Any good movie is filled with secrets. —Mike Nichols

Imagine a movie called The Graduate. It stars Robert Redford as Benjamin Braddock, the blond and bronzed, newly minted college graduate adrift in his parents’ opulent home in Beverly Hills. And Candice Bergen as his girlfriend, the overprotected Elaine Robinson. Ava Gardner plays the predatory Mrs. Robinson, the desperate housewife and mother who ensnares Benjamin. Gene Hackman is her cuckolded husband. It nearly happened that way. That it didn’t made all the difference.

It all began with a book review. On October 30, 1963, a 36-year-old movie producer named Lawrence Turman read Orville Prescott’s review of Charles Webb’s first novel, The Graduate, in The New York Times. Though Prescott described the satirical novel as “a fictional failure,” he compared Webb’s misfit, malaise-ridden hero, Benjamin Braddock, to Holden Caulfield, the hero of J. D. Salinger’s classic The Catcher in the Rye. Turman was intrigued. “The book haunted me—I identified with it,” he says. Now 81, Turman is lean, with white hair and bright eyes. Over lunch in West Hollywood, he recalls how he fell in love particularly with two of the novel’s images: “a boy in a scuba suit in his own swimming pool, and then that same boy on a bus, his shirttail out, with a girl in a wedding dress. I liked it so much, I took out an option with my own money—something I counsel my students not to do. Because no one else bid on the novel, I optioned the rights for $1,000.” Turman, who now chairs the Peter Stark Producing Program at the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts, considered himself something of an industry outsider, though by 1963 he had already produced several films (including The Young Doctors, with Fredric March and Ben Gazzara; I Could Go On Singing, with Judy Garland; and Gore Vidal’s The Best Man).

Perhaps he still feels like an outsider because he started life in the garment industry, following in his father’s footsteps, although he had majored in English literature at U.C.L.A. “Everyone always says how tough show biz is,” Turman says, “and, of course, they’re right, but it’s kid stuff compared to the garment business, where someone will cut your heart out for a quarter-cent a yard. I’d carry bolts of cloth five blocks after making a sale, only to learn that the customer bought it cheaper, and I had to schlep the bolts of cloth back to my dad’s office.” He can still vividly recall working his way down 14 flights of a manufacturing building, “getting rejected at every floor.” After five years of working with his father, he pounced on a blind ad in Variety: “Experienced Agent Wanted.” He got the job at the Kurt Frings Agency, a four-person operation specializing in European actors, including Audrey Hepburn, by candidly confessing that he “had zero experience, but was full of energy and would work very cheaply”—$50 a week.

After optioning The Graduate, Turman needed a director. He immediately thought of another industry outsider, the comedian turned Broadway director Mike Nichols, then 33 years old. At the time, Nichols had just had a great success directing Robert Redford and Elizabeth Ashley on Broadway in Neil Simon’s Barefoot in the Park, but before that he had been half of the legendary satirical comedy team Mike Nichols and Elaine May. Their sharp, skewed portrayals of “Age of Anxiety” couples struck a deep chord in American life, and their comedy sketches were hilarious, such as the one about a pushy mother and her put-upon rocket-scientist son: “I feel awful,” the son says after his mother berates him for not calling. “If I could believe that,” she says, “I’d be the happiest mother in the world.” They were improvisation geniuses and could perform sketches in the style of everyone from Faulkner to Kierkegaard.