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
Hoffman (film) "Call Me Daddy" aired, written by Ernest Gebler, directed by Alvin Rakoff and starring Donald Pleasence and Judy Cornwell. It was well received and won an international Emmy.Gebler turned the story into a novel, "Shall I Eat You Now?", published the following year. Producer Ben Arbeid optioned the screen rights to the novel and hired Gebler to write the script for a fee of ₤21,000. The film was one of the first greenlit by Bryan Forbes while he was head of EMI Films. Reportedly, Sellers despised "Hoffman" because the lead character too closely reflected his own personality. According to Bryan