An Engrossing Film.

Show: FRESH AIR
Date: NOVEMBER 05, 1999
Time: 12:00
Tran: 110501np.217
Type: FEATURE
Head: Archive Interview with Dustin Hoffman and Tony Goldwyn
Sect: Entertainment
Time: 12:06

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

On this archive edition, we have an interview with Dustin Hoffman and Tony Goldwyn. They produced the movie "A Walk on the Moon," which Goldwyn also directed. It's just come out on video. Goldwyn is the grandson of movie mogul Samuel Goldwyn.

"A Walk on the Moon" is set at Dr. Vogler's Bungalow Colony in the Catskills, a place where Jewish working people from New York City come for summer vacations. The year is 1969, the summer of Woodstock and the first moon walk.

Dr. Vogler's is located just a few miles from Woodstock, but in terms of lifestyle, it's another world. Diane Lane (ph) plays a mother of two in her early 30s who married young and is yearning to be part of the cultural changes around her. She has an affair with a hippie who sells blouses at the Bungalow Colony. They even go to Woodstock together.

In this scene, her husband, played by Liav Schreiber (ph), has just found out.

(AUDIO CLIP, "A WALK ON THE MOON")

LIAV SCHREIBER, ACTOR: Where'd you meet him?

DIANE LANE, ACTRESS: He's a salesman.

SCHREIBER: Whoo! This is great. Ooh, like a Johnny Yoon (ph) routine. So is he a traveling salesman?

LANE: Sort of.

SCHREIBER: What's he sell?

LANE: Blouses.

SCHREIBER: Blouses.

He's the blouseman. You're screwing the blouseman.

Jesus Crow. Why don't you screw the dressman? At least that way, you'd get a full outfit, you know?

(END AUDIO CLIP)

(BEGIN AUDIOTAPE)

GROSS: Now, the movie is set in 1969, and it's about this -- 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 set the summer of Woodstock.

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

DUSTIN HOFFMAN, PRODUCER: I think I was doing "Little Big Man," and we were in different locations. We were in -- on a site where the Little Big Horn fight 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 that at the conclusion of "Little Big Man," I flew to Chicago to catch another great event at that time, 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 a -- 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, but that's...

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. Ironically, the judge's name was Judge Hoffman. I saw him in action, and he really was an actor, he was a kind of 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 Abby Hoffman and Tom Hayden. And I'd been following it. For some reason I was very attracted to it. I was reading "The Village Voice" that was being sent to me when I was in Canada and Montana, and "The Daily News" and all the -- there was many more New York papers then.

And what I was aware of when I was there is 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 Abby Hoffman in there talking, really jocularly, with the prosecutor. So what'd 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 or the -- and the judge would be brought in, and suddenly they would assume roles of hating each other. (laughs)

GROSS: Interesting. So you get a lot out of being in the men's room sometimes, huh?

(LAUGHTER)

HOFFMAN: And the ladies' room. (laughs)

GROSS: Only in "Tootsie."

HOFFMAN: Hopefully.

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

TONY GOLDWYN, PRODUCER/DIRECTOR: Yes, I was 9 years old, and I was at a summer camp in Oregon, being a 9-year-old. I was very unaware -- I mean, I -- you know, the moon landing was a big deal, and there was no television at the camp I was at. It was pretty rustic. And so I asked -- I remember my mother saved me the newspaper, the front page of the newspapers 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.

GROSS: (laughs)

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 29 going on 30, and I have a -- when you mention it, I have a fixed memory of going to some -- being invited to some college, because actually I went from an unemployed actor -- actually someone 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 votes for Eugene McCarthy, from an unemployment line to that in a few months.

And I remember being at 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 it really has very little to do with me.

And I -- there was -- I know I set off a bit of disappointment. And then I did "Midnight Cowboy" after that, and -- 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 if you were on a soap opera. I mean, B-movies were really C-movies, and today B-movies are legitimized and...

GOLDWYN: Are A-movies.

HOFFMAN: Yes, and the A-movies really won't even get done. And no one went to the Academy Awards, the Golden Globes, I think, when I showed up as most promising newcomer, I was the only one that showed up there. I mean, that was a time when -- We may be going back to that now, slowly. I mean, there was a whole antiestablishment. Now we are so -- I think the kids are, you know, you know, embrace the establishment, embrace fashion, embrace making money.

And I really wanted to avert the curse of being called a star.

I forgot the question.

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

HOFFMAN: Oh, yes, I didn't -- I just wanted to be this actor. I didn't want to -- I would have done it differently. I could have been a big star today (laughs) if I would have taken advantage of it.

GROSS: What might you have done differently?

HOFFMAN: Well, I mean, you just -- I probably would have done it differently if it had happened today. It just -- it wasn't -- I wasn't brave, I was just being in vogue. That was -- it was the vogue to be antiestablishment. It was the vogue to be pure. I would probably, you know, lie about my age if I could today. 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. (laughs)

HOFFMAN: Yes, and follow me, follow me around.

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.

(END AUDIOTAPE)

(BREAK)

GROSS: Let's get back to our interview with Dustin Hoffman and Tony Goldwyn. They produced the movie "A Walk on the Moon," which Goldwyn also directed. It just came out on video. The film is set at a bungalow colony in the Catskills in 1969.

(BEGIN AUDIOTAPE)

GROSS: 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 Jewishness figured into your backgrounds.

Tony Goldwyn, let's start with you. I mean, your grandfather, Samuel Goldwyn, was a Jewish emigre from Poland whose real name was Shmuel Gelbfisch (ph).

GOLDWYN: Right.

GROSS: He was the son of Hassidic Jews, his father had been a rabbinical student. As a boy he wore peyas, 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, you know. He was of a sort of -- of a group that was really in flight from roots and wanted to really reinvent himself and be as -- be more American and -- than, 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 seemed so out of keeping. I mean, 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 -- you know, my brothers and my father and -- we were standing over the grave, and there my father was, reciting the Kaddish over the grave.

And it was surreal to me.

However, that said, I have always felt a real connection with my Jewish roots, I guess. And particularly doing this movie, although the Jewishness of it or the Jewish setting was not really at all part of the appeal, other than it was a wonderful, colorful world, but as I got into it, it was about a group of people who took an alternate path to Him (ph). I mean, this was a story about -- in the Catskills, it's a story about Jews who came to New York from Eastern Europe and settled into the Lower East Side and ultimately into Brooklyn and lived a very tough life.

And the Catskills, getting to the Catskills -- 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 the -- what we know as the Borscht Belt, and this fabulous vacation mecca.

Anyway, I guess you can -- here 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 atheist, but when you asked him, he just said, Kid, it's all -- this is -- tell me the word I should -- 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, shortly 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 say it's all horse puckey, would be, I guess the...

GROSS: The cleaned-up way of putting it.

HOFFMAN: Yes. But -- so we had no -- it was just my brother and myself. We were not bar mitzvahed. We were circumcised, but I'm sure that was just the city. There was a -- 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, you know, 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 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 that -- and you -- I -- and my dialogue was always, What do you mean? Well, what are you? And I would say, What do you mean? Well, they'd say, what's -- if they finally said "religion," I would say, I'm American. No, what religion? And I would keep pretending like I didn't understand what he meant...

GROSS: Well, what...

HOFFMAN: ... as a child.

GROSS: That's sad. When you were early in your career and you were 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 the -- maybe not in film as much, but if you turn on the soap operas, the look is still the same, and then I'm sure Tony has seen it too, in "Backstage" 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, in a sense. It means all-American, "Leading ladies," same thing.

If they wanted who looked ethnic, they would say, "Character leading man," "Character... " or "Character juvenile," as opposed to just "Juvenile" and as opposed to "Ingenue." "Ingenue" is 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 how much do you feel like you were restricted from certain parts because of your look?

HOFFMAN: I ran. It was -- when 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, although it didn't pan out that way, because I was basically unemployed for 10 years and just waiting on tables -- but it meant for me a place where someone could get a job that didn't look like the people on "Bonanza."

GROSS: (laughs)

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

In fact, it's the guy at the end of the movie that I think Katherine Ross is supposed to marry, he purposefully hired someone who looked like the actors that got all those roles. I mean, even Tony, who doesn't really look ethnic, somehow is cast as the bad guy, probably, and has been in the past, because he doesn't look enough like the Redford look, or even enough like -- or even ethnic enough to be the breakthrough (inaudible). You're like in between.

GOLDWYN: Right.

HOFFMAN: OK, villain.

GROSS: Now, is that something that you have tried to change at all as a producer?

HOFFMAN: Well, I mean, I'm -- 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 a kind of stereotypical way.

And in the past, yes, I asked for Meryl Streep when -- you know, at that time they wanted someone from "Charlie's Angels." She was unknown. I asked for Kathy Bates, and it was her first film, 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 just 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 is amazing in a community, in a so-called artistic community, that there is such a continuing naivete. If you bring a name up to an executive or a director or even a producer, the first thing they say is, Oh, no, no, 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 -- 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.

(END AUDIOTAPE)

GROSS: Dustin Hoffman and Tony Goldwyn, recorded last spring after the release of the film "A Walk on the Moon," which they co-produced and Goldwyn directed. It's just come out on video.

We'll hear more of the interview in the second half of the show.

I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.

(BREAK)

GROSS: Coming up, we continue our conversation with Dustin Hoffman and Tony Goldwyn, and John Powers reviews the new film "The Insider," starring Al Pacino and Russell Crowe.

(BREAK)

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

On this archive edition, we're featuring an interview with Dustin Hoffman and Tony Goldwyn recorded last spring, after the release of the film "A Walk on the Moon," which they co-produced. It's just come out on video.

When we spoke, Hoffman's 1997 film, "Wag the Dog," was still reverberating. The film was about presidential aides who stage a phony war just to distract attention from a presidential scandal. In this scene, aides played by Robert DeNiro and Anne Heche are trying to convince a famous movie producer, played by Hoffman, to produce and stage the war.

(AUDIO CLIP, "WAG THE DOG")

ROBERT DeNIRO, ACTOR: If you never won an Oscar, how would you like an ambassadorship?

HOFFMAN: An ambassadorship? That's my payoff?

DeNIRO: Well, you tell me what you want.

HOFFMAN: Hell, I'd just do it for the fun of it. For a story to tell.

DeNIRO: Oh, no, you couldn't tell anybody.

HOFFMAN: Oh, hey, listen, I'm just kidding.

DeNIRO: No, you couldn't tell anybody.

HOFFMAN: Oh, no, no, no, I know, it's just a figure of speech. No, no, no. It's just a -- it's pageant.

DeNIRO: It's a pageant, that's what it is.

HOFFMAN: Country's at war.

DeNIRO: It's Miss America, your Bert Parks.

HOFFMAN: Why Albania? Because, well, they have to have something we want.

DeNIRO: Well, I'm sure they do.

HOFFMAN: What do we have that they want?

DeNIRO: A little freedom.

HOFFMAN: Well, why would they want that?

DeNIRO: Oppressed?

HOFFMAN: No, no, no. (bleep) freedom. They want to destroy the godless Satan of the United -- they want to destroy our way of life, all right? OK? OK? OK? The president is in China. He is dealing with the dispatch of the B-3 bomber to Albania? Why?

Why? Help me?

DeNIRO: Well, I mean, he -- (inaudible)...

ANNE HECHE, ACTRESS: Well, all right, all right, let's see, (inaudible) politically, if you...

HOFFMAN: We just found out they have the bomb. We just found out they have the bomb.

DeNIRO: That's good.

HOFFMAN: And -- and -- no, no, no, wait, (inaudible), wait, wait, wait, wait, no, no, wait a second, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, waitwaitwaitwait.

No, the bomb's not there, because they'd have to have a rocket (inaudible). They are a bunch of (inaudible). No, no, no. Cross out (ph). All right. So it's a suitcase bomb.

DeNIRO: I didn't even know I said that (ph).

HOFFMAN: It's a suitcase bomb. You don't need missiles.

DeNIRO: You can put a bomb in a suitcase, right?

(END AUDIO CLIP)

(BEGIN AUDIOTAPE)

GROSS: 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. (laughs)

GROSS: (laughs) I am. That's great. I actually wrote that down so I'd get it straight, because I -- sometimes I lose track of what I'm saying. That's great that you noticed that. God, you hear good.

HOFFMAN: OK, go ahead, go ahead.

GROSS: So -- OK. So anyways, 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 bombing Serbia, Serbia's -- 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.

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 we were -- 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.

And I guess when you're doing it, you -- 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 kind of just look at it and you say, Oh, that's interesting. You don't -- 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 that -- and they worked together on the script, because Barry's also a writer. And what they were really talking about was the media and what Marshall McLuhan, you know, 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's -- 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. See? It's the way it's -- from the very beginning of our culture, it is the way it is spun.

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

GOLDWYN: Grenada.

HOFFMAN: In...

GOLDWYN: No, Beirut, in Beirut.

HOFFMAN: In Beirut. And shortly after that, yes, he invaded Grenada. What never ceases to -- I guess where my mind goes is not what do I think or look how 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 happens 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 any more. What happened to Noriega? That's all you heard. Well, he got put in jail, but then we learned he'd worked for the CIA before that happened. What happened to Qadaffi, I mean, when they took out a couple of blocks of apartment houses trying to get him, 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, it -- I would tell you if it did surprise me. It doesn't. 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 the 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 I -- when I heard about that, I just said, Oh, well, what do you know? That -- I kind of -- that's the reaction. It's a long-winded -- I should have just 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: My guests are Dustin Hoffman and Tony Goldwyn. We'll talk more after a break.

This is FRESH AIR.

(END AUDIOTAPE)

(BREAK)

(BEGIN AUDIOTAPE)

GROSS: My guests are Dustin Hoffman and Tony Goldwyn. They produced the new movie "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 for -- at Columbia, and that he...

HOFFMAN: Yes, he probably -- he would have loved to have been Samuel Goldwyn.

GROSS: 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. He -- there was a recession, and he got fired with a number of other people. And he went -- actually at Columbia Studios, he was head of -- went from just a prop assistant to head of props to head of the set-dressing department. He worked on -- I mean, I was told this, it 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 to be a dancer, but her mother forbade her to take the job when she got it? Do I have that right?

HOFFMAN: Well, now that my parents have passed on, I guess I have more freedom to talk. I won't get phone calls from them saying, How could you say that?

But 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 Ziegfeld girl. And I -- 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 survive long enough to see it, but she didn't.

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

GROSS: Well, (inaudible) 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 it was going to be really hard to get into?

HOFFMAN: No, my -- 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 father and my mother came to L.A. from Chicago with $50 in a Model A Ford. My father worked as a laborer building the Hollywood Freeway. I have a wonderful photograph of him standing over the shovel.

And I know they -- he loved George Raft 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 smokes because the movie stars smoked. It was a -- you know, 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 put my brother -- 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 purposely 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 5, and I was told I Washington going to be a pianist. And I grew up in Los Angeles studying a lot every day and winding up at the -- 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 that -- we had a little combo -- that other kids in the combo had, where 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 about -- I never talked about it with Tony, but for the first time, 10 hours passed like it was 10 minutes, just working on a scene with somebody, you know?

GOLDWYN: Yes, yes.

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'd found it.

HOFFMAN: I knew I'd found what I wanted to do for the rest of my life, strongly believing that I would fail at it. If I -- I mean, I do -- I wish I didn't have such a -- I wish that I could have kept my privacy as a -- 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 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.

And 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. (laughs) I was sure I was going to fail at it. And to be -- and to fail at being an actor is a much -- 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 you're going to hang out, you're going to be a bohemian for the rest of your life.

GROSS: Hanging onto those ideals.

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

GOLDWYN: Sounds pretty good.

GROSS: Do you think you're 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 Duvall, 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? He says -- and I got -- because 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 a -- I don't think it's -- I find -- I don't think it's difficult to teach well. I think the trick is to not have a method, as -- even though I studied (inaudible), know that each actor is -- has to find their center (inaudible) -- you know, it's not much different than parenting, I don't think, or directing, I guess, Tony can...

GOLDWYN: It's very, very right. I mean, Dusty is a wonderful teacher. I feel like to me, in a lot of ways, he helped -- performed the role of a teacher a lot in -- when we were cutting the film and in 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 who can, you know, like a good director, lead you to your own instincts and sort of shine a light on where you as an individual need to go. And -- 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 mainly by giving them the freedom not to feel that they have to make the scene work.

And I know this is getting involved, but that's what Tony did. And to let them find 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. Don't do...

GROSS: Oh, oh, I thought you meant, get a new career. Oh. He just meant tone it down, right.

HOFFMAN: I'm sure he felt -- he probably thought that. But he would say, You're acting, don't act, don't do anything. Because you are doing so much in front of a camera by not doing what you think is anything. I mean, you're on, whatever it is, 70 feet of screen. You're already interesting. And the audience is doing a lot of the 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 like, 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 at me. 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.

GROSS: (laughs)

GOLDWYN: Oh, that's brilliant.

HOFFMAN: And that was really a smart thing to say.

GOLDWYN: That's brilliant.

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

(LAUGHTER)

GOLDWYN: Was actually the most helpful.

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

GOLDWYN: Given you reason to have that pen in your pocket.

GROSS: Yes, is that important? Is it -- has a good take ever been ruined by an embarrassing you-know-what in your nose?

HOFFMAN: Yes, but now with digital, they can just -- it's costly, but they can...

GROSS: That's really funny.

HOFFMAN: ... they can take a lot of boogers out that they couldn't do.

(END AUDIO TAPE)

GROSS: Dustin Hoffman and Tony Goldwyn. They produced the film "A Walk on the Moon," which Goldwyn also directed. It's now out on video.

Hoffman is in the new movie "The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc," which opens next week.

Coming up, John Powers reviews the new movie "The Insider."

This is FRESH AIR.

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, Philadelphia, PA
Guest: Dustin Hoffman; Tony Goldwyn
High: Actors and film producers DUSTIN HOFFMAN and TONY GOLDWYN. Their new Miramax film "A Walk on the Moon" has recently been released on video. 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." (REBROADCAST from 4/19/99)
Spec: Movie Industry; Entertainmnet; Media

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: Archive Interview with Dustin Hoffman and Tony Goldwyn
Show: FRESH AIR
Date: NOVEMBER 06, 1999
Time: 12:00
Tran: 110502NP.217
Type: FEATURE
Head: A Review of "The Insider"
Sect: Entertainment
Time: 12:50

TERRY GROSS, HOST, FRESH AIR: "The Insider" is a new movie directed by Michael Mann, starring Al Pacino and Russell Crowe. It's based on the true story of tobacco executive-turned-whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand and his experiences with the TV show "60 Minutes."

John Powers has a review.

JOHN POWERS, FILM CRITIC: By now, you've probably heard about the controversy surrounding "The Insider." Some of the real-life people depicted in the movie, such as "60 Minutes" anchor Mike Wallace, are complaining that it portrays them unfairly.

Meanwhile, director Michael Mann insists that despite a wee bit of dramatic license, the film is essentially true.

As an outsider, I have no way of knowing which side is right. But I do know that "The Insider" is one of the most engrossing pictures of the year, a tale of two prickly, paranoid men battling corporate betrayal.

Al Pacino stars as Lowell Bergman (ph), a veteran producer for "60 Minutes." Digging into a story, he comes across Jeffrey Wigand, played by Russell Crowe. Wigand's a painfully decent, tightly wound scientist who's just been fired from a big Louisville tobacco firm.

Bergman thinks he's finally found an insider who can spill all the secrets about big tobacco, and so he quickly starts plying Wigand with idealistic notions about the common weal and promising that his TV show won't burn him.

(AUDIO CLIP, "THE INSIDER")

AL PACINO, ACTOR: You go public, and 30 million people hear what you got to say, nothing -- I mean, nothing -- will ever be the same again. You believe that?

RUSSELL CROWE, ACTOR: No.

PACINO: You should. Because when you're (inaudible) judgment is going to go down in the court of public opinion, my friend, and that's the power you have. You believe that?

CROWE: You believe that?

PACINO: I believe that. Yes, I believe.

CROWE: You believe that because you get information out to people, something happens.

PACINO: Yes.

CROWE: Maybe this is what you've been telling yourself all these years to justify having a good job, having status. But maybe for the audience it's just voyeurism, something to do on a Sunday night. And maybe it won't change a thing. And people like myself and my family are left hung out to dry, used up, broke, alone.

PACINO: Are you talking to me, or did somebody else just walk in here? I never...

(CROSSTALK)

PACINO: No, no, don't evade a choice you got to make by questioning my reputation or "60 Minutes" with this cheap skepticism.

CROWE: I have to put my family's welfare on the line here, my friend. And what are you putting up? You're putting up words.

PACINO: Words.

(END AUDIO CLIP)

POWERS: Guess who's closer to being right?

Wigand risks everything to tell his story on "60 Minutes," only to have the program kill the interview for fear of a lawsuit.

Such a story is perfect for Michael Mann, a poet of machismo whose taste for outlaw romanticism ran through "Miami Vice," "The Last of the Mohicans," and "Heat."

Of his two heroes, Wigand is the movie's emotional center and by far the more fascinating figure, a smart, jumpy, desperately honest man who clings to what's left of his integrity like a barnacle. He's played with Oscar-worthy brilliance by Crowe, the superb Australian actor, who's barely recognizable with his new paunch, gray hair, and aviator glasses.

As he showed in "L.A. Confidential," Crowe has a knack for playing big men with wounded souls who lose their innocence and then seem stunned at what the world is doing to them.

Bergman is equally stunned when "60 Minutes" double-crosses his source. But his story's hokier, because he's so obviously a Hollywood concoction. Passionate, fearless, and absolutely trustworthy, Bergman's a paradigm, the last honest man in TV news.

Such a character would be insufferable if played by a star like Robert Redford, who always has the self-satisfied gleam of one who knows he's right. Remember "Up Close and Personal"? In contrast, it's part of Pacino's strange charisma that he seems haunted by everything, even his own righteousness. When things go sour, Pacino's ancient Sicilian eyes pass a more damning judgment on TV news than anything a screenwriter could give him to say.

Back in the '80s, Mann was known for his delirious addiction to high styles, from the South Beach pastels of "Miami Vice" to the noir opera of "Crime Story." But over the years he's refined away some of that meretricious flamboyance to become one of the most hypnotic filmmakers working anywhere.

Mann has no superior at evoking pervasive paranoia, or at venturing a surreal touch, like a car burning unattended on the Louisville roadside that seems like a message from the cosmos.

And he populates "The Insider" with terrific supporting performances, especially the witty turn by Christopher Plummer. Plummer plays Mike Wallace as a man who's infinitely tickled to be such a great man as Mike Wallace. He's not about to risk his career for the Wigand story, telling Bergman -- and I quote -- "I don't intend to spend the rest of my days wandering in the wilderness of National Public Radio."

Well, well, well.

"The Insider" is not without its bombast and portentous moments. But if any subject deserves such a treatment, it's this one. Mann gives us a tale of '90s America where corporations grow ever more massive, wield ever more control, and take ever more care to suppress information they don't want us to hear.

Although this is a not a new story, it is the essential story of our time, and no Hollywood movie has told it more compellingly than "The Insider," which makes one thing abundantly clear. If you want to tell big truths about the big guys, you'd better button your coat, because you're stepping out alone into the cold.

GROSS: John Powers is film critic for "Vogue."

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, Philadelphia, PA
Guest: John Powers
High: Film critic JOHN POWERS reviews "The Insider."
Spec: Movie industry; Media; Tobacco

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: A Review of "The Insider"
Transcripts are created on a rush deadline, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of Fresh Air interviews and reviews are the audio recordings of each segment.