Tootsie on a Roll to the Top

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

Tootsie on a Roll to the Top Dustin Hoffman dresses up in skirts in a new hit comedy

Any movie's largest potential is for disaster. The process by which films are made is akin to one of those long, skidding, agonizing chase sequences shot along the rim of a cliff. Inside their chosen vehicle the egomaniacs scream at fate and one another, all the while kicking and kneeing, punching and gouging as they struggle for control of the wheel. Most movies, as everyone knows, end up in the ravine, bottoms up among the broken and rusting remnants of last year's improbable dreams. A few--sensibly designed or well-balanced or inherently powerful-- seem to steer themselves into the theaters, oblivious to the uproar that attended their journey.

Then, every once in a rare while, one arrives in style, its owner-drivers still glaring angrily at one another, but somehow the better for its terrible travails. These are the miracles of the industry, the stuff of Hollywood legends. This year's miracle is called Tootsie. It is not just the best comedy of the year; it is popular art on the way to becoming cultural artifact.

Tootsie is the story of how a failed off-Broadway actor named Michael Dorsey (Dustin Hoffman) achieves wisdom as well as professional success when he dresses up as a woman called Dorothy Michaels, becomes a star on a television soap opera and a kind of feminist media heroine as well. The movie was one of the messiest productions in recent history, for a time informally retitled "The Troubled Tootsie" in the gossip columns. No fewer than eight writers, three directors and a spare producer or two worked on it. There were hair-raising stories of Hoffman and Director Sydney Pollack yelling and throwing things at each other ("greatly exaggerated" Pollack now murmurs), of shutdowns and delays while they struggled over everything from Hoffman's makeup (which required three hours' preparation a day) and his often improvised interpretation of the character to the nature and nuances of the gags.

It was perhaps predictable. Ever since he finished Kramer vs. Kramer in 1979, Hoffman had been looking for a script that would permit him to explore the questions "What makes someone a man? What makes someone a woman?" He batted the theme around with a friend, Playwright Murray Schisgal. By the time he and Pollack (who followed Dick Richards and Hal Ashby as director) joined forces, he had acquired not only various draft scripts but a ferocious proprietary interest in the film. Says Hoffman: "The great scripts don't drop out of the sky; you have to invent them."

For his part, Pollack (whose 13 films include The Way We Were and Absence of Malice) was "very apprehensive about doing comedy." He was especially worried about directing the first script of Tootsie that he read. He recalls that it was hard to know "if it was an homage to actors, a sophisticated comedy examining sexual mores or a story about the rehabilitation of a sexist." As the production began, tempers were tight. At times during the first month, only one shot a day was completed, as Hoffman's complex makeup literally slid down his face under the lights. Eventually, it cost approximately as much to bring in a small-scale comedy ($21 million) as it did to film the life of Gandhi on an epic scale. ("Yeah, but they didn't have to shoot in New York," says Hoffman.)

The result was worth it. Tootsie is more than Charley's Aunt updated or Myra Breckenridge toned down. In telling the tale of a man forced to get in touch with the feminine side of his nature and becoming a better man because of the experience, it triumphantly remains a farce for our times, not a tract for them. Despite the many creative hands involved, the picture has perfect comic tonality. It plays as if it were written by one wise and rueful individual, directed by someone who never felt a moment's anxiety.

The plausibility of this film with a wonderfully implausible premise owes much to its richly realized background. Hoffman lent it some of his autobiography: a young actor struggling to be serious in the alternately flighty and tough world of show biz. Michael Dorsey is the kind of fellow who overthinks the role of a tomato on a commercial and quits an off-Broadway show because he does not want his character to die where the director wants him to. He is, as his agent (wonderfully played by Director Pollack) tells him, "a cult failure." Michael's friends include his playwright-roommate, superbly underacted by Bill Murray, who is so sober about his art that he wants to have a theater that is open only when it rains and a girlfriend, played by Teri Garr, who makes high comedy out of low selfesteem. She is so insecure that when she is asked to describe a part she claims to be wrong for, she replies, "A woman."

She loses the part, and Michael, broke, decides to go for it. When, as Dorothy, he enters the strange subculture of the soaps, he must contend with such fine comic caricatures as a smooth, womanizing director (Dabney Coleman) and an aging ham actor (George Gaynes) who becomes so smitten with Dorothy that he ends up in the street beneath her window warbling, "I'll know when my love comes along." Then there is Jessica Lange as Julie Nichols, the soap opera's heroine.

"Don't you find it confusing being a woman in the '80s?" she asks Dorothy/Michael, and that understates her case. Julie has a career. She has a baby but no husband. She has her male chauvinist director for a lover. She has a problem with alcohol. And now there is this strange attraction she feels for the tamperproof Dorothy.

Of course, Julie's attraction is more than reciprocated, though as long as Michael has his wig and makeup on, his is the love that dares not speak its name. It is his conflict, between the need to keep his identity secret and his compulsion to confess it and try to claim his true love, that moves the comedy to the knockabout level.

It is hard to say where all these inventions, and the wit with which they are stated, first appeared. There was an original script by Don McGuire (Bad Day at Black Rock), rewritten by Robert Kaufman (Love at First Bite). Thereafter, Schisgal and Larry Gelbart, of Movie Movie and TV's MASH, each did new versions. A large contribution was made by Elaine May and smaller ones by Valerie Curtin (Inside Moves), Barry Levinson (Diner) and Robert Garland (The Electric Horseman). After arbitration, screen credit finally went to Gelbart and Schisgal. But it was Pollack who "sat in a room with a staple gun and a pair of scissors," stitching all this material together. He insisted that a certain innocence and tastefulness had to be maintained, despite the fact that "Dustin is more outrageous, more adventurous, shall we say." The star's willingness to open himself up gives Tootsie its humanity. But the rigor of Pollack's debate with Hoffman may have sharpened the actor's extraordinary performance, shaped his improvs and brought this diffuse enterprise into the clear focus that distinguishes great comedy from the mediocre.

Hoffman is a truly demonic fussbudget, who must pull any character he plays out of his own memories, experiences and emotions, which means that he has precious little objectivity about his creations. "I can't act a moral," says Hoffman. "The best I can do is speak personally, not say this is the way it is, or should be, but this is true of me." In the film, Michael says he knows what it is to be a woman precisely because he is an actor. "An actor waits by the phone," he cries; "he has no power when he gets a job." That line is pure Hoffman.

Hoffman thinks, too, that there is a lot of his late mother, who died a few months before filming began, in the nurturing side of Dorothy. Some of her ferocious integrity as an actress comes from a friend of Hoffman's, Actress Polly Holliday (Flo on TV's Alice until 1980). He had directed her in a Schisgal play, All over Town. When he and Pollack decided that Dorothy could have a Southern accent like Holliday's, Hoffman got in touch with her and she coached him. Says Hoffman: "It wasn't just the dialect, it was this other thing she has: she is a very tough lady, she is uncompromising." After attitudes came makeup and dress. "If I were a woman, I know I'd want to be as attractive as possible. I get offended when I see comediennes dehumanizing themselves to get a laugh." But after enormous effort to turn himself into a fantasy female, says Hoffman, there came "the day I found I would turn myself down; that if I met Dorothy, me as a woman, at a party, I'd turn me down."

Even with two men pursuing her, Dorothy can't think of herself as attractive. Says Pollack: "Dustin has said to me that if he just didn't have that face, if he looked like Robert Redford, he'd be the world's greatest actor, so he incorporated his lack of confidence about his looks into Dorothy. Finally, we're looking at the story of an actor who, when he had to play the part of a woman, was skilled enough to get in touch with the woman in himself. That is why, when Jessica says at the end that she misses Dorothy, he can reply with conviction that Dorothy is still there." And say, with similar conviction, "I was a better man as a woman with a woman than I've ever been as a man with a woman."

It may not be quite a moral. But it is at least a line, and a principle, that Pollack, Hoffman and everyone else could agree on as they wobbled and squabbled along disaster's edge over the long, intemperate season they endured together. It has given meaning, and a sweet humanity, to then-comedy. It is what will make Tootsie roll straight into everyone's heart. And into everyone's mind as an unmelting movie memory.

--By Richard Schickel

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