The damage Dustin Hoffman faces to his career from Hollywood stars and their allegations
ANALYSIS: Dustin Hoffman was part of an era in Hollywood that no longer exists. We look at the problems he will endure from what are, so far, untested allegations.
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DUSTIN Hoffman’s name resonates with an older generation of film watchers who were there in the 1960s when Hollywood gave licence for male actors to depart from sword fights in tights and dismount from the Westerns to tell the stories of contemporary America.
Hoffman wasn’t a total pioneer. In the 1950s, Marilyn Monroe set forth the case of a woman beyond the control of one man; Marlon Brando owned the role of poverty-line antihero; and with an unlikely face, Humphrey Bogart was the escort to LA’s underbelly and exotic points beyond.
Yet Hoffman, 80, was at the vanguard of a new character-actor who could hold together a narrative set in one apartment or a suburban lounge room, where death was not represented by a corpse in the linen closet but something metaphorical — such as the passing of innocence.
The plots and themes centred on sex, such as in The Graduate (1967), where young Hoffman played a student seduced by a beautiful but unhappy older woman. It was a faintly seditious tale about the mask of middle-upper-class America.
Hoffman, who now stands accused by numerous women of having sexually abused them in a variety of ways, across a number of years, was an actor who meant something to people: his films marked for them a place in time.
For the current generation spoiled by an era of great films, great series and great actors — look at Jake Gyllenhaal, Ryan Gosling, Tom Hardy, Leonardo di Caprio, Matthew McConaughey, Cillian Murphy, and that’s just the batting list — may only know Hoffman as Ben Stiller’s dad in Meet the Fockers (2004).
Or maybe there’s faint recognition for Tootsie (1982), in which Hoffman dresses as a woman to get the acting roles he cannot get as a man. Now, they know him as an alleged dirty old man.
As the first claims against him emerged, Hoffman was confronted with demands for an explanation at an acting forum he attended in New York’s Tribeca. “I would not have made that movie (Tootsie) if I didn’t have an incredible respect for women,” said Hoffman.
“The theme of the movie is he became a better man by having been a woman.”
HOFFMAN’S FALL FROM GRACE
TWELVE YEARS after The Graduate, Hoffman appeared in Kramer v Kramer (1979), for which he won an Oscar for Best Actor and his co-star, Meryl Streep, won Best Supporting Actor.
It was another landmark cultural film, at a time when American divorces were in high churn and the last adhesive the church held on marriage was melting as child-custody wars were being fought in earnest.
In 2017, the major cultural debate is about the sexual sickness within Hollywood itself, yet that is a film it will find hard to make.
The Harvey Weinstein scandal, which has given both women and men freedom to air accusations, is now thrashing and sparking wildly, drawing denunciations which go well beyond the alleged predatory behaviour of leading actors to politicians all in their purview who may have known and kept silent.
For Hoffman, the accusations are belated but serious. None have yet become police matters and he and his lawyers have denied most of the accusations, or claim the situation has been misrepresented.
They are a mix of new allegations and unearthed recollections which, in the current context, paint him as a serial groper:
Anna Graham Hunter told the Hollywood Reporter she was 17 on the set of Death of a Salesman when Hoffman “grabbed my ass — he talked about sex to me and in front of me. One morning I went to his dressing room to take his breakfast order. He looked at me and grinned. Then he said ‘I’ll have a hard-boiled egg — and a soft-boiled clitoris.’ His entourage burst out laughing. Then I went to the bathroom and cried.”
Cori Thomas, a friend of Hoffman’s daughter, says she was 16 when Hoffman dropped his towel in front of her. She told Variety: “He was standing there naked. It was the first time I had ever seen a naked man. I was mortified. I didn’t know what to do. He milked the fact that he was naked. He stood there. He took his time.”
Kathryn Rossetter told NBC Nightly News that co-starring in the Broadway production of Death of a Salesman was “humiliating and demeaning”, with Hoffman feeling her up each night before they went on stage. “He would get more and more aggressive and try and go higher and higher and higher until one day he actually tried to penetrate me with his finger,” she said.
Melissa Kester told People magazine she was recording a song for Hoffman’s film Ishtar with Hoffman holding onto her in the booth, making her feel awkward. “Then I just ran out of there, and I sat in the bathroom crying. I thought, ‘Oh my God.’ I felt like I’d been raped. There was no warning. I didn’t know he would do that.”
Playwright Wendy Riss Gatsiounis told Variety she was pitching a script to Hoffman when he said: “Before you start, let me ask you one question, Wendy — have you ever been intimate with a man over 40?” Her pitch failed. “Then Dustin Hoffman gets up and he says he has to do some clothing shopping at a nearby hotel, and did I want to come along? He’s like, ‘Come on, come to this nearby hotel.’”
Hoffman admitted groping Katharine Ross on the set of The Graduate, once telling an interviewer: “I remember at one point I pinched very gently Katharine’s … probably her right buttock. You know, as a way to loosen us up. I kind of patted her and gave her a little … And she turned on me. A week later we became friends.”
Three unnamed women have given accounts: one claimed she was 15 when Hoffman masturbated in front of her; one said she was given a choice of what kind of sex she could have with him (she chose oral); a third said Hoffman digitally penetrated her in a crowded vehicle. After that, she had sex with him in a hotel room.
HOLLYWOOD ROCKED BY CLAIMS
KEVIN SPACEY’s career is over, as is Weinstein’s. James Packer’s former Hollywood partner, producer Bret Ratner, has been accused of harassment by numerous women, which he categorically denies; NBC News anchor Matt Lauer and US radio personality Garrison Keillor have lost their jobs; US lawmaker John Conyers is under investigation and Al Franken has resigned.
President Donald Trump dodged the bullet for his creepy behaviour; alleged Alabama predator Roy Moore lost an election partly due to historical claims against him; British Defence Secretary Michael Fallon resigned; US comedian Louis CK will struggle to pull a gig again.
That is not an exhaustive list and there are more to come.
Meryl Streep has been attacked by actress Rose McGowan, who has accused Weinstein of raping her (he denies it), for staying silent. Streep responded that McGowan’s claim she was complicit in protecting Weinstein were hurtful. “I wasn’t deliberately silent,” she said in a statement. “I didn’t know.”
Streep also said that recently exhumed comments she gave to Time magazine in 1979 about meeting Hoffman did not accurately summarise how she saw him, having been made in a less uptight era, and meant with humour.
She had said: “He came up to me and said, ‘I’m Dustin — burp — Hoffman,’ and he put his hand on my breast. ‘What an obnoxious pig,’ I thought.”
On the allegations of Anna Graham Hunter, Hoffman said in a statement: “I have the utmost respect for women and feel terrible that anything I might have done could have put her in an uncomfortable situation. I am sorry. It is not reflective of who I am.”
Given an 80-year-old actor cannot exactly lose his job, I asked News Corp Australia’s own film expert, Leigh Paatsch, to describe the damage Hoffman will endure from what are, so far, untested allegations.
“It means there is no such thing as an ongoing legacy,” says Paatsch. “Your body of work is so badly bruised that you haven’t got time to repair the damage caused. I don’t think there is any capacity within the general public to forgive or forget, especially for people whose perfect memories of their all-time favourite films have been disfigured.
“This is indexed by the passion people feel when they watch movies. For some people, it won’t matter one iota. For others, where you were when you watched it, how you felt when you watched it, that was important to them. Those people will find it very hard to revisit those films.”
Paatsch says Hoffman stood at the front “of a generational wave of unconventional leading men, which led to the emergence of De Niro, Keitel and Pacino. I think he had to work harder than the others because of unconventional looks, and his angular way of addressing mainstream roles. But at his best, he was top flight in his generation.”
Clearly, the casting couch mentality goes well beyond Hollywood, politics and media to ordinary workplaces.
Abused women and men working in hardware stores, building sites, supermarkets or office towers will still struggle to tell their stories because it is only the star power of the alleged assailants, created by Hollywood, that has allowed victims to step forward.
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