Cocktails with George and Martha
Movies, Marriage, and the Making of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
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4.1 • 14 Ratings
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- $21.99
Publisher Description
"Smart and entertaining . . . Gefter shows why Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? hit the '60s like a torpedo." -NPR, Fresh Air
"Delicious." -New York Times Book Review
The behind-the-scenes story of a provocative play, the groundbreaking film it became, and how two iconic stars changed the image of marriage forever.
From its debut in 1962, Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was a wild success and a cultural lightning rod. It scandalized critics but magnetized audiences. Across 644 sold-out Broadway performances, the drama demolished the wall between what could and couldn't be said on the American stage and marked a definitive end to the I Love Lucy 1950s.
Then, Hollywood took a colossal gamble on Albee's sophisticated play-and won. Costarring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, the sensational 1966 film minted first-time director Mike Nichols as industry royalty and won five Oscars. How this scorching play became a movie classic-surviving censorship attempts, its director's inexperience, and its stars' own tumultuous marriage-is one of the most riveting stories in all of cinema.
Marfield Prizewinner Philip Gefter tells that deliciously entertaining story in full for the first time, tracing Woolf from its hushed origins in Greenwich Village's bohemian enclave, through its tormented production process, to its explosion onto screens and its permanent place in the canon of American cinema. This deliciously entertaining book explores how two couples-one fictional, one all too real-forced a nation to confront its most deeply held myths about relationships, sex, family, and, against all odds, love.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This erudite study from photography critic Gefter (What Becomes a Legend Most) explores the genesis and impact of Edward Albee's 1962 play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and its 1966 film adaptation. The play's disquieting vision of domestic discord, Gefter suggests, was inspired by the "dissonance experienced throughout his emotionally barren childhood in a household of abundant material luxury." Recounting the drama that plagued the making of Mike Nichols's film version, Gefter notes that the first-time director sparred with original cinematographer and industry veteran Harry Stradling, whom Nichols claimed undermined his creative vision and eventually replaced with Haskell Wexler. During heated squabbles between married costars Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, other personnel on set were unsure "if they were witnessing the actors getting into character or simply watching the husband-and-wife dynamics of the Burtons' real-life marriage." The trivia entertains (Gefter contends the real-life sources for Albee's embittered married protagonists were a Wagner College faculty couple whose notorious fights were also the subject of Andy Warhol's 1965 verité documentary, Bitch), and Gefter persuasively credits the film with setting the template for more bracing Hollywood depictions of love after romance's first blush. This will renew readers' admiration for the classic film and its source material.
