Cocktails with George and Martha: Movies, Marriage, and the Making of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Even with such abundant material - the play, the movie, the playwright, the director (first film ever, second was The Graduate), and the stars - there's no guarantee that a thorough examination of a 1962 play and a 1966 movie, each with a debut over sixty years ago, would be of interest to anyone but boomers. Which is why I urge anyone who loves theatre and film to grab this one. I DEVOURED IT. From Edward Albee's miserable life as a neglected adoptee; to director Mike Nichols, insecure despite his brilliance as a comedy partner with Elaine May; and especially to Ernest Lehman, the film producer whose strong hand and daily journaling provide the critical details. And then there are Elizabeth and Richard a/k/a Martha and George - she, show more tagged as the beauty with no particular talent; he, obsessed with childhood acne scars and his rivalries with Gielgud, Richardson, Olivier - their third movie since exploding their marriages and their bold decision to risk their reputations - everyone's reputations. The reader cannot help but cheer the film’s towering success and to give Edward Albee the biggest accolades for writing such a magnificent theatrical experience, and to commend the author, Philip Gefter, for creating such an absorbing journey, from the dying late ‘50s to the raging late '60s, especially for women who went from reading Betty Friedan and "the problem that has no name", to recognizing the damage caused by the prevailing patriarchy and rallying for dynamic change.

Quotes: "There was a chasm in the cultural life of America. There tended to be only one predominant public conversation, and it was calibrated to a narrow frequency of white middle-class Babbitry. Yet there were plenty of educated people of different ethnic and racial backgrounds starved for reflections of themselves in a more honest and intelligent social dialogue about actual human experience."

"While theatre relies on the voice, the screen relies on the face. On the screen, film magnifies a face as if it were an entire stage; the infinitesimal adjustments in a facial expression can have the same narrative impact as a character's soliloquy in a play." show less

A "making of" history of the film Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?.

Gefter begins with a quick bio of playwright Edward Albee and a summary of his pre-Woolf career, and moves on to the play's Broadway success before diving into the heart of the book, the film version.

The central characters, and frequent antagonists, are director Mike Nichols and screenwriter/producer Ernest Lehman. Nichols was an unexpected choice; at this point in his career, he was known as a comic performer and a stage director of light comedy. He'd never directed a movie, and he'd never tackled material as serious or as demanding as Woolf.

But he knew what he wanted, and fought Lehman on the issues that mattered most to him -- making the movie in black and white; show more sticking as closely to Albee's words as possible, which meant cutting away anything Lehman had added and not cutting the oaths and obscenities.

He was working with his good friends Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in the lead roles. Like everyone else, he worried that Taylor was too young to play Martha, and might not be up to the challenge. (Casting Taylor, he complained, was "like asking a chocolate milkshake to do the work of a double martini.") It was by far the most demanding role she's ever attempted, and even a more accomplished dramatic actress of her age would find it difficult to understand the disillusionment and frustration that can come after decades of marriage.

Gefter's history of the movie is entertaining. Much of it has been covered elsewhere (I would point you to Mark Harris's superb biography of Mike Nichols), but it's useful to have all of the different perspectives in one place.

I am always particularly fascinated by might-have-been casting details, so I enjoyed learning that Albee's producers hoped for Katharine Hepburn and Henry Fonda for the original Broadway production, and that Albee's dream pairing for the film was Bette Davis and James Mason. (Hepburn turned down the play, saying that she wasn't a good enough actress. Fonda's agent never even sent him script, thinking it was too vulgar for him; Fonda was furious when he found out, and later said that never getting to play George was one of the major disappointments of his career. Davis was apparently told, or at least believed, that she was going to make the movie, and was crushed when it went to Taylor.)

Gefter is on less solid ground in his commentary on the play as a commentary on the challenges and meaning of marriage in general. It's rarely a good idea to attempt to use an author's work as a psychoanalytic tool, and Gefter is working far too hard to find connections and correspondences between Albee's play and Albee's life.

Skim the psycho-commentary; enjoy the tick-tock. show less