Time Out: Today's Working Girls and Guys

MOMA is having a retrospective of Mike Nichol's movies. I know "The Graduate" will go down as one of his masterpieces, but I would put "Working Girl" right at the top too. Both movies are perfect time capsules of 20somethings "going to work" cultures that were in a state of flux. Maybe it's the perfect time for Nichols to write and direct a new movie that captures (for posterity) the culture of today's 20somethings. It could be a Nichols' 20something trifecta I would label: Drop Out, Break Out, Time Out.

Clearly, there's another cultural flux and the meaning of work going on with 20somethings today. This week, Yankelovich announced it is fielding a new study on Millenials and the impact of the recession. Today, Richard Roeper tweeted from the U of Illinois that he wanted to yell out, "There are no jobs!" And this afternoon, I bid goodbye to Matt, a 20something art director , who resigned to go biking in Europe (Jenny, another 20something, took off in January for a New Zealand sabbatical). A headline what's going on with 20somethings today? How about "Time Out."

But, for fun, let's time travel back to the the 1980's with Working Girl (video trailer). Ladies climbing the ladder of the go-go era of biz to "Break Out." Then go back to the 1960s and "Drop Out." Following is an excerpt from the NYTimes interview with Mr. Nichols that tells a cool story about the ending of "The Graduate."

Mr. Nichols is a great believer in the single big idea, the controlling metaphor or idea that defines a picture — the notion that Benjamin in “The Graduate,” for example, is on a conveyor belt, just like his suitcase. But he is also like a psychoanalyst in that he trusts a lot in the unconscious. The point of all the preparation, he said, is to get to the point where you’re surprised. And, he added, “You want to keep doing it until you get to the thing nobody could have planned.The famous ending of “The Graduate,” for example, came about because as it came time to film the scene where Dustin Hoffman and Katharine Ross get on the bus, Mr. Nichols found himself growing unaccountably irritable.

“I told Dustin and Katharine, ‘Look, we’ve got traffic blocked for 20 blocks, we’ve got a police escort, we can’t do this over and over. Get on the bus and laugh, God damn it.’ I remember thinking, What the hell is wrong with me? I’ve gone nuts. The next day I looked at what we’d shot and went, ‘Oh my God, here’s the end of the movie: they’re terrified.’ My unconscious did that. I learned it as it happened.”

Source: Mike Nichols, Master of Invisibility By CHARLES McGRATH, NYTimes April 10, 2009