Page One

This week of Christmas, 2017, it’s fifty years since the premiere of the movie “The Graduate” on December 21, 1967. While film and cultural critics have been musing about the role of the movie in American society, I’ve been looking into its connections to Berkeley for the past several months. 

In October I gave a walking tour for the Berkeley Historical Society visiting sites associated with “The Graduate”. On December 15 I spoke to an enthusiastic Berkeley Breakfast Club about the Berkeley connections of the movie. When I gave that talk, I started out asking how many people in the audience had seen the movie when it was first released? A large number—probably a hundred or more—raised their hands. 

So even fifty years later “The Graduate” is still well remembered locally and first hand. 

So what were the local connections? 

First, the movie was based on a book of the same name, published in 1963. The book wasn’t a best seller before the movie—one account I found said it sold only a few thousand copies—but it set the local stage. Although there are some differences, the movie quite closely tracks the book, although a lot of the book’s dialogue is shortened, and some scenes are given more visually dramatic frames in the movie. 

(For example, the iconic movie images of Dustin Hoffman’s character, Benjamin Braddock, speeding around town and around California in a red Alfa Romeo don’t take place in the book. Braddock, upon his arrival in Berkeley, sells the sports car for money to live on. Thereafter, he takes taxis, buses, and airplanes). 

The book, by Charles Webb—who was born in San Francisco, and grew up in Pasadena—calls Berkeley by name as the campus town where much of the story takes place, and describes numerous local sites. There’s an unnamed hotel and theater on a main street that Braddock visits, the UC campus itself, Elaine Robinson’s high rise dormitory, a boarding house, and a cafe on Telegraph Avenue. 

All of those except hotel and movie theater reappear in the movie, although in somewhat altered forms. 

UC campus scenes describe Braddock eating and buying a newspaper at the campus dining commons, seeing Elaine pass through an adjacent plaza, following her to a large nearby classroom building with steps, planters with trees, and benches in front, and waiting there for her to reappear. 

This literary sequence is clearly: the campus cafeteria, new in the early 1960s, now called the Chavez Center, but still hosting an eatery on the Sproul Plaza side; Sproul Plaza itself; and, most probably, Dwinelle Hall which has the requisite front steps and multiple tree planters and benches in a plaza in front. 

In both book and movie Elaine lives near the campus in a modern dormitory in a quadrangle. Most likely this would be either the Unit I or Unit II residence hall complexes on College Avenue. 

There’s the cafe on Telegraph, which became the Cafe Mediterraneum in the movie. There Braddock sits in the window drinking beer, with both the Print Mint and Moe’s Books visible across the street. Moe’s is still there, although it’s now in a newer building constructed on the site of the old one. 

A local site that the movie adds that’s not in the book is the Theta Delta Chi fraternity at College and Durant, across from the Unit I dormitory complex. In the book, Braddock finds out about Elaine’s marriage plans by going to the Berkeley apartment of her fiancee, Carl. Carl has left a note on his door for his own roommate, telling him that he’s getting married in Santa Barbara (why Carl didn’t leave the note inside the apartment for his own roommate, who presumably hada key, is a mystery). 

In the movie, there’s the more dramatic scene of Braddock speeding up to the fraternity in his sports car, rushing inside, and finding a friend of Carl’s in the communal bathroom who tells him about the wedding site. 

Theta Delta Chi ended up in the movie as part of the scenery because an alumnus of Cal and the fraternity was on the production team for the movie. The film crew paid the fraternity $500 for a day’s filming time at the house, and also hired fraternity members—at $30 per day—to walk up and down Telegraph as background pedestrians in the cafe scene. 

Then there’s the boarding house. And this turns out to be a more complex story. 

In my early years in Berkeley, I remember people pointing out a house at Channing and Dana and referring to it as Dustin Hoffman’s boarding house. This was not much more than a decade after the movie came out, and there was clearly a lot of local “word of mouth” that had survived and persisted. 

(In those days, before VCR’s and the internet, memory of the movie was kept alive by periodic screenings at the UC Theater on University Avenue. During the movie at least one audience member was always sure to shout out, to laughter, “You’re going the wrong way!” when Hoffman speeds across the Bay Bridge ostensibly towards Berkeley, but actually headed towards San Francisco. The scene where Elaine and Benjamin board a bus on Telegraph Avenue and disembark at the San Francisco Zoo was also entertaining to many locals. Who could imagine such a fantastical singular transit route, snaking through four cities and across a Bay? The book, alas, explains this much more prosaically. It says they transferred buses a couple of times). 

When I started to research the exact location of the boarding house, I ran into a couple of obstacles. First, one on-line blogger had posted some years ago that the boarding house was at Durant and Dana, a block to the north. That claim had been picked up by others so today, if you do a search for “where was Dustin Hoffman’s boarding house in The Graduate?” the Durant / Dana reference may well appear. 

It’s not correct. Although there were older houses at Dana and Durant up through the 50s, there were none in 1967 when the movie was filmed. The actual location was 2400 Dana Street, a handsome Queen Anne Victorian that still stands on the southwest corner of the intersection. (In the book, Braddock gives a wholly fictionalized address on “Baker Street”, so that’s no help to the factual research). 

The second point of confusion came when I watched the movie for the first time in several years. I expected to see an exterior shot of the boarding house, but one didn’t appear. There are numerous interior shots, but some of them didn’t seem to match the 2400 Dana building. 

For example, in a couple of scenes Hoffman’s character talks in an elaborate staircase with the suspicious owner of the boarding house. 2400 Dana is too narrow to contain such a large stair hall. Also, while 2400 Dana was once actually a boarding house—from the early 20th century—in 1942 the interior was converted into six apartments, most of them with exterior entrances. So the staircase most likely disappeared before 1967 when the movie was filmed. 

This led me to the conclusion that at least some of the boarding house interior scenes were filmed elsewhere. My guess is in some large, ramshackle, Victorian in Los Angeles that I haven’t been able to identify. 

Further evidence for the Berkeley location comes from a 1967 Daily Californian article about the filming. It mentions that scenes were shot at “apartments at Channing and Dana” which confirms the location, since the only apartments at that corner were 2400 Dana. (The other three corners were occupied by two churches, First Congregational and First Presbyterian, and the newly built Unit III residence halls). 

The Daily Cal article also drops another important nugget. It said the filming in Berkeley was brief (three days) and only simple scenes were shot at each location. At the boarding house there’s just a scene of Hoffman looking out the window onto the street. 

Back to the movie. In the movie there’s one scene where Elaine Robinson leaves the boarding house and Benjamin Braddock watches her morosely from his attic window. She crosses the street, and the walls of the Unit III dormitory complex and First Presbyterian Church are clearly visible in the background. 

The window itself—a Victorian divided-light, double hung—and the metal fire escape outside are also clearly visible in the shot. And both of them—window and fire escape—are still there today, in the attic eave of 2400 Dana, looking out over the street. 

That’s proof positive that 2400 Dana was the Berkeley site of Braddock’s boarding house, at least for one scene. 

From looking at the movie, I think possibly one or two interior scenes were also filmed in the attic apartment, but others were filmed in a different building. Features of the room and the background change subtly. 

There’s another interesting aspect to the history of the boarding house. In the late 1930s a young woman from Oregon was studying at Cal. She had a boyfriend, Clarence Cleary, and he lived at 2400 Dana. She would later marry him, and she became Beverly Cleary, the famous children’s author. She wrote about in one of her memoirs that his room would later become famous as Dustin Hoffman’s room in “The Graduate”. 

And many years later, the University built a new residence hall up the street on Channing and named it “Beverly Cleary Hall”. It sits just half a block from 2400 Dana, a charming geographical coincidence. 

There’s also the interesting question of why so little filming in Berkeley when both the book and the movie firmly placed several scenes in the town? That’s a story in itself, that’s partially told by the Daily Californian article as well. According to the piece, the film crew had started negotiating in late 1966 for the opportunity to film on campus. Discussions went on for months, but the University finally demurred. UC press spokesman Dick Hafner was quoted in the article as saying he had read the script and said the film “would not bring out any of Cal’s unique characteristics” and the book could be about a college anywhere. 

Most likely the campus administration was concerned about the Berkeley campus being typecast even more so than it already was by 1967, as a place of free love, rebellion against conventional society, and angst-ridden rule-breaking intellectuals. 

So it appears only one scene used in the movie was actually shot on the Berkeley campus. A brief shot shows Elaine walking through a crowd in what is clearly Sproul Plaza. That could have been filmed somewhat surreptitiously, without attracting much notice. But the rest of the “campus” scenes ended up filmed at the University of Southern California. In fact, the Daily Cal article was even headlined, somewhat sarcastically, “Flick about Berkeley Campus Shot at USC”. 

When the movie premiered it went on to great acclaim. It was the top grossing film of 1968, and earned seven Academy Award nominations. Ultimately, only Mike Nichols, the director, received an Oscar. 

And the movie entered the popular consciousness, backgrounded by the Simon and Garfunkel songs that formed much of the sound track. Critics then and now talked about how the film caught the imagination of the younger generation, with many people going to see it over and over. Like “Bonnie and Clyde”, which premiered earlier in 1967, it signaled new directions in Hollywood responding to new forces in popular culture. 

One critic who didn’t like “The Graduate” much on initial viewing was Pauline Kael, and there’s an important Berkeley connection there, too. Kael had honed her reviewing and writing skills at the Cinema Guild movie theater on Telegraph, just a block up from the Caffe Med. In 1967 when small-time New York stage actor Dustin Hoffman came west to Berkeley and became famous, Kael was making the reverse journey to fame, starting her column of movie reviews in The New Yorker. 

Ironically, if you consider both book and movie, the Berkeley portrayed there isn’t really 1960s Berkeley. Remember that the book was written and published before the Free Speech Movement changed everything. The main local settings and situations in book and movie are an all-male rooming house, a fraternity, sequestered women’s dormitories, conventional classrooms and studies, middle class white people everywhere, and a traditional marriage proposal from blond frat guy going places to straight-laced daughter of wealthy Southern California lawyer. When Dustin Hoffman sits down for a drink at the Cafe Med he doesn’t even order coffee—in both book and movie, he has a beer. 

So perhaps the University shouldn’t have worried much. The Berkeley of “The Graduate” is more the Berkeley of the 1950s than the 1960s. 

The attitudes of both the University and the City have changed towards film. Both now have film offices that work to assist, not obstruct, film-makers who want to use Berkeley as a setting. And you can find on line the titles of some 30 movies that have been at least partially set or filmed in Berkeley in the fifty years since “The Graduate”. So the movie seemed to have started a local cinematic trend. 

What was the long term impact of “The Graduate” on Berkeley? Hard to tell. The settings are still there, although Telegraph Avenue itself faces development pressure which could wipe away most of its character defining buildings. As I learned when constructing my walking tour, it’s still possible to visit almost every site mentioned in book or movie that can be connected to Berkeley. 

Finally, when I watched “The Graduate” earlier this year, for the first time in several years, I saw it in light of the unfolding scandals of 2016 and 2017. Hoffman’s character in 1968 was a tormented young man, struggling to find meaning in life and society. In 2017, he comes across as much more of a creep and, literally, a sexual stalker of Elaine. And Mrs. Robinson who was, to many, a titillating figure in 1968, looks today awfully like a sexual predator. 

When I spoke to the Breakfast Club, I set the scene by imagining Donald Trump viewing the movie today. I created an imaginary tweet for him along these lines. 

“Saw “The Graduate” last night. A very good documentary about the problems rich people face. Liked that sports car and the emphasis on consumption of fossil fuel. Liked the scenes of the affair, very, very, accurate, although usually the man is in charge. Should have been filmed at a Trump hotel. Berkeley radicals. Sad. Liked Anne Bancroft, but my friend Judge Roy Moore says he liked the daughter better.” 

That drew a lot of laughter. It was mainly wry laughter, I think, confirming as I realized through my research, the times have indeed changed and we are aware of that.