TV ‘SALESMAN’: ATTENTION HAS BEEN PAID

Dustin Hoffman has not made a motion picture since the instantly classic “Tootsie” in 1982. He gave the next three years of his life to the stage instead, starring in a revival of Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman,” playing to virtually sold-out houses each night, earning the kind of acclaim performers dream of and extending his reputation as an actor of range, depth and intensity.

The production of “Death of a Salesman” has now been filmed for CBS, which funded the revival on stage (for $750,000) with eventual television in mind. The film, directed by Volker Schlondorff (“The Tin Drum”), is scheduled to be shown on the network Sept. 15.

Hoffman performed the role of Willy Loman on stage some 250 times, in Chicago, Washington and two runs in New York. “That was just about the right number of rehearsals before doing the film,” he said with a rather mischievous grin a few days ago. His reputation as a zealous perfectionist is an item of legend in the film world, as he obviously knows, and tales of open warfare between star and director during the making of “Tootsie” were widespread in the press. “No fights this time,” Hoffman says. “Everybody got along.”

Hoffman, born and raised in Los Angeles, was recently back in town vacationing with his wife Lisa and their three young children, Jake, 4, Rebecca, 2, and Max, 9 months. (He has daughters Karina, 19, and Jenna, 15, from his first marriage.) Home is now rural Connecticut, where the co-exurbanites include William Styron and Arthur Miller, who lives just around the hill from Hoffman.

“I jog past the house where Arthur wrote ‘Death of a Salesman,’ ” Hoffman says.

Two years ago, Hoffman and Miller met just as Hoffman was finishing a personal appearance tour in behalf of “Tootsie” and Miller had returned from overseeing a production of “Salesman” in China.

“What are you going to do now?” Miller asked.

“I want to do a play, now that I’ve got a big hit,” Hoffman said.

“I don’t suppose you want to do ‘Salesman’?” Miller said.

“What part?” Hoffman wanted to know.

Like most serious actors, Hoffman knew Miller’s work, and “Death of a Salesman” in particular, as well he knew his family history. He had done scenes in classes, read annotated copies in the New York Public Library when he wasn’t waiting on tables and had played Bernard on a recording when he was 24, as Miller knew, and he did wonder briefly if that was the part Miller had in mind.

But it was Willy whom Miller wanted him to play. Hoffman’s first reaction was that, at 45, he was too young to play Willy Loman. Miller pointed out that although Lee J. Cobb looked older, he was in fact only 37 when he created the role. And the Loman of Miller’s initial concept was a small man, nearer to Hoffman’s build than Cobb’s.

“The original line in the play was, ‘I’m short. . . . People call me Shrimp.’ Cobb changed it to ‘I’m fat. . . . People call me Walrus.’ ”

“Let’s talk,” Hoffman told Miller.

Hoffman had never seen Cobb play Loman, but he knew him and had heard him rehearse for a radio version. “It remains one of the great theatrical experiences of my life. He was like a rock by Rodin.”

“Death of a Salesman” is a play for which Hoffman feels a particular empathy. His father was a furniture salesman who worked the Southland, selling to Barker Bros. and other stores.

“Arthur said he’d never identified what Willy was selling. It didn’t make any difference; what you’re doing always is selling yourself, your writing, your acting. I don’t care what anybody says, we all want to be loved. That’s what Willy wanted. And we believe that if we work hard, we’ll be rewarded. That’s what we say as Americans; that’s the American belief. I asked Arthur once, ‘Who’s Willy’s hero?,’ and he said, instantly, Harry Truman. He knew Willy, knew everything about him when he wrote him. It was like a visitation. He would say, ‘Tell me what to write, Willy.’ He wrote the play in only six weeks at the age of 32.

“What Arthur loves about Willy is that he’s a great American--he loves this country, and he sees the great aspect of it. It’s the dark side that finally hurt him. The critics complained you couldn’t do a tragedy about a common man, but you could, and Arthur did.”

Hoffman told Miller, “Let’s cast it impeccably; we’re not doing it for the money.” They saw 500 actors in three months, Hoffman said, and were stymied longest trying to find the man to play Willy’s son Biff.

“We agreed he was the linchpin. We said, Jeez, if only Monty Clift would walk in. You need a football player but who’s a poet, too.” Then they heard about a young Chicago actor who had played in “True West.” His agent reported he was unavailable, making a film in Thailand (it was “The Killing Fields”).

“Then, one day, I’m reading actors at the Booth Theatre and I go out in the alley and there’s a wino type leaning against the wall--sandals, dirty feet, shy, diffident, teeth missing. Somebody says, ‘That’s the Chicago guy.’ I can’t believe it. That’s how Establishment I’ve become. Terrible.

“I ask him to read the second scene of Act I. I’ve tested 100 actors with those lines. I know those lines by heart. Every actor knows those lines by heart. Then this guy’s doing it like I’ve never heard those lines before. I got goose bumps. Arthur gives me a look.

“Now John, John Malkovich, had done the part in Chicago. He was only pretending to read the lines. No matter. Arthur says, do the climax scene in the second act. We started at opposite sides of the stage, and at the end we were at each other’s throats. Arthur says, ‘That’s it. You can’t do it righteously if you don’t have an actor who blows you off the stage. I’ve got to tell you, he blows you off the stage. Nobody’ll even see you in that scene.’ ”

Then Malkovich was cast in “Places of the Heart.” Rather than proceed without him, Hoffman and Miller waited nearly four months for him to finish the film.

“It’s a hard, deceptive play,” Hoffman says. “It looks naturalistic but it isn’t. You start to memorize it and you can’t. I had to memorize it by writing it out in longhand. Arthur says he took the fat out of the sentences, but if you say them right, the audiences get it. You can’t break the rhythm--if the first act doesn’t come in at 1:04, you’re in trouble; 1:06 is a problem.

“Arthur used to say, ‘You want the audience up here , on the edge of their seats, not here , sitting back. If it works, you’ll need ambulances to carry ‘em out.’ ”

Hoffman discovered that if there was quick applause at the final curtain, something had not gone correctly. When the play was working right, there was a long, taut silence, then a scattering of applause--and at last the ovation.

Miller’s greatest satisfactions often came at matinees, when there’d be busloads of 13- and 14-year-old schoolchildren in the audience, and the play would move them to tears.

“What’ll happen when it’s on television, with maybe three or four people watching in a room, I don’t know,” Hoffman says. But win or lose, the performances have been made permanent, with music by Alex North, who did the incidental music for the original production, and a set by Tony Walton.

Hoffman had told Miller he would as soon not be the one to pick a director for the TV version. There were discussions with several. It wasn’t clear to them, or to Hoffman, how it might best be done: tape, film, photographed play, performances recorded. Someone suggested he meet with Schlondorff, who was coming to New York.

“I got ‘Willied’ during the run,” Hoffman says, so deep into the part that he was sometimes confused, “and I had the impression he’d done ‘Mephisto,’ which I liked. I’d never seen ‘The Tin Drum.’ Volker loved the play and talked about it in the same terms Arthur used. But he wasn’t sure it could be filmed. Then he ran into Michael Balhaus, the cinematographer who shot a lot of Fassbinder’s pictures, and Balhaus said sure we can. They started coming to the play every night. They became fixtures backstage.

“Tony Walton did the set at Kaufman-Astoria Studio in Queens. It was the first time I’d seen a house of such exactness since ‘The Graduate.’ It had a lot of substance, and yet the walls didn’t connect. A house is not a house. If it works, then the audience is gently reminded that this is not a normal film, not normal reality. Yet we’re doing 170 pages of dialogue (and shot it in 25 days). It’s not static, but the play is virtually uncut.”

It has been, Hoffman says, “the greatest experience of my life as an actor. It’s the reason I’ve been an actor; you always hope you’ll run into an experience like it.”

Hoffman is due to start working with Warren Beatty on Aug. 26 on a new untitled script by Elaine May, temporarily called “This Thing” by Hoffman and due to shoot in New York and Morocco, with May directing. “You can believe they’re taking bets on whether it’ll start on time.” Hoffman gives what could be called an amused, unconcerned grin.

He and Mike Nichols, who directed “The Graduate,” would like to do something together again and have talked at least half-seriously of looking in on the graduate 20 years later. Nichols meantime is doing Nora Ephron’s “Heartburn” and Hoffman has another film for spring, 1986, called “The Ditto List,” in which he’ll play a divorce lawyer.

These days he seems to an old acquaintance as enthusiastic as ever but more relaxed than in earlier times, with a more detached and even amused view of himself, possibly explained by a story he tells.

“When I was 27 and trying to make it in New York as an actor,” he says, “I came back here for my annual visit home. In those days, I hated to be around the adults I knew; they’d always say, ‘What are you doing now?’ and I’d have to say, ‘Oh, I’ve got this swell new job . . . waiting tables in a new joint.’ I didn’t like to talk about it.”

He was paying a call one day on the family of his mother’s best friend and longtime next-door neighbor. The woman’s granddaughter, then 10, was sick in bed. Avoiding the adults, Hoffman sat on the bed and told her stories and made her laugh, then went downstairs and played the piano for her. When he left, Hoffman heard afterward, the girl told her mother, “I hope he waits for me; I’m going to marry him.”

Fade out, fade in, as they say. In 1978, his first marriage collapsing painfully, Hoffman came west to make “Straight Time,” his first film production and itself a painful experience. The girl, no longer 10, was about to start law school and her father asked Hoffman if there were anything she could do on the film; she needed a job. Hoffman found her a job, they talked a lot, and in the fullness of time she finished law school and they were married.

What Hoffman finds fascinating is that some of Lisa’s family are into plastics, a thought that will stir emotions in anyone who recalls that fraught conversation in “The Graduate.”

“And so it turns out,” Dustin Hoffman says, “that Mike Nichols was a prophet after all.”

Dustin Hoffman:

‘ “Death of a Salesman” is the reason I’ve been an actor.’