When an EGOT-winning director made a movie about dolphins assassinating the President
The elusive EGOT is one of the rarest and most prestigious accolades in the entertainment industry, with only a select few completing the clean sweep of winning a competitive Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony. However, only one of them got the chance to make a movie about dolphins being trained to assassinate the president of the United States.
If that doesn’t sound bonkers enough, then the project in question even has a tangential connection to Charles Manson, further adding to its unique status in cinema history. Was it a good film? No, not really. Is it even a memorable one? Not particularly. Does it live up to the delightfully unhinged premise? Sadly, it does not. Had the tongue been planted ever-so-slightly in cheek, then it would be a cult classic waiting to happen, but instead, 1973’s The Day of the Dolphin is little more than a curious footnote.
Rightfully lauded as one of his generation’s finest creative minds, Mike Nichols rose through the ranks of stage and screen at the same time, gaining equal amounts of distinction in both. Making his feature-length debut behind the camera on Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, he won an Academy Award for ‘Best Director’ for his second feature, The Graduate.
Half a decade later, he was dabbling in ludicrous sci-fi thrillers, with The Day of the Dolphin coming across on paper as much better suited to parody than straight-faced seriousness. George C. Scott leads the line as Jake Terrell, a pioneering scientist who is developing the means to communicate with aquatic mammals by teaching them basic English phrases.
When an undercover government agent infiltrates Terrell’s marine facility, the dolphins are subsequently kidnapped before being reprogrammed and retrained to commit murder by placing a magnetic mine on a boat carrying the president, which will then detonate and leave the White House in search of a new resident. Fortunately, they don’t go through with it, and the nefarious plan literally blows up in their faces when the heroes manage to send the dolphins towards the villain’s boat and blow that one up instead.
Roman Polanski was initially attached to direct in the late 1960s. He had even scouted potential shooting locations in London, but the murder of Sharon Tate caused him to abandon any designs he had on continuing his filmmaking career for the time being. Nichols was drafted in, and while the score from Georges Delerue did land an Oscar nomination, The Day of the Dolphin was a bust.
Nichols became the ninth EGOT recipient in 2001, having been on the cusp of the quartet for decades. He scooped a Grammy in 1962 when An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May won ‘Best Comedy Album’, 1964’s Barefoot in the Park snagged him a Tony for ‘Best Direction of a Play’, The Graduate got him his Oscar, with 2001’s Wit finally securing that Emmy when he won for ‘Outstanding Directing for a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie’.
When he passed in November 2014 at the age of 83, Nichols had a cumulative haul of an Oscar, a Grammy, eight Tonys, four Emmys, three Baftas, and a Golden Globe, but never let it be forgotten that he directed the only major mainstream Hollywood production revolving around dolphins being trained to carry out political assassinations.