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
Death of a Salesman (1951 film) off almost every climax of the play as though with a lawnmower" and portray Loman as a lunatic rather than a victim. , the film has never been commercially released in any home-viewing format, primarily because Columbia lost the rights when these were sold for the television remake with Dustin Hoffman. However, the film was preserved in 2013 by Columbia and The Film Foundation, which would suggest that the rights problem may have at last been resolved. 1952 Golden Globe Awards 1952 Venice Film Festival New York Times Critics' Pick 1952 Academy Awards 1952 Directors Guild of America Awards 1952