Pop Culture 101: THE GRADUATE

Charles Webb wrote a sequel to his famous book but did not publish it for several years because he had sold all the film rights to his novel and any sequels or other writings about the characters; the rights are now owned by France's Canal+. That meant the studio could film the sequel without his permission and with no compensation to Webb. The book, Home School was finally published by Thomas Dunne Books in 2008 and drew good reviews for its satire of the counter-culture in the years immediately following Vietnam. The story is set eleven years after the original. Ben and Elaine are now married suburbanites living in Westchester County, New York, and home schooling their sons, their single concession to an alternative life. (Webb and his wife also home-schooled their children at a time when it was still not legal, and had to move frequently to escape the consequences.) The situation gets out of hand when Mrs. Robinson shows up at their door and Ben and Elaine, in an effort to get rid of her, invite into their home an obnoxious hippie family. The book slyly skewers the notion that The Graduate was about youthful rebellion by portraying Ben and Elaine as a typically square suburban couple.

The Graduate was adapted into a play by Terry Johnson that began its run in London, then ran on Broadway in 2002-03, starring Kathleen Turner as Mrs. Robinson, Jason Biggs as Ben, and Alicia Silverstone as Elaine.

The lines "Plastics." and "Mrs. Robinson, you're trying to seduce me." are #42 and #63 on the American Film Institute's list of the Greatest Movie Quotes.

In the movie Rumor Has It... (2005), Jennifer Aniston plays a woman who learns that her family was the inspiration for the book and film of The Graduate. Shirley MacLaine plays her grandmother, who may be the basis for Mrs. Robinson, and Kevin Costner plays a man who could be the inspiration for Ben Braddock.

In (500) Days of Summer (2009), the narrator says that Tom, the male lead, has a notion of love and romance based on a complete misreading of the ending of The Graduate, his favorite film. Later in the movie, Tom and Summer, the woman he's in love with, go to see the movie. She breaks down crying at the end and, probably reading the film correctly, ends her relationship with him.

In one episode of the offbeat TV comedy series Northern Exposure, a character is told to pursue his love the way Ben does Elaine, and we see him do it in a dream sequence.

In The Player (1992), Buck Henry, who co-wrote the screenplay, pitches a sequel to a studio executive in which Ben and Elaine are married and Mrs. Robinson lives with them after suffering a stroke.

The ending of The Graduate was parodied in an episode of The Simpsons animated TV series, and the whole third act of the movie was spoofed in Wayne's World 2 (1993).

The TV show Mystery Science Theater 3000, in which off-screen characters make fun of the movies being screened, featured famous dialogue from The Graduate, either directly or slightly altered to suit the movie being shown.

The list of other direct or oblique references to The Graduate, and allusions to it that fans swear they've spotted in film and on television, is too long to detail every incident. There have been multiple instances of characters discussing the movie (e.g., A Small Circle of Friends, 1980; Slaves to the Underground, 1997); shots that mimic the famous poster with Ben framed inside Mrs. Robinson's naked leg; spoofs of the final wedding scene; and uses of the line "Are you trying to seduce me?" In the various Shrek movies alone, there have been several references.

It's a sign of the impact of The Graduate that on the film's "Movie Connections" page of the Internet Movie Database users have listed dozens of stories in which an older person seduces a younger one as references to this movie, when in fact such seductions have taken place throughout film history.

Although used repeatedly throughout The Graduate, only a small portion of the Paul Simon song "Mrs. Robinson" is heard on the soundtrack. Simon wrote additional verses and altered the lyrics; the new version was included in the 1968 Simon and Garfunkel album Bookends. The single, released the same year, hit #1 on the Billboard charts and won the duo a Grammy Award for Record of the Year in 1969.

The scenes in the Taft Hotel were actually filmed in Los Angeles' Ambassador Hotel, where Robert Kennedy was assassinated less than six months after the film's release.

The son of Charles Webb, the author of the book on which the film was based, is a performance artist who once cooked a copy of his father's novel and ate it with cranberry sauce.

When The Graduate was first released in Portugal, it was cut to end with Ben behind the glass at the church, watching Elaine get married. The ruling military regime at the time did this to preserve Catholic doctrine and to let no suggestion pass that church, state, and parents could be opposed.

Webb was named in a British publication in 2006 in its list of "World's Biggest Mugs – And the Blunders That Cost Them a Fortune" for signing away all film rights to his book and its characters for $20,000. Also named in the article were Dick Rowe, the Decca Records executive who passed on signing the Beatles, and Kane Kramer, who invented the precursor to the iPod in 1979 then let the patent lapse.

In the 1970s, a bus on the campus of Kent State University bore a plaque that said "Movie Star," claiming it was the bus used in the final scene when Ben escapes with Elaine.

by Rob Nixon