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Screenwriter behind The Graduate and What’s Up Doc? forged a cultural cache that paved the way for future generations
The language of American comedy would have been a lot less sparky without Buck Henry, who has died aged 89. He helped shape one of the most revolutionary films of the 1960s (The Graduate), co-wrote one of the funniest of all time (What’s Up, Doc?) and scripted the movie that became the springboard for Nicole Kidman’s career (To Die For). Each new wave of comic talent took it in turn to pay tribute to Henry in some way; Tina Fey, who cast him as her character Liz Lemon’s badly behaved father in 30 Rock, was only the most recent.
Henry was the fourth writer to try to adapt Charles Webb’s 1963 novella The Graduate, about an aimless young man who drifts into an affair with an older married woman, and he was instrumental in making drastic tonal and narrative changes that transformed the main character from a self-righteous homophobe to a plaintive and over-earnest young twit who is confounded by adult hypocrisy, his own impossibly high standards and the nebulousness of his privileged west coast surroundings. Henry, whose previous experience had included co-creating the hit TV spy spoof Get Smart and appearing on chat shows posing as a campaigner fighting to keep animals clothed (“A nude horse is a rude horse”), was brought on to The Graduate by the director, Mike Nichols, himself an accomplished comic improviser from his double-act with Elaine May. Working together, they created comic dynamite from the generational rupture between the youth of the 1960s and their Eisenhower-era parents, and found their ideal lead in the gawky newcomer Dustin Hoffman. Continue reading...