movie?

HOFFMAN: Probably Mike Nichols in "The Graduate" who told me almost every day two things: one -- three things: one was stop acting.

LAUGHTER

GROSS: Oh, I thought you meant get a new career.

HOFFMAN: He probably thought that. But he would say you're acting. Don't act. Don't act. Don't do anything. Because you're doing so much in front of a camera by not doing what you think is anything. I mean, you're on, whatever is, 70 feet of screen. You're already interesting.

And the audience is doing a lot of work with -- for you even. I mean, you don't have to do their work for them. And he said, if I did something he didn't my -- he said, "what did you do that take? And I would tell him. And he would say, "why?" And I would tell him the reason. And he would look it me and he says, "oh, I get it. OK, on this next take when you get an idea in the middle of the scene do the opposite."

LAUGHTER

GOLDWYN: That's brilliant.

HOFFMAN: And that was really the smart thing to say. And then the third he did five or six times a day was tell me to clean the inside of my nose.

LAUGHTER

GOLDWYN: Which is actually the most helpful.

HOFFMAN: Which has kept me on the marquee for all this long.

GOLDWYN: He doesn't know you have that ten in your pocket.

GROSS: Is that important? Has a good take ever been ruined by an embarrassing you know what in your nose?

HOFFMAN: Yes, but now with digital they can -- it's costly but they can take a lot of boogers out that they couldn't do.

GROSS: Tony Goldwyn, now that you've completed "A Walk on the Moon," I'm wondering how you think how making movies today compares to when your grandfather was running MGM.

GOLDWYN: Well, I think in those days the movies were studio driven completely. Now, as a result of the movement of film in the '60s and '70s -- '50s, '60s and '70s really - they are more director driven. And we're beholden to the studios as banks.

I mean, there's still a lot of restriction in appealing to the commercial marketplace, but I think there are, you know, they're really aren't the moguls who are filmmakers who are the movie makers who say this is a Paramount movie. This is an MGM movie. This is, you know, a Samuel Goldwyn movie.

There is not an identity associated, and in those days they really were. The Warner's made a certain kind of movies. You know, now even within the restrictions of the marketplace and commerciality where you feel constrained and will complain about the studios sitting on our head, it is now a director driven medium really.

And, you know, star driven too, but the director seems to be the captain of the ship as opposed to the studio head as the identity.

HOFFMAN: Don't you think that you've come, in a way, 180 degrees where your grandfather, whether -- and he wasn't the only Jewish studio head immigrant, there were many others. There's been books about it. That there was a number of Jewish immigrants who started or had a great part in the beginning of Hollywood.

And what they did was idealize what they wanted to be -- like my father wanted to be American. And it was Andy Hardy and there was a kind of signature put out in all the films of what America was. And it was Jimmy Stewart and it was Hank Fonda and it was, you know, Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland. And it had a certain American face to it.

Not unlike Norman Rockwell's "Saturday Post" covers. And now we are coming full circle where those studio heads are pretending to be in the 'hood.

LAUGHTER

And dressing down. And high fiving. It still stings me when I see a suit high fiving -- I said, my God, is there nothing sacred? It's all money.

GROSS: Dustin Hoffman and Tony Goldwyn produced the new movie "A Walk on the Moon" which Goldwyn also directed.

I'm Terry Gross.

This is a rush transcript. This copy may not
be in its final form and may be updated.

TO PURCHASE AN AUDIOTAPE OF THIS PIECE, PLEASE CALL 877-21FRESH
Dateline: Terry Gross, Washington, DC
Guest: Dustin Hoffman and Tony Goldwyn
High: Film producers Dustin Hoffman and Tony Goldwyn. Their new film is "A Walk on the Moon." Goldwyn, who also directed the film, is the grandson of studio executive Samuel Goldwyn of MGM. Dustin Hoffman is a veteran actor whose first big break was starring in "The Graduate." Some of the films he's starred in include: "All the President's Men," "Kramer vs. Kramer," "Rainman," and "Tootsie."
Spec: Entertainment; Movie Industry; Lifestyle; Culture; Dustin Hoffman; Tony Goldwyn

Please note, this is not the final feed of record
Copy: Content and programming copyright 1999 WHYY, Inc. All rights reserved. Transcribed by FDCH, Inc. under license from WHYY, Inc. Formatting copyright 1999 FDCH, Inc. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to WHYY, Inc. This transcript may not be reproduced in whole or in part without prior written permission.
End-Story: Dustin Hoffman nad Tony Goldwyn