Interview: Elaine May & Mike Nichols

This is a gem. On February 26, 2006, Elaine May and Mike Nichols sat down with an audience at New York's Walter Read Theater to screen the movie Ishtar (1987), then follow up with a free-wheeling hour-long conversation between May and Nichols. The transcript of that Q&A is here - and it is great!

Some background. In the 1950s, May met Nichols in Chicago as part of a improvisational comedy group that later evolved into Second City. They wrote and performed comedy sketches on stage, radio, and TV. Their 1962 record "An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May," won the Grammy Award for Best Comedy Performance.

Subsequently they both moved into film-making. Nichols directing credits include Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), The Graduate (1967), Carnal Knowledge (1971), Silkwood (1983), and Charlie Wilson's War (2007). May has had a long career as a screenwriter and 'script doctor' (uncredited rewrites on dozens of movies including Reds (1981) and Tootsie (1982), and her writing credits include A New Leaf (1971), Heaven Can Wait (1978), and The Birdcage (1996) .

Here are two examples of Nichols & May doing their comedy schtick:

Telephone



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And then there's Ishtar (1987). The facts are it cost around $30M to produce, running significantly over the initial budget, and only generated just north of $14M in box office revenues. The movie was savaged by critics and it became synonymous in Hollywood with "box office flop." Here are some excerpts from the Nichols & May conversation:

Nichols: Clearly we were all sitting here thinking the same thing. How were you so prescient? Where did your Orwellian vision come from? Because you invented the perfect metaphor for the behavior of the Bush administration in Iraq.

May: Well, oddly enough when I made this movie Ronald Reagan was president and there was Iran-Contra, we were supporting Iran and Iraq. We put in Saddam. We had taken out the Shah. Khomeini was there. I remember looking at Ronald Reagan and thinking—I’m qualifying this, this was just an idea, I didn’t really believe it—I thought, he’s from Hollywood, he’s a really nice man. It’s possible the only movie he’s ever seen about the Middle East are the road movies with Hope and Crosby, and I thought I would make that movie.

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And I think Ishtar is maybe the prime example that I know of in Hollywood of studio suicide. In that it had a great preview.

It had three great previews.

And then this really strange thing started to happen, which was that stories began to appear with studio sources about what a problem it was.

And many of the details were not true. This is a really embarrassing thing to say, but it’s just us, so I know it won’t go any farther, but I left almost immediately for Bali. The film was political and it was a satire but it was my secret. When these articles started coming out, I thought—only for five minutes—it’s the CIA. I didn’t dream that it would be the studio. For one moment it was sort of glorious to think that I was going to be taken down by the CIA, and then it turned out to be David Putnam [studio head]. I think this man was unique in that way, in that he was going to redo Hollywood and make it a better place. He was going to work from the inside.

It doesn’t want to be a better place. It’s like Las Vegas. From the very beginning there’s been the problem between the executives and the people making the movies. And it’s a problem because the process of making movies is not something that can be apprehended from without. A guy that works in the studios, a very nice, often very intelligent executive, thinks that expressing an opinion in a meeting is a creative act because that’s all he gets to do. And that’s as high in the creative scale as he can ever hope to get. And the problem with it is that the opinions expressed often bare no relation to the work that’s being done. Would you say you agree so far?

Except… yes, I do agree.

I’ve convinced her. Here’s where it gets to be a problem. They say “But it’s our money.” But here’s the funny part. It’s not, of course. It’s GE’s money, or it’s Sony’s money. Who is “us”?

It’s funny that you say that because Charles Grodin, the CIA agent in this movie, who is a very funny man and a great actor, defended it when it came out. It was attacked because they kept saying it’s so much money, it’s so much money. And it was actually not.

Well if nowadays you say what it costs, I’d love to make a movie for this. It was like $33 million, right?

Thirty. And he said one day, as I recall, to the people who were saying it was so much, he said, what do you care? It’s not like you’re going to get the money. It’s not like if the movie were 20 million you’d get 10 of it. You’ll never see it. What do you care how much money it is? They’re not going to give it to schoolteachers.

1987 was the year I broke into Hwood as a writer and I remember the negative rumors about Ishtar before it came out and the savage reviews the movie received. So I went to the theater to see it, thinking I was going to be seeing some absolute piece of shit. But I found it to be an entertaining movie. And I guess I'm not alone. Per the movie's Wikipedia page:

In 2004, it was included in the DVD documentary The 50 Worst Movies Ever Made. Though notorious as a box office flop, Ishtar has acquired a cult following.^[7] In one of Gary Larson's The Far Side comic strips, captioned "Hell's Video Store", the entire store is stocked with nothing but copies of the movie Ishtar. Larson later apologized, saying "When I drew the above cartoon, I had not actually seen Ishtar. ... Years later, I saw it on an airplane, and was stunned at what was happening to me: I was actually being entertained. Sure, maybe it's not the greatest film ever made, but my cartoon was way off the mark. There are so many cartoons for which I should probably write an apology, but this is the only one which compels me to do so."

The conversation between Nichols and May extends well beyond Ishtar and is a wonderful read. I was especially taken by this exchange where Nichols talks about his love for the process of making a movie:

I’m afraid I’m still so in love with the, for want of a better word, process, and the thing I love most about movies and that I love most about other people’s work is the small things. You think about your favorite thing in a movie or in a play or in a performance… it’s always something very small, it’s so small that you can barely tell other people about, but it just makes you gasp, because it’s like a little pebble of something true. And harvesting them—because, after all, the acting is done by other people—is still something that I think is so thrilling. I think the thing is just to keep doing it because with luck you can catch that wind, it can still be done.

Yes, I think the question really is, those tiny moments—the small things you remember—where do you choose to put them in? What do you choose to make this process about? Because you can make this process, I think, about almost anything. From any small thing you can make a million truths.

No question, and for me—because I teach once a week I had to sort of try to think of a couple of ideas, and one of them is that in working on something, and also in the thing itself, if it’s a movie, the question always is, “What is this really like?” Not what is the convention, not what do people always do in this case, not what happens in a ribald comedy or a tragedy-comedy or a film of lysergic unhappiness, you know, or whatever, “What is this really like?” And in the search for what it’s really like—something that you [points to May] do instinctively, every time you write—it answers the question “What is this really like?” Every line reminds you of a living person and the funny things we do and the silly things we do and, sometimes, the nice things we do. That’s the answer to the question “what is this really like?” It can be expanded a little bit to “where are we really at now? What is this like? What in the hell is happening?”

What is he talking about but going into the story so deeply that these intense, identifiable "small things" emerge that convince the viewer of the authenticity of the story world that has been created. "What is this really like?" That's a great question to ask of every character and every scene as we write our screenplays.

Anyway you can go here to read the whole transcript.

For more information, go here for a GITS post with links to a great NY Times Sunday magazine feature on Nichols.