Lawrence Turman, 96

Movie producer

Lawrence Turman, who as a novice movie producer in 1963 read about a novel by a largely unknown writer named Charles Webb, took a $1,000 option on it and thus set in motion the making of “The Graduate,” a landmark film that helped define the 1960s and the antihero genre, died Saturday at his home in the Woodland Hills section of Los Angeles. He was 96.

Turman had producing or executive producing credits on more than 40 feature films and television movies, including the boxing film “The Great White Hope” (1970) with James Earl Jones; “The Drowning Pool” (1975), a drama that starred Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward; the thriller “The Mean Season” (1985) with Kurt Russell and Mariel Hemingway; the family comedies “Short Circuit” (1986) and “Short Circuit 2” (1988); and the drama “American History X” (1998). But it was “The Graduate” (1967) that made his career and propelled those of actors Dustin Hoffman and Katharine Ross, director Mike Nichols, and screenwriter and actor Buck Henry.

It started in October 1963 when a write-up of a new novel called “The Graduate” caught Turman’s eye.

“I read a review in The New York Times and I thought, ‘Wow; sounds like an interesting possible screenwriter,’” he said in a featurette on the 25th anniversary DVD release of “The Graduate,” thinking that Webb might be useful on a future movie project. “So I read the book. And, for whatever reason, I wasn’t so keen on him as a screenwriter, but the book just stayed with me.”

Turman had produced a few movies with Stuart Millar, but their business partnership was dissolving, and Turman was not exactly a power player — the $1,000 he put down to secure the rights to “The Graduate” came out of his own pocket.

“I barely had it,” he said, “but I believed in it” — that is, in the novel — “and I wanted to get my hands on it.”

Once he did, it took years to get the film made. One of his first steps was a leap of faith: He recruited as his director Nichols, a New York stage director who had yet to pilot a movie, although by the time “The Graduate” was released, Nichols did have his first film directing credit, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” (1966). It turned out to be a good instinct on Turman’s part: “The Graduate” won Nichols the Oscar for best director and earned a best-picture nomination.

Turman also had trouble getting a studio interested.

He finally found a taker in Joseph Levine of Embassy Pictures, who at the time, Turman wrote, was “king of the schlockmeisters,” known for bringing “Godzilla” to American screens in the 1950s. “The Graduate,” the top-grossing film of 1967, drew big crowds in Los Angeles, providing Turman with grounds to gloat.

The movie told the story of a disillusioned recent college graduate (Hoffman) who has an affair with an older woman (Anne Bancroft) but who actually loves her daughter (Ross). Turman, a hands-on producer, was an integral part of the casting, including the selection of Hoffman, a relative unknown, over Robert Redford and others for the main role.

Lawrence Turman was born Nov. 28, 1926, in Los Angeles to Jacob and Esther (Goldberg) Turman. His father owned a fabric business, and after spending two years in the Navy and earning a bachelor’s degree in English literature at UCLA, Lawrence spent several years working for him, growing increasingly restless.

“I soon realized that I got little satisfaction, and no pleasure, trying to convince some clothing manufacturer to buy periwinkle blue lining from me instead of, say, royal blue from my competitor,” he wrote in his book.

He answered an advertisement in Variety that said “Experienced agent wanted” and somehow landed the job with no experience. His several years as an agent — which, he said, included placing five actors in Alfred Hitchcock’s “North by Northwest” (1959) — taught him the inner workings of the movie business and introduced him to Millar. In 1961, the two of them produced their first movie, “The Young Doctors.” (Their later projects included Judy Garland’s final film, “I Could Go On Singing,” from 1963.) On his own, he produced “The Flim-Flam Man” (1967), and a few months later, “The Graduate” was released.

Turman’s most recent credit was as an executive producer on “The Thing” (2011) — he had been a producer on the 1982 version — but in 1991, he had taken a new path. He became director of the Peter Stark Producing Program at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts, which has trained numerous producers now active in Hollywood. Turman retired two years ago.

— The New York Times