5 stories from the set of 'Tootsie'

Susan Dworkin's behind-the-scenes look 'Making Tootsie' was reissued this year for the movie's thirtieth anniversary – here are five glimpses behind the scenes.

3. Identifying with the movie's themes

Mario Anzuoni/Reuters

Hoffman said during the film's production that he felt like he knew Dorothy, his alter ego, and women identified with her, too. Costumer Jennifer Nichols watched one scene in which Dorothy, frustrated at being called pet names like "Tootsie" and "sweetie" by the director, blows up at him. "Now Alan is always Alan," she says. "Tom's always Tom and John's always John. I have a name, too. It's Dorothy." Nichols told Hoffman afterwards, "Oh, Dusty, that's it, that's just what we go through, that's just how we feel."

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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