The Graduate. Midnight Cowboy. Lenny. That's just the beginning of Dustin Hoffman's legendary Hollywood career. Over the last five decades, he's stretched and contorted himself into dozens of defining roles, earning recognition as one of the most talented actors in cinema history. Hoffman tells host Alec Baldwin that he savors each new opportunity like it's the first, and recalls his salad days when he was mis-cast, underestimated, and, on at least one notable occasion, sick on a co-star's shoe.
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This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the thing, My chance to talk with artists, policymakers, and performers, to hear their stories. What inspires their creations, what decisions change their careers, what relationships influence their work. This week, we're doing something different. A couple of months back, I had the great honor of talking with Dustin Hoffman as part of the Turner Classic Movie Film Festival in Hollywood. At the festival, we screen some of the greatest films of all time, and much of Dustin Hoffman's work fits that description. We selected Lenny, the nineteen seventy four film in which Hoffman portrays the groundbreaking but troubled comedian and social critic Lenny Bruce, who had died eight years prior of a drug overdose while battling ongoing obscenity charges. We decided to show this movie about Lenny Bruce at eleven thirty in the morning. We're gonna show TUTSI at midnight. We thought we mixed it up a bit here at the TCM. Customer and Lenny, shot in black and white by director Bob Fossey, was nominated for six Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director for Fossey, Best Actress for Valerie Paine, and Best Actor for Dustin Hoffman. We're all the same schmuck, and it does cracks me up that we try so desperately to be unique when we're all the same cat eyes and Howard Kennedy Johnson me you every cat has got that one chick really busted up his hand. I'm kind of speechless whenever I see this film. I've seen it a lot, which that doesn't come in handy when you have to interview somebody after the film to be manduid speechless. But I don't want to labor this too much, but you know, this is a movie actor who is un any other of the last seventy five years. You know, there's a lot of great film stars, and there's a lot of great actors working, especially through the sixties and the seventies and the eighties and on beyond that, and but few of them took the chances to become a different person so many times in films and transform themselves physically, emotionally, psychologically, um their voice, you know, to inhabit a character. I don't think there's another actor alive in the film business in the last several years, who transformed themselves again and again, and then would play something very close to themselves, their own speech, their own behavior, perhaps their voice, and all the President's men and in Cramer versus Kramer. Uh but you know, please, um, but I just want to say that this is a person I've admired on the deepest level for a long long time, and it's my great pleasure to ask you to join me and welcoming Dustin Hoffmann. Yeah. Great, you're two kinds. M Thank you when you make films like this, I mean you've worked You've made so many great films and worked with so many great directors. Was Fosse some of them? Was out a goal for you too to work with Fosse? No, how was it to work with Fossey? Tough? Tough, tough? Uh. Bob was a originally a choreographer. Her and choreographers don't have dancers coming up to them saying, what's my motivation? They dances do what they're told. You know. He tried to be in a sense to collaborate, but it was tough for him and it was tough for me. We had a tough time. Did you like to do a lot of takes. Yes, both of us did the script. I thought it was problematic, so I wasn't that anxious to do it. We went into rehearsal with the principal actors, with the wonderful Valerie Paene extraordinary performance and was Valerie, myself and you know, Jane Minor and I think Stanley Beck were in New York in the room and it's going rough the rehearsal, and after five days we started Monday. After five days, we're rehearsing routines, rehearsing scenes, and on Friday, Bob Fosse says, we don't have a movie. We don't have a script. See on Monday the reverse two weeks or three weeks, and we thought it was gonna be shelved when Hallomen came back Monday and he says, I solved it, and he interspersed it. He says, I'm going to intersperse it with interviews because the scenes there's no connective tissue to them, they don't connect. So Stanley Beck, who was wonderful and at my manager, Valerie Pete, thank you. Uh uh. Stanley and I were close friends since we were beginning actors. Uh and Valerie Preen and Jan Minor are going. I think that's all it is, isn't Those three are going to be interviewed throughout the movie and He'll and I'll have an easier time of shooting it. By the way, that's Bob Fossey asking the questions. Now, when when you make a film like this and there, or any of the films you've made, I should say, do you have any kind of the unique relationship for a specific relationship with the cinematographer Surtease. This film was nominated for six Academy Awards and in every one of the major categories you would imagine Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Screenplay, and cinematography for Surtees, who made his reputation shooting a lot of Clint Eastwoods films for many, many years. Bob Surtees was one of the great cinematographers Robert Surtees. He was the cinematographer the graduate Bruce is a son and son. Yes, we were going with the father and son ten And when you shoot a film, do you have a specific relationship with cinematographers when you make a film? Or no, No, I don't uh, I don't want to know. Uh. Where the cameras. In terms of UH, I do ask about lenses sometimes if I want my hands to do something, and I say, where are you cutting? Where's your bottom frame? Because if if it's here, also i'd have to have my hands up here to have it in the shot. Other than that, I don't really want to know. It's interesting that you say that, Alec, because one of the things I objected to with with Bob is that he posed me. And when you see it, it's gorgeous. So he was right. I was wrong, but you know i'd be up there, and I worked so hard on these routines. Uh. I had never seen Lennie Bruce. Bob had never seen Lennie Bruce. Mike Nichols, who I talked to before I did it, because he had done the graduate. He and Elaine May were acting upstairs on Sunset Boulevard was it called a duplex or something a nightclub, and Lenny Bruce was downstairs, and in between their acts they would come downstairs and watch Bruce because no comedian, they said, would do a whole show improvising. You know, sometimes you do two minutes, three minutes, and the rest is your is your stuff. But Lenny would come out and not know what he was going to say. I think the only who comedians I know since Lenny that that do that one was Robbed Mumbles Robin Williams, and the other one was a wonderful Billy Connolly, and neither of them many times would just they would just go uh and that that takes a lot. But what was the question? Um the sorry? We're talking about cinematographers and oh and I worked hard. I got the thirty three rpm s that Lenny had made us what we called him that we didn't call them finals, and I'd lay down on the floor and I would play. I had three months. I had about three months, and I did every you know. I wrote down longhand every single line he said in all the records, and he even the ones he did over, he would always deviate and I would write them down. And then I would go to Bob Fossie and I'd say, geez, I like what he did here, because he used these sentences or he used that, and I was promised. And I think that's what I got so upset about, that I would be able to shoot it. We were going to shoot it. And I think that's what Bob wanted. We were going to shoot it in different clubs in Florida and with live audiences, and that's what I wanted. I want to be able to really feel like I'm doing it with the real audience. And he'll have whatever, three or four cameras at once. He agreed, and that's what we were supposed to do. And then it's probably money wouldn't allow it. So it was quite laborious sometimes to do these routines over and over again, and he would tilt the camera, he would go, He'd be like, where you are and I'd be on the stage. He said, okay, now look a little bit this way, and I'll look up, now look down, Okay, now do the routine from here to here. And you know, it kind of broke my heart because I was trying to be the guy. You know, Foster. It was a great, great artist. And uh, it's funny because I just saw a film recently with that Alfred Hitchcock, directed with Carrie Grant, and uh. Carry Grant said he had never worked with Hitchcock again after the first picture because they didn't get along, because Hitchcock didn't like to collaborate. But then they made up and they made more movies, and that Lenny Bruce was not someone you had been a fan of or had a big awareness of before them. You no, No, I just I was in New York. I just never saw him. We couldn't have uh, you know, I mean before I was successful. We couldn't afford to go to nightclubs, you know. They it was expensive. And uh, I love the jazz is what's so extorting? It was next to you. Jazz never dates. Jazz is the same now as it was that. It's like god ut to score? Oh and uh and I had time. No, I didn't. I had never seen him. I had never seen I don't think any comedian. I didn't go to nightclubs much. And I went out to l A because they said. Someone said to me, if you want to know Lenny Bruce, Uh, you gotta go see Sally mar his mother, who was alive. And I went. She was very friendly. Uh. She introduced me to one of his best friends who used to shoot up with and he in turn introduced me to friends at Lenny And I had a tape recorder, you know, like a wallet, not a walan is like a pearl tape recorder, and I taped everything, and she says, you want to go to Vegas because they're all They're all his friend, Buddy Hackett other people. And I said, oh my god, yes, And I was taking all these notes. It was the best time of research I've ever had. They all said the same thing. Uh, except Buddy Hackett. Um. They said, you know, you know Broadway Danny Rose thing, will you allen? Did you know? And they used to get together, the comedians, Lenny and these guys when they were you know certainly what it was. I don't know Cantor's or And they said they'd sit around do what they did and brow it down, you know, tell jokes. And I staidly look around, and he was always very quiet. And suddenly he's gone, because he wasn't shy guy. And he's gone, and they look around. I don't know where he is. And then they find him in the kitchen talking to the people that work in the kitchen to help. He loved to just talk to the people and and ask questions and find out stuff. I think he originally this is the stuff I had heard. They kind of say it in the movie. The musicians were more important to him than the audience, because when you do show after show after show. He if you noticed the musicians, they're always sitting like that, you know, because they ing with them all chance of a Von Monroe and uh and Lenny uh Len. He felt that if he could crack up the musicians, then he was getting somewhere. I think he wanted to be in Hollywood. We wanted to be an actor. Also, I had heard you shot this movie where we shot a lot of it in Florida. The nightclubs, the stage work. Yeah, one nightclub. Basically, I think the scene when we were sitting next to each other, the scene up there where I'm in my raincoat and use Yes. When I came back after my three months, I had all this stuff to give Bob. You gotta put this in. You gotta put that in. You gotta put that. And the one thing that he kept was that scene. And the reason he did is when I was memorizing, it wasn't then. You know, this is before the kind of media. You know, you had cell phones and all the texting. Some guy heard I was doing the movie and he had been a student somewhere in Chicago, and he sent me found out my business address in New York, and he sent me a cassette and I played it word for word. It's that scene. And I got piste off at Bob because when he shot the Master from upstairs, right in the back, and when I saw it, I said, he didn't cut in. You didn't cut in? He says, no, So that's eight minutes, you know, being up there, just in one shot, and again he was he was right. Uh, it's nice of you to admit that. Actually, it's very generous. I've met a lot of stuff forty years later. But but do you think do you think in your I mean, obviously you're someone who when you I mean, I don't believe anything I read. But I mean, but but involved I try to minimize that in my life of the time. But but the but but for you, obviously you know, very fastidious and very very lots of questions and lots of seeking and so forth in the work you were doing. And what do you think that comes from in terms of all the films you've made from Graduate on into Cowboy and everything like that, where you just seem so, what's the word I mean, you're so Jewish? Is that in I'll convert If that's it's that simple. I'm gonna convert tomorrow. That's what's gonna get me into your strateusy. But the but, but, but the thing is you you just seem like you always have something to prove a lot of people got where you got and they did what you did, and you scored with these performances and the originality. But then you keep going and you still feel like you have Did you feel that way? You still have something to prove again and again and again? What drove you? I guess the same thing that still drives me. Kobe Bryant was interviewed recently. It was before he had a step out for the season, because he heard himself. I saw the interview and I wrote it down. I told my son, Jake was basketball, same question. You know, all these years of great basketball playing and he still spend so much time practicing and playing whatever. Why? And he said, I guess for the challenge of every day. It's beautiful, sons. And I have only one slight personal connection to Lenny Bruce and that and that was that Marvin Worth was a dear friend. He died producer. He produced the stem he produced to Malcolm X with Spikey, produced a lot of good and he was Bruce's manager, and Marvin Worthy was from Brooklyn and his wife Jo never from Brooklyn. And he had the one of the heaviest New York accents I've never heard in my life. His voice was down here. He had a very heavy accent like this. And he said to me, I'm gonna revive Letty on Broadway, and I want you to do play Letty. I go, what and he said, uh, he goes. I got a thousand hours of tapes of Lenny. I got thought, Julian Barry, We've got so much material and Lenny's he said, there's so much stuff we could put in there. I don't worry about that. It's all gonna work like a charm. And I go and he goes, and your Dusty, he called you Dusty. Dusty's not the only one who could play that pot. By the way, He's got the only person who could play that part. I'm like, uh huh, Sarah. And he goes, and he goes, he goes, and I go, but what about the other thing? He goes, one other thing? What about the other thing? He was one other thing, one other thing. One of the things. I go, I'm not Jewish, he said, You're from Long Island, right, I said, yeah, you go your hand, you're half way there. The rest of the will take care of himself. O that and he would have been wonderful. But when you did this film, how involved in your films were you before? Then later in the casting? Oh, I have to tell you. I'm glad you're asking me. Another example of the Fosse's genius, uh, is that I met Honey Bruce. Uh and uh uh? Which came first? I met? He cast Valerie Parrain before he met Honey Bruce, and then he met her, and then I met her we you know, not together. And I couldn't believe Honey Bruce that Valerie was the reincarnation of Honey Bruce. Literally, I mean it could have been like mother and daughter. I was and I said, Bob, you had to have met the Honey Bruce before you cast Valeri says no, it was just this intuition. I had nothing to do with any of the casting except except Stanley. He was nice enough to have Stanley in it for my manager and all my films. Uh. Yeah, I mean the graduate. They've been trying for two years to cast it, and Katherine Ross and myself were the last two two screen test after two years, and I heard that they were sitting in the screen room not particularly excited about our screen test, and I said, well, either we go with them or we don't do it. And it was that kind of a that they said that in interviews. I think Larry Terman said that the producer and uh Midnight Cowboy, uh he uh he cast Uh, he didn't cast John Floyd. He cast some someone else and they wouldn't let him out of his contract. And after that happened, I said, please see my friend John Voyd. We weren't close friends when we've been off for all way together. And he says no. John Sessinger said he read for it and he doesn't have that Texas accent. He was from Yonkers. I said, yeah, but he's an actor. He can get it, you know. And John immediately went down to Texas forgot where with the tape recorder and spent whatever time and came back and and read for it and he got the part. But he was second choice. Kate Jackson was the first choice for Cramer versus Kramer. She was in Charlie's Angels and they were saying, oh, the film will pay back itself before we started shooting, because they were so popular. And then the studio wouldn't let her out. So I kept telling them about this Meryl Streep. I had heard about it, ah, and they saw and they saw her. So there's been a few I've suggested, I've I've never demanded or you know, I don't. I don't think that works actually, unless you're directing or producing. Well, some people, there's some people they have these approvals of casting and they and they utilize that in whatever way. And those are the people who they just don't get involved. They just like they just let it that all take care of itself, and the it doesn't really change what they do. You know, Devlent Hackman and I knew each other on the early days. They're much older and and uh, we never worked together. And suddenly I'm doing this thing. A few years ago. We're shooting in New Orleans a runaway jury and I have a I think a supporting part and Gene Hackman has a leading part. And the director finds out that we knew each other. We went to the past, seen the playhouse together to kicked out after three months, they're not having any talent and h oh my god, you guys know each other for all those time, dirty years. Yeah, we gotta do a scene. So they wrote a scene. It's it's one of the last scenes in the movie. Takes place in a public bathroom. It's like an eight page dialogue scene. And afterwards, it was the last thing I shot the movie. It's over, and Gane and I say, let's go out and get drunk. And we go to an Italian restaurant in New Orleans and we're getting drunk and Hackman says, were you scared? I said, I was so scared. Man, I thought I'm gonna I'm going to forget my lines. He said he felt exactly the same way. You know, because you are what you are at the beginning, you don't really change. We were unemployee actors for ten years, and he said to me, and one of the great things ever said. We were just close to each other. He says, do you feel the same way I do after you finish a movie? And he probably made a hundred twenty movies. I said, what do you feel like You'll never work again? Of course, every single time that that's it. After five decades of consistently winning roles, every actor dreams of Hoffman's years of joblessness remain charming. His latest film, The Program About Lance Armstrong, will be released later this year. Listen to other episodes of Here's the Thing in our archives, like my conversation with Dick Cavitt, whose career as an iconic talk show host includes a TV interview with hot young newcomer Dustin Hoffman, fresh off his film The Graduate, the tape of which may or may not exist. There are several several versions of what really happened. I just remember being told one day, Dick, they're going to either reuse the tapes or race them or jump them. When you see what tapes that once to the ABC show and you can have them if you want to for sixty dollars. And I thought, well that's a ludicrous amount of money. Yeah. Take a listen at Here's the Thing dot Org. This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing Today, recorded live at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood as part of the Turner Classic Movie Film Festival. Dustin Hoffman has been nominated for the Oscar for Best Actor seven times. He's won the award twice. Actors Strive for depth and range in their work. Hoffman makes this appear effortless. There's obviously roles you played, like Cramer versus Cramer and all the President's men, and you seem it's, I don't know what word to use. It seems close from who you are, your voice and your appearance and your psychologic stuffing. You're paying playing a contemporary character. You're not playing somebody with some disability or what have you. It's not rain Man or someone who's damaged and broken like Cowboy and so forth like that. But you've done both. There's a there's a theatricality of the roles and a vividness to them, and you're not afraid to do that. Where does that come from? From being in the theater? Yeah? I mean I where are you from? From? Long as? I'm from fucking long Asland, fuckings long with two? So how first of all, I wish we lived in the same city. How old were you when you started studying act? And when they sent you out? They sent you out for certain kinds of parts, young leading men, the young guys who could cried a lot or whatever. I'm the short Jew and uh still with some acne, and I come to New York and night to study, and I always said leading men, young leading men, Juvenile's character juveniles. That's what I was designed as. I couldn't get an agent, and that's just code for Semitic, you know, because in those days the leading man was white Anglo Saxon Protestant and the ethnic person was character juvenile or character us. It really was that way anyway. So I went out a few times. I could, you know, go to open auditions, because if you're not equity then you can't go to a regular audition, and you can't go to a regular audition until you get your equity card, and you can't get an equity card until you get a job, so you know, catch twenty two. So the few times that I could go, it was the character Juvenile and by Hooker Crook, uh Nichols casts Cassan Ross and I in a graduate and I'd been just starting to get somewhere off Broadway doing you know, my own style of stuff, hunchbacked German, gay guy with a limp, you know, first thing that I got mentioned for in the in the New York Times, and uh Nichols had heard about it, and uh and I got to you're not kidding. You played a hunchback Germany, German homosexual with a limb Ronald ribbon. What was the production Harry Noon and Night? And the other actor was what's this Joel Joel Gray? Sorry Joe? Uh, yes, that was accurate. So uh he brings me out to test me, and I didn't want to test. I was doing, for the first time in my life, doing well off Broadway. I won an award, and I thought, I'll have a career, you know, do I'll do off Broadway. And you know this as well as I do. Uh. You know, if God has said, look Alec, you'll never be in the movies, you'll never get leading roles. If you're struggling for years, you won't even be on Broadway. I will guarantee you a good part Broadway for the rest of your life. You'd sign you would, you know? Uh? And so would Hackman who moved Fronture and down you know, six flights, and do Val who worked midnight to eight in the post office. And I was doing waiter jobs and a little acting teaching if I could. And it's you know, it's never changed as actors here. You know the pain of that um and uh, here. He is now taking me out into l A and testing and can we do anything about his nose? I remember, and I mean, well the guy is He said, you don't and he couldn't believe it. I mean, he's the hottest director from Neil Simon Broadway and also Virginia Wolf. He did, Uh, there was no hotterer director at that moment in time. He was Spielberg. And he said, what do you mean you don't want to do this part? I said, I read the book of Mr. Nichols. Was on the phone. He's in l A m in New York doing a play. I said, ben hi been Braddock in the book. He's five ft eleven, blonde hair. I says, it's Redford. I said, you don't want me and he said no. He says, I I would like to test you. He said, you mean he's not Jewish. I said, right, it's Benjamin Braddock and he said something I've never forgotten this is well, maybe he's Jewish. Inside years later he's from Berlin, Mike. He came here in the early thirties and Uh, he had his own pain because he didn't have a lot of hair. He had scarlet fever and uh, he not too long ago, just a few years ago. I read in the paper that he never understood why he cast me, and then he finally did through the analysis or something, and he said, because I was like an alter ego of him. He felt like he was me in uh, you know, on the periphery, you know, out of it, and he was casting himself the funny looking guy. Do you know that that movie was shot and I went back to New York to collect unemployment. It was a lot, because you know, it's fifty bucks a week is getting the mostly to get and they're cutting the movie again. I read this in the newspapers and Lawrence Turman, I think it was a New York trrens, a producer. They're showing it all over the bell Air circuit, every Hills, Bellair, Brentwood, on the movie theaters they have in the homes, and over and over again, Turman said before it opened, and over and over again, people in the industry would come up to Larry, why brilliant film you almost had if you hadn't a miscast the league And that was a perception. You know. It's interesting because speaking of that casting thing, he and I have had a little there was a whiff of this, of this, of my appreciation of his career, and you wind him mind. I remember this. I doubt you remember this. But I go to the old Westwood Marquis Hotel because I get called to go an audition for the movie Hero and Stephen Friers is the director, and the phone rings, and this is back when I was making films in the nineties and everything, and I'm lighting one off the other and I'm gonna meet this guy, and I'm like, God, I'm in my car. I'm like God, masically gonna go to the Westwood Marquis and they just lay out the facts. They're like, you know, snap out of it. You're gonna go to the Westwood Marquis. You're gonna be Stephen Friers, and you're gonna have a meeting with Dustin Huff. And I'm like, I love this guy. I want to bring this movie where this guy and all of a sudden, like twenty minutes goes by and Stephen Fiers. If you know the movie Hero, where someone commits this actor, there's a case of mistake and identity, and Andy Garcia played the other role, so there has to be this case of mistaken identity between the two actors. Stephen Fiers literally twenty minutes in. I mean my dream is just take flight, my wings. I'm flying over the West Food Blocky Hotel. I'm gonna make my first movie with Dustin eff and Hoffman and Stephen Fears looks at me. He goes, you know, I just realized that you don't look anything like Dustin at all. And it was like there, I'm flying. Also, he shoots my balloon like crash onto Westwood Boulevard. I'm dead on the highway there. I'll never figure to talk about. Yeah, I'm not. I'm not. Our dreams, our dreams, how they how they escape us. But I'll call the Emma right right right in west But the exactly when you do, when you show up and you work with Slushranger and you do Cowboy, do you you come up with all that and you show him did he help you? Did you Cowboy? Very briefly, he didn't want It's very similar to Friars and You. He did not want to see me because he had seen a graduate and that's the only thing he'd ever seen me in and he was an artist in a ship that I was in a big hit and suddenly an instant star. He wanted the right person, and he refused to see me. And I heard about this, and I had read the book. I thought the script was okay. It was Waldos. He actually came in a room with John votnite when we did it near a wall instide tape recorder. We improvised everything everything. The Slessener was great at that, and he would go home, uh Waldo well and write the improvisations into the scenes that he had already written. Anyway, he wouldn't see me, and I said, please, you know, I gotta see him. He's got to see me. And he agreed. I know we're running out of time, so go quick. Uh forty second Street. What are they called those things where you you go when you put the quarter in? I can't remember the automat the automat, thank you, And I said, the automa. I'm gonna directed movie of him playing. You heard it? Go ahead? And I used to go there and we all did you know too, three in the morning whatever, uh, and get coffee or whatever. And it was all kind of trance people there. And I said, I'll meet him in the automat and I want to do it about one or two in the morning, because you know, and I'll dress accordingly, which is what I did. It kind of like I wore in that scene at rain Co and I didn't shave a few days and I greased my hair. I was auditioning and I came in and I just said, met him there, sat there, and he looked at me, and he looked at you know, sparsely crowded, you know, people around. He says. Oh. He says, yes, I think you'll do quite well. So the voice and all of it, you just throw that out there. You come up with that. Oh well, yeah, you keep trying to meet my friend Bill Daniel. My friend Bill Daniel. You two kinds. Where do you find this? You get desperate? Um, but I and I didn't. I that's my bob. I wasn't desperate enough. And uh, we we're rehearsing and then uh a pressing dra hastic shoot some exteriors before we started shooting, uh, principal photography because he's got winter and he needed winter. So John Voight and I go and he says, well, you don't have to talk. I said, I don't have a character. I don't have a voice, I said, I can't I barely have a walk. No, we'll have the camera cross the street. You guys just gotta walk. We're not starting for a month, but we just need the weather, you know, the smoke com on whatever was right? Okay, So John and I were walking. John Boyd and I knew each other for years. I was the assistant director, which is like, you know, sharpening pencils in the off Broadway when he was in From the Bridge with Bob du Valley was brilliant and he was up and coming star and uh, and you know we were competitive. Actors are always competitive and uh, you know, if you're walking on the street, you got a script, you have a reading, or you did the read, you see another actor coming up, you've always put it behind your back, you know. But no, it's just something you because you don't want the competition. Uh. Anyway, So we're across the street walking and says after divorce, says, yeah, but I'm supposed to cough. We're at that point in the movie where you know he's got you're gonna find out he has t B or whatever. He says, Yes, says this says, alway, you do some coughing, do something not going but you don't have to talk. Okay, I'm rehearsing out of panic, you know, trying on he's limps or whatever. And uh, I said, shouldn't be shooting. We got a month ago. I haven't found him yet. And suddenly we're walking and we paused, and I'm trying the cough and I threw up literally on John Void's cowboy boots, and afterwards such as as, I think we've got it, you do, and John, because he's an actor and you know, we're competitive. He Plessenger told me later he went up to pless and Journey. He said, John, let me just ask you something. Is he going to do that all throughout the over? He says, because I'm not even in the scene if he tells, Well, let me just say this because obviously, I mean, I got another forty five questions I could ask, but they do have a schedule here for the festival. But I do want to say, I mean, as as u as sappy as this sounds on behalf of everybody here, I want to say thank you to you because I mean, I really, from the bottom of my heart, from the bottom of my heart, you are one of the greatest movie actors that has ever lived in the sort of well I wanted to during us act really actors ever and you know somebody, gonnas, please help me in factory Dustin Happen. Dustin Hoffman has gained some hard won wisdom during his career, and despite turning seventy eight this summer, he's embracing a very new way to share it. He's teaching an acting class online. The description reads, Dustin teaches you everything he wishes someone had taught him. You can sign up at masterclass dot com. This is Alec Baldwin. Thanks this week to Shaun Cameron and everyone at Turner Classic Movies you're listening to. Here's the thing