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
Billy Bathgate (film) Billy Bathgate (film) Billy Bathgate is a 1991 American gangster film directed by Robert Benton, starring Loren Dean as the title character and Dustin Hoffman as real-life gangster Dutch Schultz. The film co-stars Nicole Kidman, Steven Hill, Steve Buscemi, and Bruce Willis. Although Billy is a fictional character, at least four of the other characters in the film were real people from New York of the 1930s. The screenplay was adapted by British writer Tom Stoppard from E.L. Doctorow's novel of the same name. However, Doctorow distanced himself from the film for the extensive deviations from the book. Billy Behan