the last book I ever read (Cocktails with George and Martha: Movies, Marriage, and the Making of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, excerpt nine)

from Cocktails with George and Martha: Movies, Marriage, and the Making of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Philip Gefter:

At twenty, Nichols saw Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor in the film he would come to call his Bible—George Stevens’s A Place in the Sun. The experience was as revelatory about movies as Streetcar had been about theater. It is a mournful film about a poor yet appealing young man thrust into a glamorous circle he cannot resist. His inexperience is challenged, his moral compass goes haywire, and his life is destroyed. At the time, Nichols identified with Clift’s character, feeling himself to be a rube, too, and wondering how he would find his own way into a more cultivated world. The film is shot in a lush black and white that underscores its moodiness. Stevens luxuriates in long takes that, like still photographs, allow the eye to linger and the viewer to contemplate the characters, as well as the details of their circumstances. Nichols later claimed to have seen the film about 150 times, mostly when he was in his twenties. Throughout his life, A Place in the Sun would be the movie he would mine for inspiration. As Mark Harris writes in his biography of Nichols, “It was his core text when he prepared to direct Taylor himself in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and the length of each shot in the stillness of Stevens’s camera strongly influenced his approach to [his next film], The Graduate.”