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Of course, Julie's attraction is more than reciprocated, though as long as Michael has his wig and makeup on, his is the love that dares not speak its name. It is his conflict, between the need to keep his identity secret and his compulsion to confess it and try to claim his true love, that moves the comedy to the knockabout level.
It is hard to say where all these inventions, and the wit with which they are stated, first appeared. There was an original script by Don McGuire (Bad Day at Black Rock), rewritten by Robert Kaufman (Love at First Bite). Thereafter, Schisgal and Larry Gelbart, of Movie Movie and TV's MASH, each did new versions. A large contribution was made by Elaine May and smaller ones by Valerie Curtin (Inside Moves), Barry Levinson (Diner) and Robert Garland (The Electric Horseman). After arbitration, screen credit finally went to Gelbart and Schisgal. But it was Pollack who "sat in a room with a staple gun and a pair of scissors," stitching all this material together. He insisted that a certain innocence and tastefulness had to be maintained, despite the fact that "Dustin is more outrageous, more adventurous, shall we say." The star's willingness to open himself up gives Tootsie its humanity. But the rigor of Pollack's debate with Hoffman may have sharpened the actor's extraordinary performance, shaped his improvs and brought this diffuse enterprise into the clear focus that distinguishes great comedy from the mediocre.
Hoffman is a truly demonic fussbudget, who must pull any character he plays out of his own memories, experiences and emotions, which means that he has precious little objectivity about his creations. "I can't act a moral," says Hoffman. "The best I can do is speak personally, not say this is the way it is, or should be, but this is true of me." In the film, Michael says he knows what it is to be a woman precisely because he is an actor. "An actor waits by the phone," he cries; "he has no power when he gets a job." That line is pure Hoffman.
Hoffman thinks, too, that there is a lot of his late mother, who died a few months before filming began, in the nurturing side of Dorothy. Some of her ferocious integrity as an actress comes from a friend of Hoffman's, Actress Polly Holliday (Flo on TV's Alice until 1980). He had directed her in a Schisgal play, All over Town. When he and Pollack decided that Dorothy could have a Southern accent like Holliday's, Hoffman got in touch with her and she coached him. Says Hoffman: "It wasn't just the dialect, it was this other thing she has: she is a very tough lady, she is uncompromising." After attitudes came makeup and dress. "If I were a woman, I know I'd want to be as attractive as possible. I get offended when I see comediennes dehumanizing themselves to get a laugh." But after enormous effort to turn himself into a fantasy female, says Hoffman, there came "the day I found I would turn myself down; that if I met Dorothy, me as a woman, at a party, I'd turn me down."