Mike Nichols RIP

well, he extended S&G's lifeline well into the next century.

I saw a clip of Good Morning America on the ABC News site where they played Carly Simon's dopey river song from Working Girl as an intro to talking about Nichols. So some producer said, "Simon & Garfunkel too fucking ancient -- Carly, that's our demo."

LEEEEEEEETTTT

THE RIVER RUUUUNN

I'm kind of dubious that any morning shows not on Mrs Nichols' network did a stand-alone segment.

Two of my friends were screamed at by MN; touched by greatness.

I'd argue the success of the Bridge Over Troubled Waters did more to maintain S&G's career than the soundtrack to The Graduate (which is not very satisfying as an S&G album, though I lovelovelove April Come She Will)

All those S&G songs were a year-plus old when they were put on the soundtrack! Except for the nascent version of "Mrs Robinson," which was a fragment that Paul just slapped some new words onto.

he was completely hairless! where did i read that? nichols and may are all-time for me. and his good movies are good. and, needless to say, the day of the dolphin is one of the funniest movies ever made.

Yeah, he had a disease in childhood that took all his hair.

really, what was the pitch for Day of the Dolphin? Loosely based on a French scifi novel described as "a stark Cold War satire."

the one I should rewatch is The Fortune. It can't be as bad as its reputation suggests (or as bad as Heartburn).

I liked it; Stockard Channing got the best reviews, and Warren & Jack do a sort of Abbott & Costello & Laurel & Hardy thing.

silkwood and postcards from the edge are my faves. although virginia woolf is obviously all-time awesome. especially if you are an old drag queen like me.

Kind of annoyed at the way Woolf has made people think the play is camp, which no doubt comes from Taylor. Come over and listen to my 4 x LP original cast album w/ Uta Hagen.

I said on the obits thread, we watched Heartburn at the weekend, as my other half had just finished the novel. So so awful. I mean, I guess Bernstein's mostly to blame for meddling in the script, but a) Nicholson seems to think he's still on the set of The Shining and/or a massive coke binge; b) is Streep's character meant to be so intolerable and unlikeable? and c) holy fuck working Itsy Bitsy Spider into that lovely Carly Simon tune is even more annoying than the trailers for Avengers 2 interpolating 'I Got No Strings' into the script.

and again Channing is the highlight (Richard Masur too to a lesser degree)

is Streep's character meant to be so intolerable and unlikeable?

well, she's Nora Ephron.

Mandy Patinkin was fired, and Nicholson came in without anyone noticing he was completely wrong for it I guess.

along with a few other films of that era the film really transformed how pop music functioned in a feature-film context.
― I dunno. (amateurist), Thursday, November 20, 2014 11:41 AM (1 hour ago)

In terms of narrative film, I think it's the breakthrough (the Beatles films are different). Warhol and Anger and some other non-narrative people were doing lots too, but I can't think of a narrative film before The Graduate where pop music was so crucial. All for the good, for me.

i like the fortune ok: Dumb Jack, like prizzi's honor. i watched catch-22 like 5000 times in high school (it's a doomed project i guess but martin balsam, jon voight, bob balaban are all totally otm) but a rewatch a few years ago didn't rly live up. staggering scale tho. enjoy travolta+bates in primary colors. rip.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4l4zhoHMe0Y

from this roundup:

https://www.fandor.com/keyframe/daily-mike-nichols-1931-2014

There is such a thing as "valid" camp, Morbs.

with valid weenie roasts

primary colors is terrible and a reminder of those dark days when someone let emma thompson into all our movies.

Good tribute from Jon Robin Baitz:
http://www.vanityfair.com/vf-hollywood/2014/11/mike-nichols-jon-robin-baitz

scott!! what the fuck?!

the graduate seems to divide folks who were around at the time. i mean 90% of boomers love it for seeming to capture a certain attitude, and the other 10% hate it for the same reason. i think it's easier to have a more ambivalent attitude toward it if you're younger. i basically like it, and i think the stylistic innovations (or at least bravado) still feels fairly fresh.

i wasn't around at the time and i like it quite a bit. everything amateurist says here is otm.

i was always more of a You're A Big Boy Now kinda guy.

some of the choices for camera placement strike me as WHOO LOOK AT ME in a flashy way that complements the script's easy zings, and the movie just stops after Mrs Robinson fades

That's true, even w/ the toast popping up after Ben leaves his parents openmouthed in the kitchen. Shooting through the fish tank i didn't mind.

Oh I saw his staging of Stoppard's The Real Thing with Jeremy Irons in '84, that was a good one.

re camp:

At the University of Chicago in the 1950s, the young Susan Sontag considered him her best friend.

also

I once talked to a well-known character actress who worked with Nichols on a comedy on stage in the 1980s. On opening night, she said, he came to her dressing room and indicated several places in the script. “Those are your laughs,” he told her. “And if you don’t get them, you’re fired.” I asked if Nichols might have been kidding her. She didn’t seem to think so.

http://www.rogerebert.com/balder-and-dash/mike-nichols-1931-2014

i always figured he was gay. even though he was married 4 times. diane sawyer is gay isn't she?

I loved this guys movies from the 60s/70s. The movie adaptation of "Catch-22" is much better than "MASH" imo.

punting this over from the Obit thread:

Carnal Knowledge... its sexual politics are pretty horribly dated imho

probably best discussed in the Nichols thread, but i'm curious why you think so? the film surely views the Nicholson character as a cretin.

― things lose meaning over time (Dr Morbius), Thursday, November 20, 2014 4:18 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I wld really need to rescreen CN, but I didn't get as much of the loathing as you and others found in the way that the Nicholson character was presented - or at least, I found admiration and celebration there, too. It seemed to me very much the work of a middle-aged cartoonist seduced by the sudden glamour/money/fame of young Hollywood, and by "the new sexual freedoms" of the times - see also: harvey kurtzman's delight at being invited into the Playboy Mansion. But it could also be a reaction to, or memory of, Jack's charisma, and his subsequent reputation as a hipster-libertine, which seems increasingly distasteful in light of pal polanski or countless other swinging 70s dude's unpleasantness. Man, I only watched this film a couple of years ago and I'm slightly chagrined by how little of it I recall other than a general atmos; I remember the ending being very trite.

Carnal Knowledge is pretty bad. but, yeah, funny/interesting in a kitschy way now. you get to look at the clothes and decor anyway.

sure the style of "the graduate" is flashy, but i think that flashiness (which is very indebted to the european new waves, as everyone knows) was a somewhat healthy development in American cinema at the time, even if its effects down the line have been mixed. people whose idea of cinema is aligned with the stylistic economy of Classical Hollywood (always more of an ideal than an actual thing) seemed to recoil at the excesses of the New Hollywood but like I said above that debate feels very dated now that the New Hollywood is Really Old. for example the animosity that Sarris and his acolytes showed toward Kubrick has always perplexed me. I'm not Kubrick's biggest fan (just like I'm not Nichols's biggest fan) but the dismissals of his work from a vocal minority of cinephiles are a little hard to fathom nowadays.

anyway.

not that Kubrick is "New Hollywood", since he precedes that phenomenon and was working in the UK by the time it came around. but he was perceived as a kind of "new" filmmaker whose work somewhat travestied the Classical moment in American cinema that was seen to have just passed.

btw there are like 200 "New Hollywoods," from the 1940s up through the 1990s, but I'm speaking of the media phenomenon (and to a lesser extent actual film-production phenomenon) heralded by The Graduate/Bonnie and Clyde.

btw the Woolf commentary track up there is fascinating -- Ernest Lehman's biggest idea at the time Nichols was hired was making the child REAL (and dead). What a maroon. Also around 36:00 Nichols has a nice observation about Wyler and a scene in The Heiress.

I loved this guy. You're all nuts.

Ernest Lehman's biggest idea at the time Nichols was hired was making the child REAL (and dead). What a maroon.

hahahaha oh dear - i need to listen to this commentary

you see, the play's ending had been criticized!

We studied the play at high school, can still remember when the TWIST was revealed in class and actual cynical 14 year olds *gasped* aloud

it was spoiled for me by the SCTV K-Tel version

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yIMAowxy_A

1999 FC interview:

Carnal Knowledge is the darkest movie I ever made. It's the only one I ever see again. I'm very impatient, and in looking at it I'm very annoyed by its pace. Because I was so hung up on not cutting and doing everything in one, I just think it's slow. In the beginning especially, I just think, C'mon, let's go, let's go. And then indeed it does get moving, in the middle, and then I think it works—I like it very much. It's a mannerist film, and that's both what I like and don't like about it. It was written as a play, and I said I thought it wasn't a play, actually it was a movie. I think without planning to, it was in some ways reminiscent of Feiffer's panels, when he draws his cartoons....

People thought it was an anti-woman film. I never thought that was true. It was a film about the underclass and what its members suffered. The main thing to remember about Carnal Knowledge was it was about a specific generation of men. I don't think those men exist now, and I think feminism has changed everyone to some extent. But what you said is absolutely true, that we all think of men as the liars. Well, of course, women, like any underclass, are liars, too—they're just better liars, because their lies are part of a necessary strategy. I think some of that is in the movie; we probably could have used more of it.

http://www.filmcomment.com/article/of-metaphors-and-purpose-mike-nichols-interview

I wonder if he changed his mind about "those men" no longer existing in the last couple weeks...

Good observations in thread. While finishing Mark Harris' bio, I watched The Fortune and Silkwood again. The latter held up quite well; the houses feels lived in, and Streep, Kurt Russell (meow), and Cher interact as if they've known each other for years (one of Streep's most acceptable fussy performances too).

Apparently he and Susan Sontag might've hooked up when younger. Makes sense: she was the New York intellectual version of Mike Nichols.

Commentary on The Graduate with Soderbergh; properly fascinating

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WqjLzi5a8A

I forgot that it was him who did Silkwood actually, probably my favourite Meryl performance ever, she just vanishes into it so completely. Russell, Streep and Cher is such a great little gang.

The Mark Harris book sounds great; especially the stuff about Heartburn;

https://www.vulture.com/article/mike-nichols-a-life-mark-harris-excerpt.html

I had no idea -- silly me -- to what degree he remained a theater director.

To learn that Silkwood (a) hit #1 (b) hit #1 in its sixth week of wide release is a peek into another world.

Heartburn is an odd bad film. The rhythms are slack as hell, the material's disgraceful (e.g. an early sequence in which members of the family take turns urging weepy Streep to leave her bedroom to get married), and the leads are miscast; yet it has a rumpled lived-in-ness with which Nichols has often succeeded (it's streaming on Prime).

Tried it a few months ago and gave up during the wedding.