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For his part, Pollack (whose 13 films include The Way We Were and Absence of Malice) was "very apprehensive about doing comedy." He was especially worried about directing the first script of Tootsie that he read. He recalls that it was hard to know "if it was an homage to actors, a sophisticated comedy examining sexual mores or a story about the rehabilitation of a sexist." As the production began, tempers were tight. At times during the first month, only one shot a day was completed, as Hoffman's complex makeup literally slid down his face under the lights. Eventually, it cost approximately as much to bring in a small-scale comedy ($21 million) as it did to film the life of Gandhi on an epic scale. ("Yeah, but they didn't have to shoot in New York," says Hoffman.)
The result was worth it. Tootsie is more than Charley's Aunt updated or Myra Breckenridge toned down. In telling the tale of a man forced to get in touch with the feminine side of his nature and becoming a better man because of the experience, it triumphantly remains a farce for our times, not a tract for them. Despite the many creative hands involved, the picture has perfect comic tonality. It plays as if it were written by one wise and rueful individual, directed by someone who never felt a moment's anxiety.
The plausibility of this film with a wonderfully implausible premise owes much to its richly realized background. Hoffman lent it some of his autobiography: a young actor struggling to be serious in the alternately flighty and tough world of show biz. Michael Dorsey is the kind of fellow who overthinks the role of a tomato on a commercial and quits an off-Broadway show because he does not want his character to die where the director wants him to. He is, as his agent (wonderfully played by Director Pollack) tells him, "a cult failure." Michael's friends include his playwright-roommate, superbly underacted by Bill Murray, who is so sober about his art that he wants to have a theater that is open only when it rains and a girlfriend, played by Teri Garr, who makes high comedy out of low selfesteem. She is so insecure that when she is asked to describe a part she claims to be wrong for, she replies, "A woman."
She loses the part, and Michael, broke, decides to go for it. When, as Dorothy, he enters the strange subculture of the soaps, he must contend with such fine comic caricatures as a smooth, womanizing director (Dabney Coleman) and an aging ham actor (George Gaynes) who becomes so smitten with Dorothy that he ends up in the street beneath her window warbling, "I'll know when my love comes along." Then there is Jessica Lange as Julie Nichols, the soap opera's heroine.
"Don't you find it confusing being a woman in the '80s?" she asks Dorothy/Michael, and that understates her case. Julie has a career. She has a baby but no husband. She has her male chauvinist director for a lover. She has a problem with alcohol. And now there is this strange attraction she feels for the tamperproof Dorothy.