Dustin Hoffman Psychiatric Institute, affiliated with Columbia University, when he was 21. "It was a great experience for me," he said. "All my life I had wanted to get inside a prison or a mental hospital. . . . I wanted to get inside where behavior, human behavior, was so exposed. All the things the rest of us were feeling and stopping up were coming out of these people." He used that experience to help him develop the character of Raymond Babbitt, a high-functioning autistic savant, yet a person who critic David Denby described as "a strangely shuttered genius." Hoffman created certain
Philip Seymour Hoffman one of the year's biggest blockbusters, "Twister", playing a grubby, hyperactive storm chaser alongside Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton. According to a "People" survey of Twitter and Facebook users, "Twister" is the film with which Hoffman is most popularly associated. He then reunited with Anderson for the director's second feature, "Boogie Nights", about the Golden Age of Pornography. The ensemble-piece starred Mark Wahlberg, Julianne Moore, and Burt Reynolds; Hoffman played a boom operator, described by David Fear of "Rolling Stone" as a "complete, unabashed loser", who attempts to seduce Wahlberg's character. Warmly received by critics, the film grew into a