Screen:

...Was the part of Julie's baby in the film played by the baby Lange had with Mikhail Baryshnikov...

...Julie at one point tells Dorothy she wishes that instead of being devious, men would just come out and say, "I find you interesting...

...Tootsie constantly undermines its own wisdom about women in subtle, funny ways...

...During that scene Hoffman had added to the middle of the film, Michael explains to George why he's so good at playing a woman...

...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR.es...

...George shouts in exasperation...

...It didn't seem to him logical that an actor would want to escape from a role he had worked this hard to succeed in...

...A tomato can't think...

...When Michael tries out for the soap, for instance, what gets him the job is the tightness not of his looks or mannerisms as a woman, but of his frame of mind as Michael...

...The second is one that was added to the middle of the script to help Hoffman get over a difficulty he was having with the characterization of Michael...

...To make it easier for him to go along with Michael's ultimate rejection of Dorothy, a new scene was therefore added showing that Michael really did love his success for a while...

...In the other scene, where Michael first decides to audition for the soap, he is inspired by an argument he has with George, his agent, who is played by Tootsie's director, Sydney Pollack...

...The result is a performance with a wonderful resonance to it, a reverberation of comedy and pathos in which each intensifies the other...

...But it doesn't hold true for Michael himself, who puts poor Sandy through the same humiliations he here claims to understand all too well...

...But as she storms out on Michael now, she vows to go on with her career in spite of her fury at him, or maybe because of it...

...Exactly...

...Actually, he was about to try on one of her dresses...

...Tootsie is only a special opportunity because it allows him to use the experience of acting itself in that way...

...Finally, she gets out of her relationship with him the only thing she wanted from it in the...

...She learns from him as a lover the anger he could never make her feel as a drama coach...

...Like Michael, he's too absorbed in perfecting his Dorothy to worry about whatever larger issues that might raise...

...That role wouldn't have allowed Dustin Hoffman to draw upon who he really is, an actor, the way the subsequent script by Larry Gelbart does...

...Needless to say, this complicates Michael's relationship with Sandy, whom he can't tell about his triumph because she would never forgive him...

...The reason is that the tennis pro would have been just another fictitious character...

...An actor like Hoffman is always trying to bring to bear on a role as much real experience as possible...

...He was able to bring to bear on the soap opera his script contains his many years of experience as a writer for TV In addition to successes like M*A*S*H, Gelbart had a rare failure a few seasons ago when he tried to base a TV series on his relationship with his actress wife, Pat...

...Michael yells back.' 'It wasn't logical that it should sit down!'' You can see why both Hoffman and Pollack were really able to throw themselves into this scene...

...I wonder whether a number of the people involved in making Tootsie didn't experience a similar feedback between their personal and professional lives...

...Dorothy replies, whereupon she gets both the audition and the part...

...That's why Tootsie is such a good comedy...

...Fortunately for us, all either Pollack, Gelbart, or Hoffman cared about while actually making the movie was that the man who put on the dress at least be good at playing a woman...

...Matters are complicated further by the fact that he soon falls in love with his co-star on the soap, Julie (Jessica Lange), but starts making love to Sandy, even though they've always remained just friends before...

...When the director of the soap starts to turn Dorothy down too, without even letting her open her mouth, she blows up...

...This explanation may work for Hoffman...

...The latter was necessary because Hoffman couldn't accept Michael's eventual desire to get out of Dorothy's contract on the soap...

...Not too profound, though...

...How Hoffman's feelings about acting filtered into Michael's can be seen from a couple of key scenes in Tootsie...

...In Gelbart's re-write, Hoffman plays Michael Dorsey, an out-of-work actor who turns himself into an actress named Dorothy Michaels in order to get a part in a soap opera...

...At that, Hoffman is superb...

...If a man puts on a dress in 1982," Pollack told Gelbart at their first meeting, "he'd better become a better man for it...

...When Sandy didn't get the part in the soap, she was ready to quit acting...

...Hoffman's portrayal of Michael clearly relies upon his own experience as well as that provided by the script...

...I'd like to make love with you...

...The producer follows her there to ask whether this display of pique was acting or the genuine article...

...By the time Dorothy's option is renewed on the soap, Sandy thinks Michael is a homosexual, Julie thinks Dorothy is a lesbian, and we think we can now see the logic of Michael's wanting to get out of Dorothy's contract...

...When Larry isn't funny," another comedy writer once remarked, "he's profound...

...It's a perfect parody of the arguments they had over Tootsie...

...The result is that the comedy in Tootsie seems to come about, like Michael's troubles, as a natural, almost inevitable consequence of the situation the film creates...

...He tells her part of it-that he's in love with another woman...

...The showdown with Sandy comes one night when she pleads with Michael to tell her the truth...

...You macho shithead" she calls him as she departs for the elevators...

...One night Michael remarks to his roommate (Bill Murray), "I think Dorothy's smarter than I am...

...Which answer will get me an audition...

...The first is the scene where Michael decides to try out for the soap...

...Since he can't tell her that, he acts as if he undressed for her instead...

...It's because as an actor, sitting by the phone waiting for some director to call with a job, being powerless in his relationships with directors and producers, he has come to understand how a woman feels...

...The pressure of that effort and of Gelbart's meditations on TV fare in general are felt in the poignant monologues that Dorothy improvises on her soap...

...first place...

...He points out that Michael even held up production on a simple commercial, where all he had to do was be a tomato, because he couldn't understand the motivation when the tomato was supposed to sit down...

...If you listened to what Pollack and Hoffman have been saying about Tootsie, you'd never go to see it...

...He used his own life as an actor as a kind of second wall off which he can bounce his performance...

...So at a party Michael tries to pick her up by saying just that, and she throws a glass of champagne in his face...

...The movie is smarter than the people who created it, too...

...George claims no one will hire Michael any more because of his reputation for being hard to work with...

...The entire film seems graced by a special awareness of the ambiguity, the interchangeability, that reality and performance have for actors...

...I'm thinking especially of Jessica Lange, who, like the actress she plays, is an unwed mother...

...This happens because Sandy finds him in her bedroom one day with his clothes off...

...The one other person whose experience on the film must have resonated like Hoffman's, however, is Larry Gelbart...

...Screen WOMAN OF THE YEAR TOOT TOOT TOOTSIE WUENTOOTSIE was still in "development," the central character was going to be a tennis pro who couldn't win a championship until he entered a women's tournament in drag...

...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...

...It may be yet another instance of how he was able to bring his experience as an actor into play in Tootsie...

...He only decides to do a reading after his sometime girlfriend, Sandy (Teri Garr), whom he has coached for the part, fails to get it...

...She gets mad...

...It can't even move...

...They think they've made a movie about Feminism...

...It never quite takes itself seriously...

...This idea never would have worked, at least not as well as the one on which Tootsie actually was based in the end...

...She can't seem to evince the anger that the role requires, but Michael, just having been turned down for a half dozen roles, has all the frustration he needs in reserve...