Elaine May (Female Filmmaker February pt. VI)

A New Leaf

Mikey and Nicky

Good evening, my good friends, I hope you’re all enjoying the fleeting but fun sense of patriotism and joy that Bad Bunny magically conjured during his historic Superbowl Halftime Show performance. I don’t give a shit about football, I don’t even know a ton of Bad Bunny’s music, and yet I can still appreciate and admire the impeccably cinematic quality of his performance. The loudest voices in America are often bigots, but Bad Bunny really pulled it off and captured something special. Speaking of artists who understood the collective cultural sensibility but was often misunderstood by pretentious, hateful critics, let’s continue our celebration of Female Filmmaker February with a round of films made by the incomparable, ingenious, inconceivably unique writer-director Elaine May. This is a name I’ve heard for years, but didn’t quite understand the power and reverence behind her name until I did research for my Mike Nichols double feature last year. Elaine May, born as Elaine Iva Berlin, was brought into the universe on April 21st, 1932 (and is still alive, bitch!!) As a child, May performed with her father Jack Berlin in his traveling Yiddish theater company, making her stage debut at age three. Because the troupe toured extensively, May attended over fifty schools by the time she was ten, and when she was eleven, her father passed away. Elaine and her mother then moved to Los Angeles, where she attended Hollywood High, and eventually dropped out. At the age of sixteen, Elaine married Marvin May, an engineer and toy inventor, with whom she had their daughter: eventual fellow actor and screenwriter and iconic Jewish Bad Girl Jeannie Berlin. The couple divorced in 1960, and before she met the three other male companions and husbands of hers, she decided to study acting. When she found out that the University of Chicago was one of the only universities to admit students without high school diplomas, Elaine May hitchhiked to Chicago with just $7 in her pocket. May began informally taking classes by auditing—nevertheless engaging in discussions with instructors and once even starting a huge fight after asserting that Socrates’ apology was a political move. Mike Nichols, who was then an actor in the school’s theatrical group, remembers her coming to his philosophy class, making “outrageous” comments, and leaving. They learned about each other from friends, and eventually director Paul Sills brought May to Nichols and said, “Mike, I want you to meet the only other person on campus who’s as hostile as you are: Elaine May.” Six weeks later, they bumped into each other at a train station in Chicago and soon began spending time together over the following weeks as “dead-broke theatre junkies.” Thus began the legendary partnership of Nichols and May: beginning with them getting kicked out of their improv group for being “too good”, heading to New York to create incredibly popular comedic plays that became the talk of the town and the industry, and ending much-too-soon with a semi-hostile professional break up. Of their partnership, Jack Rollins once said, “Their work was so startling, so new, as fresh as could be. I was stunned by how really good they were… They were totally adventurous and totally innocent, in a certain sense. That’s why it was accepted. They would uncover little dark niches that you felt, but had never expressed...” Mike Nichols often said the two were just “winging it”, and May once told a Newsweek interviewer, “When we came to New York, we were practically barefoot. And I still can’t get used to walking in high heels.” Nichols and May indirectly poked fun at the new intellectual culture which they saw growing around them. They felt that young Americans were taking themselves too seriously, and this became the subject of much of their satire. Together, they created a “New Age of Irony” for comedy, which showed actors arguing contemporary banalities as a key part of their routine—a style that heavily influenced the likes of Steve Martin, Bill Murray, David Letterman, and too many more to name. May also helped remove the stereotype of “women’s roles” on stage, with producer David Shepherd once noting that, “she accomplished this partly by not choosing traditional 1950s female roles for her characters like housewives or women working at menial jobs… Elaine broke through the psychological restrictions of playing comedy as a woman.” Jack Lemmon declared that “She’s the finest actress I've ever worked with… And I’ve never expressed an opinion about a leading lady before... I think Elaine is touched with genius. She approaches a scene like a director and a writer.”

Elaine May broke out of the theater, officially, and 1971, made her writing and directing debut with her film A New Leaf. Inspired by a short story she’d read in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine called The Green Heart, A New Leaf introduces us to the impossibly rich and pretentious New York society man Henry Graham (Walter Matthau), just as he receives the most devastating news of his life: he has officially spent all of his trust fund and has no money left. While I’m much more accustomed to the gruff, surly sonofabitch Matthau typically plays (see The Odd Couple, The Bad News Bears, A Face in the Crowd, Charade, and King Creole), as Henry Graham he is delicate, refined, elitist, and so stuffy he sounds positively congested. Upon learning, misunderstanding, then properly accepting that he is now poor, Henry drives around to admire his favorite rich-people-places, the whole time lamenting out loud in a whispered voice, “I’m poor.” He gazes at his tailor, his favorite restaurant, his racquet ball club, his horse stables, even his butler with rueful eyes, too stunned and depressed to express his newfound lack of fortune. As he bemoans to his butler, “I have no skill or ambition, I was always just rich.” With no job prospects or family members to borrow from, his butler says there’s really only one option. “Suicide?” Henry assumes, “No, sir, I was going to suggest marriage.” Henry goes on to stress that a wife would just be in his way, constantly talking to him, but the butler implores him, “Don’t become poor… not just for you, but for me.” We’re then shown a small montage of blind dates and random meet-cutes at rich-people-establishments, wherein Henry is introduced to a plethora of off-putting but wealthy women. But then, fate places him in the same lunch parlor as the ultimate off-putting wealthy woman: a professor of botany named Henrietta Lowell (Elaine May.) As Henrietta fumbles with her glasses, drops multiple tea cups, and in general appears to be the most flustered person on earth, Henry gets all the tea on her from a mutual acquaintance, who states that, “She’s always reading, she doesn’t ride, doesn’t entertain, she’s the most isolated woman I know.” To which Henry responds, “Rich? Single? Isolated? She’s perfect.” After spilling one too many cups of tea on the carpet, Henrietta is kicked out, with Henry, feigning offense, following behind her. He offers to drive her home and learns that she arrived by bus, exclaiming in disbelief, “By bus? And then to be treated like THIS?” The two end up spending the rest of the day and evening together, Henry pretending to care about botany, and Henrietta, presumably for the first time, getting to talk at-length about her favorite subject. Within days they’re engaged, married, and, after wiping a red wine stain from her upper lip, he kisses her—all in that order. Though Henrietta’s lawyer keeps trying to talk her out of this marriage—even as he walks her down the aisle—Henry and Henrietta are married and honeymooning in the blink of an eye. Unsurprisingly, Henry has plans to kill Henrietta and take her fortune, but surprisingly, he is compelled to take care of her disheveled appearance: fixing her hair, cutting off clothing tags she’s neglected to remove, pruning and fussing over her out of either embarrassment or compulsion, with no objections from her. It’s accidentally quite adorable, and despite Henry’s decidedly queer-coded disdain for her, they make an oddly cute couple. I won’t reveal whether or not Henry successfully kills Henrietta, but just know that the ending we were given was much sweeter than the version Elaine May originally intended. The making of A New Leaf was just the first of many convoluted, contentious, over-budget and over-time productions led by Elaine May. To begin with, May wanted Christopher Plummer or Cary Grant to play Henry, but the studio claimed that no one would see it if Walter Matthau didn’t star. She also never wanted to star in the film herself, but agreed to do so if the studio let her produce and have the final edit on the film—two promises the studio never kept. Robert Evans cut several plot points from the film, shaving it down by about an hour, and totally removing some of the sharpest critiques of misogyny that May built the script around. She even tried to get her name removed from the film, in retaliation Paramount decided to delay the release, and this game of unprofessional chicken went on and on until someone—it’s unclear which party—gave in.

Despite the protests on both the studio and the director’s sides, A New Leaf was a hit, and almost immediately after, Elaine May went on to direct her daughter Jeannie Berlin in one of her most famous roles, The Heartbreak Kid. Throughout her career, May constantly butted heads with studio dickwads, critics, editors, and anyone else who got in the way of her vision. She was Oscar-nominated for writing the screenplay for Heaven Can Wait, she worked as the script doctor for Tootsie, Reds, Dick Tracy, Labyrinth, Dangerous Minds, Wolf, and officially made up with her old friend Mike Nichols to collaborate on The Birdcage—she even directed the 2016 TV documentary Mike Nichols: American Masters. In addition to her film Ishtar, which was once considered the worst movie of all time, a handful of her films have been reevaluated through a modern lens and are now considered misunderstood masterpieces. One such film in this category is her screwball crime dramedy from 1976: Mikey and Nicky. Although I was certain they played brothers, Mikey and Nicky stars Peter Falk and John Cassavetes as two longtime friends and smalltime Philly gangsters on one long, chaotic night. We open on a sweaty, sloppy, rumpled John Cassavetes as Nicky, who, in addition to being sexy in spite of this dishevelment, is having a stressful evening. Bent cigarette in mouth and gun in hand, he makes a call from his messy hotel room, muttering, “Mikey, I’m in trouble.” But when Mikey (Peter Falk) arrives, Nicky is too paranoid to even open the door for his childhood friend. When he finally does convince his friend to let him in, Mikey is naturally quite concerned. Nicky explains how a fellow gangster by the name of Ed Lipsky was just killed, and Nicky is convinced that there’s now a hit out on him as well. Mikey attempts to ease his friend’s worries and desperately tries to get him to take an antacid to avoid an ulcer, and thus begins an hours-long odyssey wherein Mikey tries to keep his friend calm and safe. First, the two go to a diner and drink some beers, their faces shrouded in clouds of cigarette smoke, and they have the first and only normal conversation of the night, where they catch each other up on their respective family lives. Nicky’s behavior is erratic and unpredictable, and he constantly wants to be on the move. Next, Nicky wants to go to a late-night movie, but Mikey begins to stall. He claims it’s so he can call his wife and let her know he’ll be home late, but Mikey is a bit of a suspicious character himself, and Peter Falk toes that line between good guy and scumbag impeccably well. The entire midnight adventure is mayhem, and in between bouts of high-strung paranoia and anxiety, Mikey and Nicky have fairly thoughtful conversations about paranoia and anxiety. And despite the tumultuous nature of this movie’s setting and premise, it genuinely looked like Falk and Cassavetes were having a ball the entire time. Similarly to A New Leaf, the film’s original budget grew exponentially, causing Palomar Pictures and Twentieth Century-Fox to drop the project. The shoot lasted 110 days of filming in both Philadelphia and Los Angeles, leading towards 1.5 million feet of film being used—almost three times as much as was shot for Gone with the Wind. By using three cameras that she sometimes left running for hours, May captured spontaneous interactions between Falk and Cassavetes. At one point, both men had left the set and the cameras remained rolling for several minutes. A new camera operator protested that the two actors had left the set, “Yes”, replied May, “but they might come back”. When Paramount assumed control over the film, May hid two important reels of footage in her husband’s friend’s garage in Connecticut, rendering the initial cut of the film incoherent. Only the critics saw this version, and reactions were not positive. After lengthy litigation and bad blood, May returned the hidden reels and allowed Paramount to create its cut, and she did not direct again for over a decade. Though she consistently had complicated relationships with her collaborators and her financiers, Elaine May couldn’t help making memorable movies full of moxie. And much like Ida Lupino, she couldn’t be confined to one thematic box or style of cinematic style. When she wasn’t making the culture herself, she seemed to always meet it where it was at, and both of tonight’s films were emblematic of her ability to find lightness, even in the darkest scenarios. Female comedians, filmmakers, artists, and corny blog-writers like myself have a lot to thank Ms. May for, so allow this post to act as one, long, verbose thank you letter, from one kooky Jewish broad to another. Thanks for reading along, my fellow visionaries. Toodles!