Dustin Hoffman walked into the Criterion Closet and came out with just four films, and two of them belong to his late friend Hal Ashby. The two-time Oscar winner’s episode of the long-running Closet Picks series went up on Criterion’s YouTube channel on November 9 and had passed 196,000 views by the next day.
His picks are a tight, personal list:
- Shampoo, the 1975 Ashby comedy set in Los Angeles hair salons
- Being There, Ashby’s 1979 satire
- Mikey and Nicky, directed by Elaine May in 1976
- The Royal Tenenbaums, Wes Anderson’s 2001 family comedy
According to Criterion’s own summary of the video, Hoffman tells “a moving story about his good friend Hal Ashby,” recalls the part May played in shaping the Tootsie screenplay, and lavishes praise on Gene Hackman for his work as the Tenenbaum patriarch.
Why four picks says a lot
Most guests leave the closet with armfuls of discs. Hoffman’s restraint makes his choices read like a short memoir, because almost every title connects back to his own career.
Ashby is the clearest thread. Before Sydney Pollack took the job, Ashby was briefly set to direct Tootsie, the 1982 comedy in which Hoffman played an out-of-work actor who reinvents himself as soap star Dorothy Michaels. Columbia pushed Ashby off the project over his post-production commitments on another film. Picking two Ashby titles four decades later feels like a tribute to the version of Tootsie that never got made.
May is the second thread. Hoffman brought her in to rework the Tootsie script, and in a few weeks she added Bill Murray’s deadpan roommate, Jeff Slater, deepened Teri Garr’s character, Sandy, and suggested Garr for the role. She was never credited. Choosing Mikey and Nicky, May’s own bruising crime drama with Peter Falk and John Cassavetes, puts her work as a director next to the story of her uncredited rescue job.
The Anderson pick is the outlier, and the most generous. It is a nod to a peer, Hackman, who came up in the same era of New Hollywood.
What the video does well, and what it leaves out
The format suits Hoffman. Closet Picks works best when a guest uses the shelves as prompts for stories, and the actor, who rarely does long-form interviews these days, gets space to talk about collaborators instead of selling a project. Criterion’s description promises anecdote rather than a hard sell, and that is a large part of why the series keeps pulling six-figure view counts.
The trade-off is breadth. With only four films, there is nothing from the 1967 coming-of-age comedy that made Hoffman a star, even though Criterion’s catalogue has carried it and its streaming service hosts a separate Hoffman interview about it. Fans hoping for a tour of his own filmography will need to look elsewhere.
There is also a commercial layer worth keeping in view. Every Closet Picks episode links straight to Criterion’s shop, and Mikey and Nicky is flagged as streaming on the Criterion Channel. The video is a lovely conversation and a sales window at the same time.
A closet with a history
The closet itself, once a disused bathroom in Criterion’s New York office, now holds every title the label distributes, more than 1,700 films. Guillermo del Toro was filmed picking from it on an iPhone in 2010, and over two hundred guests have followed, from Martin Scorsese to Bong Joon-ho. Criterion has been busy this month in other ways too, releasing a 4K edition of the animated hit we covered when Netflix posted a KPop Demon Hunters dance lesson. More film coverage is in our Entertainment section.
Hoffman’s visit follows episodes with John Turturro on November 2 and Parker Posey on November 6, the first guest filmed in the closet at Criterion’s new office.
Further reading
Image: Gorup de Besanez, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. How we work.
