Movies, Marriage, and the Making of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
December 1, 2023
A cinematic history of an explosive portrayal of marriage. When he was 15, biographer and photography critic Gefter saw Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and was fascinated. The film, he recalls, "put its finger on the rumbling beneath the polite surface" of suburban marriages--like his parents'--and laid bare "tensions that I felt but that were left unacknowledged." Deeming the movie "my standard against which all movies about marriage are measured," he takes a deep dive into the genesis, making, and reception of the movie, from its 1962 beginnings on Broadway (the first three-acter for playwright Edward Albee) to its transformation into the acclaimed movie starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. The play, with Uta Hagen as Martha and Arthur Hill as George, was a hit, burnishing Albee's reputation and garnering several Tony awards. Warner Brothers paid generously for the film rights, handing the 3.5-hour play to screenwriter Ernest Lehman to be condensed into two hours. Mike Nichols, a well-regarded Broadway director, agreed to take on his first movie. Taylor and Burton, recently married after a notorious affair on the set of Cleopatra, were signed as the stars. Gefter chronicles a spate of conflicts, shifting alliances, and emotional outbursts that erupted on the set. Nichols argued with Warner over whether to film in black and white, as Nichols insisted, or color; actors and staff balked at Nichols' impatience and arrogance; Burton goaded Taylor. The result, nevertheless, was a critical and financial success, praised by the New York Times as "a magnificent triumph of determined audacity." Gefter offers a close reading of the movie to support his assessment of it as "era-defining." Revealing the emotional struggles and challenges at the core of any marriage, the movie was "both a product of the 1960s and a catalytic influence that came to define that decade." A penetrating examination of a bold film.
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December 11, 2023
This erudite study from photography critic Gefter (What Becomes a Legend Most) explores the genesis and impact of Edward Albee’s 1962 play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and its 1966 film adaptation. The play’s disquieting vision of domestic discord, Gefter suggests, was inspired by the “dissonance experienced throughout his emotionally barren childhood in a household of abundant material luxury.” Recounting the drama that plagued the making of Mike Nichols’s film version, Gefter notes that the first-time director sparred with original cinematographer and industry veteran Harry Stradling, whom Nichols claimed undermined his creative vision and eventually replaced with Haskell Wexler. During heated squabbles between married costars Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, other personnel on set were unsure “if they were witnessing the actors getting into character or simply watching the husband-and-wife dynamics of the Burtons’ real-life marriage.” The trivia entertains (Gefter contends the real-life sources for Albee’s embittered married protagonists were a Wagner College faculty couple whose notorious fights were also the subject of Andy Warhol’s 1965 verité documentary, Bitch), and Gefter persuasively credits the film with setting the template for more bracing Hollywood depictions of love after romance’s first blush. This will renew readers’ admiration for the classic film and its source material. Agent: Adam Eaglin, Cheney Agency.
Starred review from February 1, 2024
Gefter (Wagstaff: Before and After Mapplethorpe) skillfully assesses how Edward Albee's 1962 play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? became the 1966 Mike Nichols film that challenged many white, middle-class, Western cultural assumptions of the mid-20th century. The film is about family, deception, marriage, and loyalty, and audiences often had trouble distinguishing between the marital woes (different though they were) of the pedestrian characters George and Martha and of the glamorous stars Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. Gefter relives the film's taunts, dares, and one-liners, which helped end the film industry's Hays Code. Gefter offers vignettes of all the major players: actors Taylor, Burton, George Segal, and Sandy Dennis and producer Ernest Lehman. He delves into the verbal and conduct codes and the campy worlds of gay New York and Hollywood, which inform much of the book. Its insights include that George's and Martha's names are derived from the first First Couple of the United States. The book also reveals how Lehman cut the three-and-a-half-hour play by an hour for the movie adaptation. VERDICT Multilayered and eminently revisitable (like the play and the film), Gefter's wonderful book helps readers reevaluate vis-�-vis values prevalent half a century later.--Frederick J. Augustyn Jr.
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