Sam O'Steen

O'Steen allows for long, personal looks at Hoffman's facial expressions to give the viewers an idea of what the character is thinking instead of the "quick-cutting" seen so often in modern films.

For example, one sequence in the film begins with the recent college graduate Benjamin (Dustin Hoffman) floating on an air mattress in his parents' swimming pool.

As he leaves the pool to walk back into their house, the scene cuts smoothly to a room where Benjamin is meeting an older woman ... for clandestine sex.

Over the next couple of minutes through continuous editing the scenes shift back and forth between his parents' home pool and Benjamin's mental projections of his meetings with Mrs. Robinson.

This associational montage shows adeptness of the editing technique and reinforces the inner sense of Benjamin's feelings of alienation and ambivalence ...O'Steen directed seven films for television in the 1970s and 1980s, most notably Queen of the Stardust Ballroom (1975) and Kids Don't Tell (1985).

He was nominated three times for the Academy Award for Best Film Editing, for Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1966), Chinatown (1974), and Silkwood (directed by Mike Nichols, 1983).