“People who expect wonderful things have serious problems. I don’t know anyone of significant talent who goes into something thinking, This is gonna be great! Artists fear the worst, and for good reason. Every time the worst doesn’t happen, it’s a miracle.”
- Mike Nichols
My big project this summer (well, really, since early April) has been working my way through the mammoth 600-page biography Mike Nichols: A Life by Mark Harris. If the name does not instantly ring a bell, he’s the man who gave us such classic New Hollywood films as Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Graduate that portended the ‘60s cinematic turn towards edgier, more personal works. (If nothing else, the Sad Batfleck meme probably doesn’t exist without Mike Nichols.) But, as you might be able to guess from the length of the book, those only represent the tip of the iceberg.
In his 83 years, Nichols achieved the height of fame and success on both stage and screen. This manifests most obviously in his rarefied status as an EGOT winner (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, Tony) but he also pushed both form and content in ways that audiences in his time were not always equipped to appreciate at the time. And the roots of Nichols’ genius and generosity continue to grow outwards and blossom in the great artistry; heck, one of the things he did in his final weeks on earth was to give notes to Lin-Manuel Miranda at a workshop of Hamilton.
If you have even a passing interest in film (which I have to assume applies given that you’ve subscribed to this newsletter), I cannot recommend reading the book enough. I’d also recommend that you watch as many of Nichols’ films in tandem with your reading, if you do choose to pick up the biography. Part of why it took me so long to get through the book was trying not to get ahead of myself, always ensuring that I never lost the connective tissue between projects. Often times, these metatextual elements entirely reframed the way I viewed a work. And watching them in chronological order yielded fascinating insights about a director who emerged out of the gate with two of the most important movies of the twentieth century … and perhaps never topped them, but at least he seldom rested on his laurels.
Almost of these are available somehow on streaming services — the only ones that are a bit tricky to view are The Day of the Dolphin (available on Kanopy via some cities’ public libraries), The Fortune and Silkwood (both of which I checked out from the New York Public Library). If you must know before I dive into my learnings, here’s how I’d rank them:
Consider the below partially some CliffNotes on Mike Nichols: A Life, but my aim is also to explain a bit how it’s deepened my understanding of what we consider the role and measure of a director to be.
An auterist theory that can’t make room for Mike Nichols is lazy. You might know the precise artistic theory behind the French word for “author,” but you’ve probably internalized its tenets. This school of thought posits that (usually) the director is the sole, or most important, author of a film and that there’s value in tracing their signature throughout a body of work. If you look for the prominent visual stylings of Wes Anderson and Quentin Tarantino in each of their movies, you’re thinking like an auteur. You’re also doing it if you’re spotting common themes or compulsions in directors like Steven Spielberg or David Fincher.
I’m indicting myself in this, to be clear — a lot of criticism looks for these obvious signposts of a director’s presence in a film and traces it as a kind of simplistic way to understand a movie. I think this style of criticism tends to overrate directors who make themselves very present and underrates directors who simply bow down at the altar of the story and the performances. Nichols got advice from the great director Billy Wilder, a man with 6 Oscars on his mantle, early in his career that he carried with him throughout: “Don’t forget to leave some string for the pearls.” Translated: “He meant, connect your masterpiece scenes – tell the fucking story!”
There are many common threads that tie together disparate and distinct periods in Nichols’ work, as Harris’ biography demonstrates. They just require looking deeper and understanding the nature of his collaborative process.
A great director who fails from time to time is still a great director. Nichols took some swings and missed. That doesn’t devalue the masterpieces.
One of the most riveting parts of the biography is the way that Harris sheds light on the films that Nichols thought would be successful … only to then bomb. With a few notable exceptions, he approached every project with gusto and hope that it could become something special. They didn’t always turn out that way, but it was not for lack of trying.
For example, when he sensed that his werewolf thriller Wolf was not living up to his ambitions, he called his friend and former collaborator Elaine May to help him punch up the script. Together, they were able to salvage some of the office scenes and give the dialogue among publishing world folks a little crackle. But neither of them could fix the disaster of the action sequences, which ended up having to be portrayed in super slow-motion in large part because the editor found so little of the footage to be usable. Without this technique to draw out the scenes, they didn’t have much of a movie at all.
So when you understand the approach behind the swings, sometimes the whiffs make a little more sense. That doesn’t excuse the movies, but it makes them a little bit more interesting because — as Roland Emmerich one said — no one makes movies bad on purpose. (How he explains Stonewall, I don’t know.)
Critics devalue Mike Nichols’ work because they assume the craft of directing actors to give great performances is somehow simple. “FiLm iS a vIsUaL mEdIuM,” they said. Yes, control over image is a key differentiator of the stage and the screen. But I think many people take this dictum a little too far and institute a kind of supremacy of the visual aesthetics when evaluating movies. It takes talent to draw out a great performance, too.
I think, speaking from a critical lens, many writers are uncomfortable putting the alchemy of acting into words. It’s tough! The craft is personal and messy, relying just as much on what the viewer projects onto the performance as it does on what the performer projects out into the world. Whereas when it comes to evaluating the visual language of a film, there’s at least some ability to pinpoint the technique with precision.
Nichols just had that thing with actors, and even some of his most abysmal movies still got good work out of the people he positioned in front of the camera. For him, it was as much people management as artistry. The entire chapter of how he collaborate closely with Dustin Hoffman to create the indelible, generation-defining Benjamin Braddock is so chock full of great stories that I found myself re-reading paragraphs and anecdotes multiple times. To share all the bits I found riveting would take too long, but here’s one simple example that showed the kind of technique Nichols wielded to get what he needed from Hoffman on a day when the actor felt a little fatigued:
“This is the only chance you’re ever going to have to do this scene for the rest of your life. When you look back, do you really want to say ‘I was tired’?”
Nichols took movies for reasons that often times had little to do with noble artistic reasons. It’s easy to bend yourself into a pretzel to defend the choice of a filmmaker in an attempt to find the artistic rationale for it. But sometimes it’s just simple and not explainable in aesthetic terms: they want, or need, to get paid.
Nichols, who became a high society NYC figure that palled around with Jackie O, had a lifestyle to maintain. His most notorious flop, The Fortune, was a pretty flagrant commercial play for a broad audience with an underdeveloped comedy. In his own words, “of course God always punishes you for immediately. Even for a moment if you think something so stupid, it’s over, [and] it will cost you a lot of money.”
But there were also some other revelations from the biography that made me think about Nichols’ movies in a different way, such as why he did the straight-up-the-middle softball that is Biloxi Blues. He was itching to direct Working Girl but didn’t feel up to the task right away after recovering from a serious drug addiction in the late ‘80s. Rather than jump into a task he was not prepared for, but refusing to let a tantalizing project go, he took on this film adaptation of a Neil Simon play (a writer whose plays he directed many times on Broadway) to get his sea legs back. When understood as a modest attempt to just re-establish equilibrium, the blandness makes a little bit more sense. It was deliberately comfortable.
Nichols showed that stage experience could enrich moviemaking, not cheapen it. Ever read a review that compared a movie to “filmed theater?” If so, I’m going to guess it wasn’t a positive notice. Early films in the sound era often provided a meager facsimile of the stage, and the works that established cinema as its own medium made choices that radically departed from theatrical conventions.
Harris’ book shows how Nichols bridged the two worlds, cementing himself as a trusted name in both art forms, without ever giving himself over entirely to one or the other. Especially in his periods of Hollywood exile, Nichols took refuge in the stage but never retreated into it entirely. Those periods often left him refreshed and inspired him to approach film more creatively. He understood the differences between the two spheres that made each a unique form of expression and found ways to bridge them. Here’s one great example of how Nichols intuited he’d have to tweak Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? for the screen:
“To a great extent, emotion and tensions are discharged in laughter. [But] you don’t stop or slow down for laughs in movies. Therefore, the movie would have to be far more emotional than the play. The recruiting of the audience as a participant in the battle was no longer possible … that prizefight element of the play was gone, which left me with the heart of it.”
My goodness, did Nichols understand comedy. If you’re at all a comedy nerd or interested in the mechanics of the joke, then you really need to read the book. Be it in his inspired mid-century pairings with Elaine May (go look at any of their old sketches on YouTube and have a hoot) or on set of a raucous comedy like The Birdcage, he understood humor like a scientist understands a chemical compound.
In an era when most studio comedies are crafted through line-o-rama, a style that just lets the actors riff on a variation of lines to give the editor bountiful options in the final cut, Nichols’ intentionality and deliberation really stand out as exceptional. It’s not just in the pacing, either, though you’ll certainly notice how much fewer in quantity yet impactful in quality the laughs are in films like The Graduate. Here’s a description of how he kept The Birdcage from going off the rails that I’ve been thinking about a lot:
“He kept his eye out for what he called ‘the expensive laugh’ – the joke that came at the cost of believability, consistency, or emotional honesty – and would often rethink a scene if he saw it going in that direction.”
Nichols paid a price (and sometimes a penance) for working in fields deemed less prestigious for arbitrary reasons. Harris charts Nichols’ ups and downs through the industry, never hesitating to point out where silly prejudices colored people’s impressions of his work. In the ‘80s, Nichols fell out of favor in some circles because he seemed more interested in “women’s pictures,” films deemed less serious simply by virtue of the protagonist’s gender. After a high profile flop with 2000’s What Planet Are You From?, Nichols “recovered” by doing a TV movie for HBO, then considered a much lower class of filmmaking. (That movie, Wit, was arguably his most visually accomplished and inventive piece after The Graduate — and was easily the most pleasant surprise of my viewing.)
It was especially interesting to read Harris’ dissection of Heartburn, an adaptation of Nora Ephron’s thinly-veiled novel about the dissolution of her own marriage. The film is told unapologetically from a female point of view, not really bothering to give much of a “he said” perspective. If you’re trained to think that the male POV is necessary to understand a movie, then of course you’ll find Heartburn a bit of an incomplete viewing experience. But if you understand that it’s meant to occupy the female character’s thoughts and spaces, then Nichols’ approach feels entirely appropriate and correct. I still don’t think the movie entirely works, but it did make me think there was more to the film than meets the eye.
Knowing the biography of the people behind a work of art can shine light into dark, hidden corners of it. I think the film I did the biggest about-face on in Nichols’ filmography was Working Girl. This Cinderella story set among ‘80s Wall Street yuppies feels like a bit of a glossy, consumerist fantasy in line with other movies of the era that just wanted to create cheerleaders for capitalism. Yet there’s so much more than meets the eye when factoring in Nichols’ background. As an immigrant who fled German in the ‘30s, he believed in the power and promise of America to reward outsiders who could figure out how to navigate the ladder of upward mobility.
The film is a bit of mishmash of Nichols’ competing desires to celebrate systems that could enable success stories like his while also critiquing how those same systems shut out other strivers. He gets in some of his jabs, but they land softly … especially if you don’t know where or how to look for them. (Hint: it’s the bookending shots.)
A director’s late period work might lack the vitality of their earlier films, but there is always something of value in seeing what they do with the knowledge they accumulate. If I’ve shared this quote once, I’ve shared it a million times, but Alexander Payne just said it so well a decade ago: “They say that often a filmmaker's first film can be his or her best. Why? Because he or she has been waiting 30, 35 years to tell that story. So a lifetime of whatever it is, frustration or observation, that all comes out.”
But there’s another school of thought — a director’s late career can be just as fruitful and fascinating because they’re growing and reflecting back on the stories that fascinated them in their younger days. By the time Nichols was in his final decades, he begged for financing from people who had grown up watching The Graduate and got inspired to get in the moviemaking business themselves. He almost got the job for American Beauty and yet was ultimately passed over because the producers wanted — wait for it — a Mike Nichols-like figure of the ‘90s to make it.
I found it interesting to revisit Closer, a movie I probably had not seen since high school, when encouraged by Harris to see it as Nichols returning to the territory of two couples sniping at each other from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Where the younger Nichols feels like he’s more in the ring with the fighting lovers, the older Nichols feels more removed — almost like he’s looking on with detached, but not disinterested, amusement.
Nichols knew how to share and articulate his wisdom in ways that made everyone around him better. Nothing warmed my heart and inspired me more than all the ways in which Nichols sought to inspire and empower the people around him through all he learned in his prolific career. What’s the point if you don’t share in that wealth of knowledge? Here’s Ben Shenkman, a relatively green actor, describing how Nichols brought him into observe Al Pacino on the set of Angels in America:
“Mike turned to me and said, ‘So what have you learned?’ I said, ‘Keep it simple?’ And he said, ‘No, that’s not the right answer. The right answer is: See how hard it is? Even for the master, even for your idol? See how many times he has to try it? You’ve just watched ten takes, and I know you can see it was great here but not there, and then great again but not great right at that important moment. That’s what film acting is. We’re not trying to draw the perfect line. You do whatever you need to do – be real, be fake, be quiet, be loud – and then leave the rest to me. I’ll know it when I have it, and I’ll put it all together.’”
That’s it for today! I’m still working on some of the post-main feature segments that will be exclusive to the Thursday newsletter that will eventually become for paying subscribers only — something that popped into my head today was to do a “This Week in Film Twitter” where I tried to explain the latest stupid hubbubs blowing up among film nerds so you don’t have to be on the Bird App yourselves.
In the meantime, another reminder of the first Marshall and the Movies meetup at Film Forum for Shadow of a Doubt on Tuesday, August 10 at 8pm! Please let me know if you want to join a fun, eclectic crowd to be captivated by the Master of Suspense’s most underrated work.
Until Monday…
Yours in service and cinema,
Marshall