In addition to articles and interviews about screenwriting, a writer can learn a lot by reading about aspects of the filmmaking process — directing, editing, acting and so on. This is especially true when you have an especially insightful article like “Mike Nichols, Master of Invisibility” by Charles McGrath in Sunday’s New York Times. Instead of a fluff piece, McGrath drills down to explore what makes Nichols such a unique visionary. And part of what he discovers is Nichols’ connection to the writing:

If his movies have a common denominator, it’s probably their intelligence and, though Mr. Nichols doesn’t think of himself as a writer, their writerly attention to detail. They’re almost invariably based on good scripts, from which he extracts extra layers of nuance.

Nichols, whose lengthy list of movie directing credits includes Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), The Graduate (1967), Carnal Knowledge (1971), Silkwood (1983), and Charlie Wilson’s War (2007), started out his career in entertainment as part of the comedy duo “Elaine May & Mike Nichols.” Here’s one of their sketches: An argument played out against Beethoven’s 5th symphony:

Comedy sketches – performed and written. So Nichols’ roots in storytelling is that of a writer. To be more precise, writer as psychoanalyst:

Ms. [Nora] Ephron compared Mr. Nichols’s way of preparing to psychoanalysis. “You sit there for days and days,” she said, “and he keeps asking questions. What is this scene in the movie about? What does it remind you of? You free associate. And eventually you figure it out.”

Mr. Nichols is a great believer in the single big idea, the controlling metaphor or idea that defines a picture — the notion that Benjamin in “The Graduate,” for example, is on a conveyor belt, just like his suitcase. But he is also like a psychoanalyst in that he trusts a lot in the unconscious. The point of all the preparation, he said, is to get to the point where you’re surprised. And, he added, “You want to keep doing it until you get to the thing nobody could have planned.”

And check out this insight into how Nichols works as a director from Meryl Streep:

Ms. Streep said: “What makes Mike so great is one of the hardest things for people temperamentally drawn to directing. People who direct tend to want to be in control, and Mike’s gift is knowing when to take his hands off and just let it happen. A lot of directors are still dealing with the text when you’re on the set. Mike has done all that beforehand, so when you get on the set you feel it’s a secure world where all the architecture is in place. You can jump as hard as you want and the floor won’t give way.”

“A lot of directors are still dealing with the text when you’re on the set. Mike has done all that beforehand.” Again a writer’s sensibilities at work.

It’s a great article with some remarkable anecdotes (one of which I extracted for today’s Hollywood Tales), so I highly recommend you give the whole piece a read, but let me end with this quote from Nichols himself:

He added: “The greatest thrill is that moment when a thousand people are sitting in the dark, looking at the same scene, and they are all apprehending something that has not been spoken. That’s the thrill of it, the miracle — that’s what holds us to movies forever. It’s what we wish we could do in real life. We all see something and understand it together, and nobody has to say a word. There’s a good reason that the very best sound an audience can make — in both the theater and the movies — is no sound at all, just absolute silence.”

This speaks volumes about the script. About the subtext in dialogue and the intention in characters’ actions. About the emotional life of and between characters in the story’s Internal World. About the white space on each and every script page, which is equally as important as the words we choose to write. As screenwriters, we need to live with our stories and live with our characters so deeply that all that wonderfully rich and oftentimes silent ‘stuff’ lifts up off our script pages and into the reader’s imagination.

UPDATE: Jeff did some research about the writer of the novel upon which The Graduate was based and found this Wikipedia post:

Here’s Wikipedia’s entry on author Charles Webb:

“Webb grew up in affluent Pasadena, California. He attended Midland School in Los Olivos, California and graduated from Williams College in 1961. He declined an inheritance from his father, a wealthy doctor [1].

Webb lived for several years in Hastings-on-Hudson. His wife was notorious for greeting people at the door stark naked.

As of 2006, Webb has been with his long-term partner Eve for more than 40 years. Eve shaves her head and calls herself “Fred” in solidarity with a Californian support group called Fred, for men who have low self-esteem [2]. Fred is an artist and her work includes illustrations for Webb’s 2002 novel New Cardiff. The couple have two sons, one of whom is now a performance artist who once cooked and ate a copy of The Graduate with cranberry sauce [3].

The Webbs removed their children from school so that they could tutor them at home. This was an illegal act in California at the time, and to evade the authorities they fled the state; at one point they managed a nudist camp in New Jersey. They also divorced – accounts vary as to why (it was not due to personal differences), either in protest against the institution of marriage [4] or against the US’s lack of marriage rights for gays [5]. They sold their wedding presents back to their guests and having given away four houses in succession lived on the breadline, taking menial jobs as cleaners, cooks and fruit-pickers, working at K-Mart and living in a shack [6]. They currently live in Hove, East Sussex.”

My suspicions are that Webb himself wrote that!

Additionally, Wiki reports that he actually wrote a sequel entitled HOME SCHOOL. Indeed, check Amazon dot com and in fact, it is available in hardcover, came out back in January!

I wonder how it tastes with cranberry sauce?

That’s awesome stuff! And I’d never heard any of that before. Lies posted by Webb? True? Who knows! Who cares. It’s entertaining as hell.

Thanks, Jeff, for finding and posting that!