Robert Culp wears a Rolex GMT-Master

Bob Sanders comes back from the Institute a changed man, or at least a man who talks like one. In Paul Mazursky's 1969 debut, written with Larry Tucker, Robert Culp plays a documentary filmmaker who spends a weekend at a Big Sur retreat with his wife Carol and returns to Los Angeles preaching total honesty, a doctrine the two of them then test on their married friends Ted and Alice until all four end up in one Las Vegas hotel bed. The Academy took the comedy seriously, handing it four nominations: Elliott Gould, Dyan Cannon, the Mazursky and Tucker screenplay, and Charles Lang's photography. Culp and Natalie Wood, the other half of the foursome, were left out.

The watch on Bob's wrist is not the red-and-blue Pepsi a viewer might assume. BAMF Style, working from the frames, describes "an 18-karat yellow gold GMT Master" that "has a brown bezel and brown dial with a 3:00 date window," carried on the President bracelet Rolex had introduced for the Day-Date, and no reference number has been published for it. The likeliest explanation for its presence is the simplest. BAMF notes that "Culp's two Rolex GMT Masters were likely Culp's own watches as both would appear in many of his movie and TV appearances of the era." The gold GMT was part of how Culp dressed, on screen and off, and Bob Sanders inherited it.

Mazursky did the field work himself. He read about the gestalt therapist Fritz Perls, went to Esalen with his wife, and turned the visit into the Institute that opens the film; the satire was researched in person. The audience repaid the effort: the picture returned $31.9 million on a $2 million budget, one of the biggest hits of 1969.