Tootsie on a Roll to the Top Dustin Hoffman dresses up in skirts in a new hit comedy
Any movie's largest potential is for disaster. The process by which films are made is akin to one of those long, skidding, agonizing chase sequences shot along the rim of a cliff. Inside their chosen vehicle the egomaniacs scream at fate and one another, all the while kicking and kneeing, punching and gouging as they struggle for control of the wheel. Most movies, as everyone knows, end up in the ravine, bottoms up among the broken and rusting remnants of last year's improbable dreams. A few—sensibly designed or well-balanced or inherently powerful— seem to steer themselves into the theaters, oblivious to the uproar that attended their journey.
Then, every once in a rare while, one arrives in style, its owner-drivers still glaring angrily at one another, but somehow the better for its terrible travails. These are the miracles of the industry, the stuff of Hollywood legends. This year's miracle is called Tootsie. It is not just the best comedy of the year; it is popular art on the way to becoming cultural artifact.
Tootsie is the story of how a failed off-Broadway actor named Michael Dorsey (Dustin Hoffman) achieves wisdom as well as professional success when he dresses up as a woman called Dorothy Michaels, becomes a star on a television soap opera and a kind of feminist media heroine as well. The movie was one of the messiest productions in recent history, for a time informally retitled "The Troubled Tootsie" in the gossip columns. No fewer than eight writers, three directors and a spare producer or two worked on it. There were hair-raising stories of Hoffman and Director Sydney Pollack yelling and throwing things at each other ("greatly exaggerated" Pollack now murmurs), of shutdowns and delays while they struggled over everything from Hoffman's makeup (which required three hours' preparation a day) and his often improvised interpretation of the character to the nature and nuances of the gags.
It was perhaps predictable. Ever since he finished Kramer vs. Kramer in 1979, Hoffman had been looking for a script that would permit him to explore the questions "What makes someone a man? What makes someone a woman?" He batted the theme around with a friend, Playwright Murray Schisgal. By the time he and Pollack (who followed Dick Richards and Hal Ashby as director) joined forces, he had acquired not only various draft scripts but a ferocious proprietary interest in the film. Says Hoffman: "The great scripts don't drop out of the sky; you have to invent them."