Mulligan and Pakula, both around 40, were socially conscious filmmakers who had teamed on five movies over the previous decade they had dealt with race in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), abortion in the Steve McQueen/Natalie Wood comedy-drama Love with the Proper Stranger (1963), and (tentatively) homosexuality and suicide in Inside Daisy Clover (1965).Įxperienced with casting young female leads, they chose Sandy Dennis, who was virtually unknown to moviegoers at the time of casting but whose breakthrough film, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, would open while Up the Down Staircase was in production and win her an Academy Award by the time Staircase was released the next year. Pakula (who hadn’t yet stepped behind the camera) couldn’t have been more apt choices to shepherd the story to the screen. A movie sale was a natural, and within the context of that mid-’60s moment when urban blight, the shaping of young minds, and the uphill fight against systemic entropy (no matter what the system) were frequent magazine-cover topics, director Robert Mulligan and producer Alan J.
The novel was an instant success, selling 1.5 million copies within the first month of its publication. It was the story-told innovatively in notes, memos, essays, fragments, suggestion-box insults, and jottings-of Sylvia Barrett, an idealistic young woman getting her first taste of the realities of working in a rough-and-tumble, ethnically mixed urban public school. In 1964, Bel Kaufman, a middle-aged, Berlin-born New York City schoolteacher, published her first novel, Up the Down Staircase.
As the masterpieces, pathbreakers, and oddities of that landmark year reach their golden anniversaries, I’ll try to offer a sense of what it might have felt like to be an avid moviegoer 50 years ago, discovering these films as they opened. In this biweekly column, I’m revisiting 1967 from a different angle. In my 2008 book Pictures at a Revolution, I approached the dramatic changes in movie culture in the 1960s through the development, production, and reception of each of the five nominees for 1967’s Best Picture Academy Award: Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, In the Heat of the Night, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, and Doctor Dolittle.
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