Dustin Hoffman might just be the figurative face of New Hollywood. In 1967’s The Graduate, he made his acting debut in a film that helped shape the shift from the style and standards of Old Hollywood dramas to a new way of telling stories and breaking from tradition.
So when Hoffman says film is as bad as it’s been since he started acting, you may have a problem.
“I think right now television is the best that it’s ever been and I think that it’s the worst that film has ever been – in the 50 years that I’ve been doing it, it’s the worst,” Hoffman said to the British newspaper The Independent. Them’s fightin’ words from an actor whose only switch to the small screen in recent years was his short lived HBO show Luck.
And while Hoffman didn’t add any specifics about films, studios or his particular challenges getting films made, he added this about how much the industry has changed since he first began acting. “It’s hard to believe you can do good work for the little amount of money these days. We did The Graduate and that film still sustains, it had a wonderful script that they spent three years on, and an exceptional director with an exceptional cast and crew, but it was a small movie, four walls and actors, that is all, and yet it was 100 days of shooting.”
Hoffman is currently promoting his film The Choir (also known as Boychoir), a film loosely referred to as Whiplash with church singers. He’ll also appear in Stephen Frears’ The Program, a biopic on Lance Armstrong.
Hoffman has a point about how much the industry has changed, but is this the worst things have been in the last half century?