Among the greatest tragedies in modern cinema is the fact that Elaine May hasn’t directed a feature film since “Ishtar.” Now she has something new on display: a documentary. She directed the American Masters tribute to Mike Nichols (who died in 2014), and that’s appropriate: the two became famous together, in the late nineteen-fifties, as an improvisational comedy duo. So May herself is a part of Nichols’s story, but, for the most part, she lets him tell it.
But first, before Nichols gets to open his mouth, May begins with a swift comic touch: the title card, “Mike Nichols: An American Master,” set to the perky strains of “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik,” dissolves to a clip of Adolf Hitler bellowing a speech. That’s because Nichols was born in Berlin but, as a Jew persecuted under the Nazi regime, immigrated at the age of seven to New York. Nichols tells that story, as he tells the story of the rest of his life and work, in the form of a talking head against a murky black background, the work of a filmed interview from some time in his later years, conducted by the producer Julian Schlossberg.
Most of the film’s fifty-two minutes feature Nichols in this one filmed interview, which is punctuated only by a few snippets of interviews with others (including Meryl Streep, Renata Adler, Robin Williams, Tom Hanks, and the director Stanley Donen, who is May’s partner) as well as a handful of archival stills, newspaper clippings, and film clips. But these punctuations feel unusually judicious and brisk; what’s noteworthy about the film, besides Nichols’s own reflections, is the fact that May leaves him on camera talking in close-up, without musical or graphic adornment, for surprisingly extended periods. The movie (which airs on PBS tonight at 9 P.M.) isn’t a major contribution to May’s filmography; her singular and original artistry doesn’t take utterly free flight here, but the show is nonetheless distinctive in its sparseness, its fixed and almost obsessive concentration on Nichols’s face and voice. Beyond the substance of the film, its very form is May’s highest tribute to Nichols: she can’t stop looking at him and listening to him.
Nichols discusses his happenstance matriculation at the University of Chicago as the crucible of his work. It was there that he became fast friends with Susan Sontag and other young illuminati (including Ed Asner and Zohra Lampert), took a desultory interest in the theatre, studied with Lee Strasberg, and then—with no sense or dream of a vocation—got involved with the Second City improv company. With the group, he developed unexpected skills that, in his partnership with Elaine May, took off, completely beyond his expectations. (“We were so surprised; what were they all carrying on about?” he says. “We were so, sort of, dazed by it.”)
A clip of the pair’s performance at the 1959 Emmy Awards suggests what everyone was carrying on about. But, Nichols says, their success was bewildering to him and May, and, perhaps even worse, “neither of us could understand this thing. . . . And then Elaine and I were on Broadway. A big fuss was made almost immediately. We were very successful . . . and we felt nothing, because it was what we had done for quite a while.”
May plugs onto the screen an article headlined “Egghead Comics Score Hit.” It was the late nineteen-fifties, May and Nichols were not yet thirty, and they were slightly ahead of the times. A decade and a half later, intellectualizing comedians, led on different fronts by the Harvard Lampoon and by Woody Allen, would press to the forefront of entertainment. The youth revolution, such as it was, was also the revolution of the college-educated. Yet Nichols and May would make their enduring mark on those later times separately. The lack of novelty, despite the perpetual surprise of improvisation, was what drove the act, and the friends, apart:
When the act broke up, in 1961, Nichols says, “Not only had I lost my best friend, I lost my work. I was the half of something.” He appeared in a play in Vancouver; when he was invited to direct a play, he did so, for lack of anything else to do, and then was asked to direct another play, one by Neil Simon called “Nobody Loves Me,” soon renamed “Barefoot in the Park,” starring a young Robert Redford. As Nichols says, when he began directing, “I knew instantly what to do.” At that point, he realized, “This is my job. . . . This is what I was preparing for.”
Nichols may have been an “egghead,” but he had, in his telling, a pretty tough shell. Called to Hollywood to direct “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” his first film, he not only faced down the studio head Jack Warner with a nervy threat to resign but also treated him with a contemptuous standoffishness. It was May who broke up the act because she had other plans, but it was Nichols who realized his plans first. Quickly becoming the toast of Hollywood (“Virginia Woolf” was nominated for thirteen Oscars and won five), he then made “The Graduate” and followed with “Catch-22” before May made her directorial début, with “A New Leaf,” in which she also co-starred. (Hers was a brilliant but troubled start; her conflict with the studio over the film’s reëditing ended in court—and it was only the first of her great yet conflict-riddled productions.)
Nichols tells the story of how he shot himself in the foot the old-fashioned way—he made a couple of flops and went back to directing plays until reëstablishing himself, in 1983, with “Silkwood.” By contrast, May, after her one great commercial success, with “The Heartbreak Kid,” made “Mikey and Nicky,” a film with a famously rocky and contentious path to completion, and one that’s as great an artistic achievement as it was a commercial flop. She wrote scripts, she script-doctored, and then she got another chance at directing, thanks to Warren Beatty’s loyal devotion; the result was the even greater, even more maligned “Ishtar.” Meanwhile, Nichols returned to the business with a new lustre, directing movies until 2007. (May features a brief clip from his final film, “Charlie Wilson’s War,” which bears a surprising resemblance to a scene from “Ishtar.”)
May caps the tribute with a clip of Nichols sharing his assessment of cinema history—an assessment that’s laced with resentment at his unbeloved place in it, his ranking among the unoriginal entertainers of the time rather than alongside May as one of its prime cinematic artists. It’s in this editorial touch—the placement, at the film’s apex, as its climactic moment, of Nichols’s lacerating allegations of critical misjudgments—that May tips her directorial hand. His culminating spew of bile wrenches the show out of the merely anecdotal, out of autohagiography, and into the twisted guts of an unquiet soul who went to the grave resentfully despite the worldly rewards (“we’re famous, we have money”) that he earlier thought would be enough.
As death approached, Nichols thought of that other kind of immortality—that of the work—and here he takes critics to the court of God and makes his case. Nichols complains that he saw “The Graduate” in the late eighties, right after he completed the television production of “Angels in America,” and found it “surrealistic,” like the adaptation of Tony Kushner’s play. He then complains about the label “generation gap,” which had been affixed to the earlier film: “I’d never thought of generations. I was thinking about material things, material objects, somebody drowning in material objects, trying to free himself from death by material, through madness, which is what ultimately happens.” Then he cuts loose, saying, “The people who describe all our work to us often don’t know what they’re talking about. They’re wrong.” May offers visual reinforcement, showing a poster for “Bonnie and Clyde” along with a phrase from Bosley Crowther’s pan of it in the Times, then a poster for “2001: A Space Odyssey,” with a phrase from Pauline Kael’s pan of it: “It’s a monumentally unimaginative movie.” (The film misattributes the line, though—it appeared not in The New Yorker but in an essay that she wrote for Harper’s.)
May follows this with a mockup of an essay called “Auteurs and Their Influence on Hollywood,” which matches the next phase of Nichols’s cheerful rant. “They are people, literally, people who think that expressing an opinion is a creative act,” he says. “The auteur stuff—I think there were these French guys with cigarette ashes all over them and that they basically misunderstood the whole thing.” Matching a stereotype with a stereotype, Nichols mocks the French taste for Jerry Lewis (insulting Jerry Lewis en passant), and continues,
Renata Adler offers a reason why Nichols might have been denied “auteur” status: the fact that he did “so many different sorts of things worked against it, because it wasn’t so clearly Mike’s work.” Stanley Donen, James L. Brooks, and Steven Spielberg come on board briefly to criticize the notion of the auteur, and then Nichols returns: “To say it’s the work of one man is to completely misunderstand a quite mysterious process, and the only answer to it is, it’s different with different pictures.” He proceeds to assert the crucial importance of scripts and screenwriters.
It may not be the work of one man, but May’s films, at least, are certainly the work of one woman (all the more so in that she’s among the best screenwriters as well as directors of her time). And, of course, the rebuke to critics, though coming from Nichols's mouth, is all the more pertinent under May's editorial touch, given that her career, not his, was buried by critical incomprehension, indifference, and derision.
May rounds off the film with a few seconds of her own public tribute to Nichols, from her speech at the 2010 AFI Life Achievement Award ceremony in his honor, which is a comic masterwork in itself. The film concludes with her voice-over, in which she calls Nichols’s work “oddly underrated” and pulls out four of his films as his best—“The Graduate,” “Carnal Knowledge,” “Silkwood,” and “Working Girl.” These films show that “every three years, American culture undergoes a complete change,” she says, yet “they’re not about it, they’re about us.” In a splendidly gracious and loving way, she distinguishes Nichols’s great talent, his enduring artistry, with what comes off as royally—and, I believe, unintentionally—faint praise. That, too, is the mark of an artist—as Robert Bresson said, the artist is someone who is unable to do things as others do them. Nichols succeeded—all too well—and May, to this day, stands out because she doesn’t fit in.
