COCKTAILS WITH GEORGE AND MARTHA

A cinematic history of an explosive portrayal of marriage.

When he was 15, biographer and photography critic Gefter saw Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and was fascinated. The film, he recalls, “put its finger on the rumbling beneath the polite surface” of suburban marriages—like his parents’—and laid bare “tensions that I felt but that were left unacknowledged.” Deeming the movie “my standard against which all movies about marriage are measured,” he takes a deep dive into the genesis, making, and reception of the movie, from its 1962 beginnings on Broadway (the first three-acter for playwright Edward Albee) to its transformation into the acclaimed movie starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. The play, with Uta Hagen as Martha and Arthur Hill as George, was a hit, burnishing Albee’s reputation and garnering several Tony awards. Warner Brothers paid generously for the film rights, handing the 3.5-hour play to screenwriter Ernest Lehman to be condensed into two hours. Mike Nichols, a well-regarded Broadway director, agreed to take on his first movie. Taylor and Burton, recently married after a notorious affair on the set of Cleopatra, were signed as the stars. Gefter chronicles a spate of conflicts, shifting alliances, and emotional outbursts that erupted on the set. Nichols argued with Warner over whether to film in black and white, as Nichols insisted, or color; actors and staff balked at Nichols’ impatience and arrogance; Burton goaded Taylor. The result, nevertheless, was a critical and financial success, praised by the New York Times as “a magnificent triumph of determined audacity.” Gefter offers a close reading of the movie to support his assessment of it as “era-defining.” Revealing the emotional struggles and challenges at the core of any marriage, the movie was “both a product of the 1960s and a catalytic influence that came to define that decade.”

A penetrating examination of a bold film.