THE ACTOR'S STUDIO - DUSTIN HOFFMAN - ACTOR'S FACTS / ADVICE

Received 7 academy award nominations

One 2 best actor academy awards

Has earned 7 British Academy Awards Nominations

Won 4 Brittish Academy Awards

Won Italy's Donatello Award for 4 times

Earned an Emmy

Has earned 11 Golden Globe  Nominations

Won the Golden Globe 5 times

Earned life achievement awards by the American Film Institute  and by the Berlin International Film Festival

The Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Venice Film Festival

People's Choice Award for Favorite Motion Picture Actor

Both Empire Magazine and Entertainment Weekly have named him  one of the best movie actors of all time

Born in Los Angeles

Father's name was Harry Hoffman
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Acquired the name Dustin Hoffman by an actor named Dustin Farnham


Harry Hoffman's dream was to work in Movies and got a job at Columbia as an assistant prop man

Worked his way from head of the prop department to set design

Later got fired a year before Dustin was born  and later became a furniture salesman
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Movies were a sanctuary for Dustin growing up and his particular favorite was the King Arthur movies

He performed Death of a Salesman as a tribute to his father whom was also a very hard working man.

The first movie that affected him was Bambi and Dumbo.

Dumbo had the ears

and Dustin had the nose.

Dustin never liked school

Acting never came across his mind and his parents put a piano in front of him when he was 5 yrs old  and dreamed one day he would play at Carnegie Hall

He was singled out as the tiniest kid to play Tiny Tim in junior high


Dustin attended Los Angeles High School and was never part of the drama dept for there was none.

His brother although  gave him a collection of plays by John Gas during High School and one that touched him was Death of a Salesman.

The play was so profound for him that he couldnt' stop crying for Willy Loman was similar to his father.

The mother in the play was trying to hold it together like Dustin's mother
in real life.  Dustin related to the flunky loser son, Biff was like his older brother who was an A student and who was a football and baseball varsity player. Still  he had not felt the acting bug at that early age.

After graduating from LA High Dustin knew he had to get a job which he didn't want to do or enlist in the service.  His brother had already been in the Navy and said to him to not enlist or stay in college.

The only college that would have Dustin was Santa Monica

and went there in order to make grades that would allow him to go to a University.

One of his friends mentioned him to take acting and Dustin refused but his friend reminded him how nobody flunks an actor. Later Dustin ended up taking the acting course and it appeared to be a shock for him for he could not focus.  He tried until he gave up and then suddenly he was picked to do a scene from the
Glass Menagerie

with a female scene partner .  When he started to rehearse the scene with her he realized acting had no time no clock and therefore he got lost in his own acting.

He later appeared at the Pasadena Playhouse

 where he encountered a young Gene Hackman

and the two were picked as the two least likely to succeed.

They two earned that honor by hanging out together and were known to be rebellious and Gene was not asked to come back but Dustin was.

Gene Hackman was kicked out only after  four months of attending the playhouse and was told he had no talent . Dustin remembers him being so natural as an actor that they didn't think it was acting.  This was before the Stanislavsky method of acting that is common today.

After appearing at the playhouse he goes to New York and ended up bunking up with Gene Hackman .  When he stayed with Gene, Gene Hackman was married and slept on his kitchen floor next to the icebox.  Gene only wanted him there for a few nights but New York scared Dustin so much he didn't want to leave the apartment.

The only way Gene Hackman could get rid of Dustin was to find him a roommate and that roommate was Bob Duvall. They both were working actors at the time Gene was working for a movie company and Dustin got a job at the New York Psychiatric Institute as a tenant.

He later got a job at Macy's selling toys

ABOUT ACTING -

"The worst thing about acting is you don't have an audience .  You can't work unless you have a job.  You find a way to make life an audience for yourself" .

Dustin also went to New York to study acting in the late 50s , early 60s

When Dustin left the Pasadena Playhouse his mentor Barney Brown .  The playhouse hated his mentor for his mentor was introducing the Stanislavsky method and everyone there was labeling him as a communist.  He remember Barney taking him aside and saying "You are going to be a theater person, your going to learn to do it all and your not going to get anything for ten years".

After getting into a verbal disagreement with his instructor he left the Playhouse and parted for New York where he enrolled in the Actor's Studio

where Lee
Strasberg

was conducting private classes at Carnegie Hall after waiting 2 years to enroll.

Jack Nicholson auditioned 5 times before being admitted to studio

Harvey Keitel auditioned 11 times

How many times Dustin had to audition before being admitted to the Actor's Studio?

3 or 4 times

Dustin later did a play called The Journey of The Fifth Horse

 and received an award.  Later a kid who was in the play said he was auditioning for the Actor's Studio  and wanted him to be his scene partner? They auditioned, they dismissed the kid, and Dustin was admitted.

Dustin credits the Actor's Studio as being one of the great actor schools around where you could get an acting education from some of the greatest teachers in the world and the best part was it was for free.

When Dustin was in the play "Eh" the New York times reviewer wrote "Bros superbly played by Dustin Hoffman is a sort of a cross between Ringo Star and Buster Keaton ".  This work earned Dustin the theater world and drama desk awards but of more importance attracted the attention of a young director named Mike Nichols who casted him in The Graduate. 

During the time of filming Anne Bancroft was 35 , Dustin was 30.

In 1969 he earned a one Oscar Performance for The Graduate  and another in Midnight Cowboy

When Dustin prepared for his role as Ratso in Midnight Cowboy

utilizing the Stanislavsky method  by applying makeup at home and taking to the streets and just went looking for his inspiration for his character.  He went looking for a limp, a limp that was so graphically describe in the novel and later found a guy on 42nd street waiting to limp across the street and that's when he had found his character.

How he got the role of Lenny Bruce in Lenny

the director that came to him Bob Fosse

wanted him to play Lenny.  He suggested Cliff Gordon  but Bob Fosse could not finance it with him but knew he could with Dustin.

ABOUT RESEARCHING INTO A ROLE 

Some actors don't want to research into a role  but Dustin does. When you are famous you get access and when he was researching the role of Lenny Bruce he was introduced to Lenny Bruce's mother who took him to Vegas and introduced  him to Chuckie Gale, Jackie Vernon, and all comedies
who were friends of Lenny's.  He took a tape recorder and taped them all including Buddy Hackett.

When he prepared for the role of Carl Bernstein in All The Presidents Men

his marriage wasn't going very well so he wanted to get away so he flew to Washington DC and he goes to the Washington Post and hangs out with Carl Bernstein

MORE ABOUT RESEARCHING INTO A ROLE

"When your doing research your'e reference is the movies and that's all you have to reference on.  So when you go to a newspaper office the only thing you have to reference is what you saw on the screen".  When he went to the Post it was quiet and there was hardly anyone at their desk and thats what he wanted to capture.

When working with Robert Redford he found out that their characters were like one in the same.

During filming Robert Redford suggested why don't we learn not just our own lines but each other's line.  He figured their characters should be operating that way and finishing each other's lines whenever they feel like it.

During filming marathon man Dustin Hoffman claims Lawrence Olivier was in terrible shape and  in poor health .

He was in pain and everyone knew he was on painkillers.  He claimed here was a man who perormed King Lear, Richard the IIII, and Hamlet in his head

and yet had a hard time memorizing a few
lines all because of the painkillers.

Lawrence Olivier only took the part in Marathon Man  because he was dying and because he wanted enough money to feed for his family.

Dustin received his four academy award nomination and won his first best actor award in Kramer vs Kramer .

During this period of time he was in a divorce, he was fooling with drugs, and he didn't want to act anymore.  He reached out to Director Robert Benton

 and wanted to read his script because he too was going  through a divorce and he's never seen a movie nor read anything that has the quality of what
going through a divorce feels like.

DUSTIN'S ADVICE ON ACTING 

"In acting you try to admit to more than the lesser crime you want to get down to the deeper crimes of yourself.  Acting in any art is doing what you are 
incapable of doing .  We're flawed ."  

Dustin's involvement in Tootsie

came when he was an unemployed actor and came upon Writer Murray Schisgal

who was doing One Act Plays up  in Stockbridge and got into his one acts and hit it off and became friends and his mentor. When  they were up at his apartment in New York and during a conversation between him , his wife, and father Murray jumped up and said "Bill there is a Shirley in you, there is a Shirely in everyone.  There is a woman inside you that is dying to come
out"  

Dustin thought about that conversation the next day and then called Murray and said "I wonder what it would be like to be a different sex".  We're trained to look at woman a different way because of what we see in magazines and films.  It took 2 1/2 years to prepare for the role.

Two themes in the movie are Dustin turning into a better man when he became a woman and two how Dustin Hoffman the actor can be a royal pain in the ass because the movie was a satire on himself.

After Tootsie,  Dustin later played Willy Loman in Death of A Salesman. 

 He got involved because after he married his current wife in Roxford, Connecticut and found out Arthur Miller

lives a few minutes away and he hears Dustin has a tennis court and comes to play with him and his friend.  Arthur suggested he play Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman . Dustin denied wanting anything to do with it  because Lee Cobb

was in it but Arthur Miller originally wrote it for a skinny character with Dustin's acting kind of caliber.

Dustin later won his second academy award as Raymond Babbit in Rainman.

 He prepared for the part of Raymond by going to UCLA and watching numerous footage reading books by Oliver Sacks.

 He saw footage of two twins in a Bronx hospital which Dr Sacks showed him and that's where the tooth pick scene originated from. The doctor was smoking  while he was talking to the two twins and was using kitchen matches and they fell to the floor.  One brother said the amount and the other brother said it in thirds .  Dustin wanted to know what just happened he thought they were thinking like computers but the Doctor denied it saying no they thought it was faster than that.

He got into the character of Raymond by when filming the movie he was responding to Tom Cruise's lines in delayed and that's when the "YEAH" response and his character was born.

ANOTHER ADVICE ON ACTING

"Sometimes when your prepared to do a scene and your not ready sometimes you just have to do it.  There is no magic in acting sometimes you will hit something and sometimes you won't.  Sometimes you can get so angry at your limitations and your ability to come close that , that's when you  hit the subtext and not the scene.  That's what can happens sometimes that in the end everything has its own way
of working out when you think you have not done your part in capturing the scene. "

DUSTIN'S QUOTE ON TAKES 

"I've always thought the take is the actor's time to fail and every art has to have its failure.  Some people who are theater trained are all the same and when they do a movie they cant' get it out of their that there is no curtain and no audience there.  They have  to get it into their head that it's just a take it's just dead film and maybe not even go to production and it's just your opportunity 
to fail".

During his part with DeNiro In Sleepers

 where Dustin plays a small part as a lawyer

 and DeNiro is in the witness stand and DeNiro has his lines on index cards and checking them and puts the cards down when the camera is rolling.  Then DeNiro says "I don't know my next line" and then references back to his index cards and that's when Dustin learned a huge lesson that  DeNiro waits and waits until it happens.

ANOTHER QUOTE ON ACTING

"As a Director and a actor you don't have to know everything and you're not going to be able to do everything that the script calls for. Do what you can.  That's what you share, that's what you give.  The audience is the co-author , the co-director, and the collaborator.  They will do the rest of it. " 

Wag The Dog earned Dustin his 7th Oscar Nomination in which this film united Dustin and Robet DeNiro

Later Robert DeNiro and Dustin Hoffman would reunite for Meet The Fockers.

 Dustin wanted Barbara Streisand

 and nobody wanted her and she didn't want to work but Dustin knew her from their time at the Actor's Studio.  When they met Barbara avoided everyone after reading the script in which she said "You're part is great but I have no part".  Dustin knew that if she does Barabara is on top and you can forget about the script and she became Mr . Mom.

During Stranger In Fiction he liked the script and was one of the best script he ever read.

DUSTIN ON ARTISTS 

"Artists are ones who go by their gut instincts and can't work any other way.  Failing is not the worst, committing a sin is worst, not failing. Everything is success, success,  success but give me something that goes "OOOH" and let the film not work , let the actor not even be consistent and put them in a place with somebody and that's worth everything. " 

Mr. Magoriums Wonder Emporium

was written by Zack Helm

 who wrote Stranger Than Fiction

and was his first ever Directorial debut.  The Wonder Emporium is a children's theater for adults but its also a toy store that he's owned for 113 years and he's 243 years old and things happen it's magic. The Director
and him agreed on while shooting that he didn't want to do prosthetic so he suggested to find a way to suggest a character that you can't argue with.

ACTOR'S QUESTIONAIRE

1. What is his favorite word?

Zugga! It's a language he developed with his family a little Hoffy  talk that means wonderful.

2. What is your least favorite word ?

Woulda, Coulda, Shoulda

3. What turns you on ?

Seeing someone you know or don't know out of a control laughing..

4. What turns you off?

Seeing a parent with a kid outside being verbal and physical with the child.

5. What sound or noise do you love?

The sound of collective joy

6. What sound or noise do you hate ?

Anything that resembles shut up

7.  What is your favorite curse word?

Smoothe Needle Prick Bug Fucker

8.  What profession other than your own would you like to attempt?

Music

9.  What profession would you not want to participate in?

Hunting

10. If there is a god what would would he say to you?

That's odd you don't look Jewish

ACTORS ADVICE 

What is the value of imagination vs experience?

"Your body is your instrument.  You don't have a violin that you play you are your own violin.   Get to know your body with the physical with the emotional  and get to know how to they integrate with each other as best as they can.  The method is your own method and it takes years to find it . " 

Why do we act?

"He would be doing this period.  He would be doing this if he was in a community theater because he can do it and can do it anywhere.  THere is nothing more
thrilling than this.  You can do it anywhere .  If he hadn't gotten a part in The Graduate he would still be doing if he was teaching at acollege or at a repiratory theater
he would be doing it.  Go, be lead. "