POLL: Elaine May

Mikey and Nicky is such an odd duck: Mean Streets filtered through Husbands by the woman who made The Heartbreak Kid. It makes more sense than it should; The Heartbreak Kid already showed that May understands toxic masculinity as well as Scorsese or Cassavetes. A few too many of the scenes between Cassavetes and Falk are allowed to ramble on too long, a Cassavetes tactic that doesn't always play as well here (a recent rewatch of Husbands confirmed for me that Cassavetes exerted more control over the shape of his films than appears). I can see it growing on me with later viewings, but for now I file it as more of a curio (albeit a successful one) than a legit 70s Classic.

That ending, though.

seeing Ishtar on the big screen tonight, woohoo!

a dangerous business...

Watched the Criterion of M&N last night, which I'd last seen only four years ago. A 5-star film.

The alleged "loose" woman who bites Falk is played by Walter Matthau's wife Carol Grace. She'd also been married to William Saroyan... twice. Hadn't had a film credit since '59, never had another.

Very brief but amusing roles for M Emmett Walsh and Bill Hickey.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/tv/awards/tony-awards-2019-elaine-may-wins-first-major-acting-award-at-age-87/ar-AACDbSD?li=BBnb2gh

!!!

https://thefilmstage.com/news/elaine-may-to-direct-first-narrative-feature-in-30-years-with-dakota-johnson-led-crackpot/

!!!!!!

I rewatched Heaven Can Wait (1978) last night, script credited to Elaine and Warren Beatty. Her touch is most apparent with the Charles Grodin-Dyan Cannon murderous couple ("Don't cover my mouth!" "You used to like it") and in cop Vincent Gardenia's pre-climactic grilling about hats, cocoa and cookies.

88! I wonder if she plays piano.

took me a while to find its groove but it's a good movie with some really interesting things on its mind re: jealousy and unaddressed resentments in male-male friendships etc. Yes to all, gotta say some of it seemed familiar too. Will say no more.

If you're leaning in the direction of "She ripped off Mean Streets," it was shot in '73 and the script existed long before that.

No, I didn't mean Yes that part in particular. Hadn't thought of Mean Streets: some similarities, but whatever the chronology, provenance etc. of scripts, seemed and seems like such relationships could exist in and between many lives...

i've now watched all four of these and i don't really get her. the new york part of ishtar is very funny but the rest of her filmography leaves me cold. i watch a lot of old movies but her movies feel so of another time that they feel completely foreign to me (harold & maude is another movie like that to me). also i'm turned off by how little interest she seems to have in the visual aspect of moviemaking - ishtar looks alright but mikey & nicky looks like crap, is often out of focus and/or murky and dark. what am i missing

I think the grimy run & gun look of Mikey & Nicky works for the material. (My only complaint with the look of it would be the couple of scenes where you can plainly see the wireless mics on Falk & Cassavetes, which takes me out of the movie if I notice them.)

But I know what you mean. Mikey & Nicky is the only one of her movies that 100% works for me, I rate New Leaf and Heartbreak Kid as 'good but could have been great', and part of what holds them back imo is the bland approach to shooting & staging. I always chalked it up to her coming out of theater. But I dont think youre missing anything per se if it doesnt work for you, I think with these films you either find a way to look past the flaws and enjoy the writing & performances or you dont.

The Heartbreak Kid is an ordinary looking film, although it's been so long since I watched anything but a deteriorated print (VHS, YouTube, Swedish print), it's hard to say. For that particular film, it never bothered me.

The way she shoots Cybill Shepherd--the female gaze--means more to me.

Doc otm re Matthau's casting as a rich wastrel scion:

he's terrific. the miscasting, such as it is, is hilarious. somehow that gap heightens the sense of a man totally, defiantly oblivious to his own situation.

and Zack Snyder's Gardner Fox's Justice League: The Whedon Cut:

all may was really doing was arguably wasting other people's money, right? can't say it strikes me as crazier than, like, warner brothers spending tens or maybe hundreds of millions of dollars on post-wrap *reshoots* for "justice league" because they didn't know what they wanted, and were retooling their whole lineup's vibe on the fly, strikes me as far more absurd and stupid. tho obviously in may's case the relevant thing is that it was self-defeating since it severely curtailed her opportunities to make more films. feel like a man in the same position would get more chances to redeem, idk.

omg that DN

and i think this might be the week i finally accept the Youtube quality and watch Heartbreak Kid. ~april is May~

Here's a wayback link for the Movieline report on May's appearance at the Ishtar screening upthread

No doubt hero of the arts Brian Calle is rushing to restore the archives of the Village Voice, but just in case this doesn't happen for no apparent reason, here's that piece on revisiting A New Leaf.

And new to the thread: MAD Magazine's take on The Heartbreak Kid, by Drucker and Siegel. (nb that you'll have to scroll up and down to read the opening double-truck.)

https://vitatrain4life.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/giphy-49.gif

the Heartbreak upload is very poor quality, but it's not like May's main concern was the look of the film, soo... Just pretend you're watching broadcast TV on a CRT.

Don't watch it on fucking Youtube, you'll miss the unctuous texture of the egg salad on Jeannie Berlin's face, and the intensely rich redness of her sunburn.

Somewhere in storage I have a copy of the widescreen DVD of the O.G. Heartbreak Kid from Anchor Bay. Probably some decent rips up on back channels. Apparently Bristol-Myers Squibb (who through some litany of business deals own the Palomar Pictures library) are holding it and other films hostage because they made King's Ransoms on remake rights*, and are trying (and failing) to make lightning strike twice on physical media/streaming licensing.

*In addition to THK, they've got The Stepford Wives and Sleuth.

Torrenting is really the only accessible other option - it's a three-hour round trip walk to the one video store that has it here, and they require a $200 deposit for their sole copy. Discussion upthread notes how scarce prints are, even if repertory cinemas had not been closed for a while, for some inexplicable reason.

I assume BMS (who owned Palomar in time to actually make most of the library, including THK) just don't care enough to bother licensing, and are setting their rates high enough to turn away suitors on purpose. Pelham 123 is their other notably-remade title.

Paramount was able to get a temporary DVD license as part of their deal for the Stepford remake, and a bunch of non-remade Palomar titles were put out on DVD by MGM back in the day, some of which Kino has more recently put out on Blu.

Carrie Courogen
@carriecourogen
·
Apr 4
Replying to
@carriecourogen
A podcast as big as Blank Check, with a large fanbase talking about how they are being introduced to this filmmaker via the podcast, has a responsibility to do more than the bare minimum to get this right. This many errors, tired exaggerations, and assumptions is unacceptable.
Her fact check of the Elaine May episode:

I fact checked the Blank Check episode on Elaine May’s A New Leaf pic.twitter.com/3Zslz39MJz

— Carrie Courogen (@carriecourogen) April 4, 2021

For those not listening, her corrections do not correspond to errors made on the podcast.

i think they kinda do? the hosts' hearts are in the right place, but they are not really research and facts oriented - the comment about skimming wikipedia is really not too far off of the way griffin will typically characterize his own pre-show reading.

a couple do but - her first point outright repeats, rather than corrects, the same thing that Newman and Sims said on the podcast
- Elaine and Marvin May separated after three years but did not divorce
- improv point might be accurate but I don't recall them saying she went to Chicago with the intention of getting into a pre-existing scene, rather than improv in Chicago being the next phase of her career
- her fourth point m/l contradicts itself? performers going to NYC to work as performers and pursuing an audition with a major talent agent while there is not an argument AGAINST them wishing to make a living by performing?
- Penn point might be accurate, idrc, might be crosstalk?
- Tony point mbaidrcmbc
- theatre one is a good and valid correction
- if she thinks Griffin mispronouncing words or names is laugh-out-loud hilarious then it's bemusing how she made it through his approx. seven pismronunications per episode for the last five years without concluding it is a comedy show, not an educational one
- studios point is valid but also was clearly the speakers riffing in speculative metaphor, not presented as reportage
- citing your sources in order to specifically call out their bias or slightness is not a journalistic failure
- the shooting coverage thing is valid if that's what they said
- I think the comedian and UCB-trained improviser Griffin Newman, whose persona is built on exaggeration and amplification, was improvisng a comedic exaggeration by saying that May slept with a loaded gun under her pillow to protect the Mikey & Nicky reels from the studio

and her saying that David should kill himself out of embarrassment for joking about movies on a podcast, when he has a day job as a film critic, does not suggest that her criticisms are entirely measured and in good faith imo

Somewhere in storage I have a copy of the widescreen DVD of the O.G. Heartbreak Kid from Anchor Bay

I have a copy of this too. The AB disc is pretty average, visually, but definitely superior to the YouTube stream.

i'm not seeing the "kill yourself" part?? but the way twitter behaves and stuff loads or doesn't load still baffles me so i guess i could be missing it. that would certainly change my reaction.

i think there is an interesting issue here, which is how much *are* you obligated to do your homework/research? in my own archi-blogging i often write about topics in a looser, glibber way than i ever would in my academic writing: discussing buildings without first reading all the published work on them, repeating fun anecdotes or gossip without necessarily doing the legwork to confirm the original truth vs the telephone-game version etc. i also lean way more into formal analysis and whether i think the building is bad/good/great/masterpiece in a way that would be at best irrelevant in the kind of historical writing i'm trying to do for a living, which is much more about social/political/economic context and not so much art appreciation. it's fun to have the space to write more lightly, to be more of an opinionated amateur critic/tourist/connoisseur than a professional historian. but if my blog had thousands of followers it might not actually be so fun - i do think i'd feel more of an obligation to get things "right" and be more discreet, circumspect, precise, careful. or at least have big disclaimers on every post.

so i get where, if someone were concerned about the ongoing misunderstanding of elaine may or the systemic marginalization of female filmmakers, you might really be bothered by a podcast with a HUGE following, that demonstrates a certain sloppiness with stuff. like whether or not every fact check is completely on-point, she's accurately clocked that this is not a carefully researched karina longworth podcast, it's a looser comedy/discussion/fan podcast, maybe serving as a fun creative outlet for a critic like Sims. and, i'd buy an argument that that's less of a problem when they're riffing on James Cameron than it is with May. the intense defensiveness of the BC fans on their subreddit is kinda disappointing. lotta "jokes" that are just warmed over "cancel culture" stuff and/or saying that fact checks are good but daring to post them publicly is just outrageously rude and unfair...

Courogen apparently is working on a May biography, so she's done the work and would know the facts, and should rightfully be irked with something widely out there that's lesser.

I am a new Blank Check fan -- started listening about a month ago by dipping into the archive -- and Courogen's tweets depressed me because they seemed like valid points and so this new favorite thing of mine felt tainted.

However, with some distance -- and now having listened to both the New Leaf and Heartbreak Kid episodes -- I am less bothered by them. I think Courogen raises some worthwhile points about the ways in which the podcast may unwittingly perpetuate some broad narratives about May -- which I assume her biography will attempt to correct. But the list of errors, which seemed egregious to me at first, now looks nitpicky. (For what it's worth, in the episode about A New Leaf, Griffin also says that Mark Harris's Pictures at a Revolution is about the movies of 1969, but it's actually 1967. Whatever.)

I agree with Doctor Casino that the defensiveness of Blank Check fans on Twitter and Reddit is disappointing, though. It reminds me of the Reply All scandal from earlier this year. I think the question of who gets to tell these stories and what kind of responsibility they have is enormously complicated, and I understand why this caused the consternation it did.

I am curious if anything will come of this:

I haven’t listened to them yet! But am happy to work with her to add further context and clarity on the socials as the eps get released

— Blank Check Podcast (@blankcheckpod) April 4, 2021

I mean, I assume that is a bit of crisis management on Marie's part, but it would be nice to see the show explicitly address the critique. It's really too bad that the episodes were all pre-recorded.

yeah. to me i take the fact checks as less "these are very important facts and they are wrong," and more "getting this many minor things wrong is a giveaway that they haven't done more than a half hour's prep for this miniseries." and i think that would be the more objectionable thing, in a "you have a listener base and that means you have a responsibility" sense.

i did see where Griffin agreed that the "pasta dinner" bit is bad, whether misunderstood or not, and that it would henceforth be dropped without fanfare. ostensibly, the original joke was that he really, sincerely and chastely, only wanted to have pasta with Daisy Ridley, and also that he was "offering" an extremely cheap and unimpressive date experience to a movie star. but the pitfalls there are pretty obvious and dropping it is the right move.

Yeah, as a new listener, I had no idea that "pasta dinner" was a bit, and I cringed when I heard it in the first 5 minutes of the episode.

the shooting coverage thing is valid if that's what they said

i would even argue that this one is kind of a ridiculous splitting of hairs: "she went over schedule shooting too much coverage" vs "she went over schedule bc she had to go back and and reshoot many weeks of scenes to get coverage, which was the exact right amount of coverage but shooting it caused her to go over schedule". like technically correct i guess but not really a 'how dare you sir' gotcha.

i get why ppl like blank check but its definitely in a class of lite infotainment podcasts i dont have much use for, where i always wish i was just reading a long article or book about whatever the subject is.

but most of those fact checks are v corny imho, 20 not 30 years with stanley donen, 3rd not 4th woman in DGA, come on now, and sic otm about many of them being contradictory or redundant. but hearing that she is writing a may bio makes a lot of sense bc its very much that LRB letters page vibe of the Very Very Invested biographer aggrieved about someone else stepping on their subject

The differences between her blowing the schedule on A New Leaf (having to go back and pick up coverage bcz she didn’t get editing and just did her shotlist) and the others (shooting endlessly and having everyone improv, even in battle scenes in the Moroccan desert, then building the film in the edit) are fascinating and worthy of comparison. But Blank Check’s approach is about the viewers’ reaction to the work, not about a Longworthian research and scripted presentation of facts. It started as a review podcast that did the Phantom Menace every week, pretending as though no other Star War film had ever been made. Their analysis of Demme’s deep, empathetic interest in humanity came from their watching all his films, and didn’t address Tak Fujimoto’s choice of lights and lenses, as interesting as that would also be.

i'm not seeing the "kill yourself" part??

Courogen deleted some of her tweets, but it was something like “if I were a salaried film critic for the Atlantic, I would simply choose to die of embarrassment rather than publish inaccurate material about a filmmaker.”

i mean if we're gonna extend BC some benefit of the doubt and allowance for what they're trying to say and do, then can we also say that there is in terms of intent and colloquial meaning a difference between "i would rather die of embarrassment " and "you should kill yourself" ?

Like there’s a difference in serious intent between “May fought with the studio to protect her intent with the film” and between “May was sleeping with a loaded gun under her pillow to protect the film reels under her bed, lest the studio burst through her window in the dead of night,” you mean?

Whew i had no idea podcasts were judged so seriously over there. Not saying they shouldn't be but.. some of the ones i've heard could be fact checked out of existence within about 15 minutes by the same logic.

Is Blank Check any good usually? Do the ILX film bods like the hosts/ the show?

i'm a fan of the show! really good casual film dork listening most of the time. a key factor is that david's voice/mannerisms go down smoothly for me and often just tickle me. it's not a serious history show but they do genuinely love the movies and hollywood and are leeeeeagues ahead of most "here's a couple of guys with movie opinions" shows one could imagine.

so i get their vibe. I also could imagine someone legitimately misreading an exaggeration like the gun/pillow story as someone retelling a wild anecdote that they believe to be true. (for all i know that's some widely circulated myth and not a griff-ism, but i myself know too little about May to say.)

more generally... there's a middle ground between "knows nothing, just riffing and goofing" and "did Longworth-level research." i've been frustrated before on seasons where i did know more about the filmmaker/context, and where they landed in that middle ground didn't work for me... Miyazaki was one of those. i know their "connoisseurs of context" thing is partly kidding themselves about NOT being true experts, but combined with the amount of time they DO devote to context/backstory (versus a show that's like "the premise of the show is we watch movies knowing nothing about them"), it does make you want them to know what they're talking about. and getting lots of individually minor things wrong does kinda work against that, and when you're an expert on something, it's frustrating to hear someone with a huge audience getting shit wrong. this really doesn't seem outrageous to me.

i like blank check a lot, i binged a ton of it over the winter. i like learning about the movies but mostly i enjoy the enthusiasm (for most movies) and the banter.

and yes must acknowledge: their start was with a long run of episodes based on the conceit that they did NOT know what they were talking about (discussing the star wars prequels as if they were the first and only star wars films). but it's changed a lot since then. i definitely learn stuff from the show, mostly the way you learn something from someone explaining it casually at a bar. but there is sort of a trust that when they're relaying fun and memorable trivia that it's also correct trivia that you could repeat without contributing to general ignorance and confusion. i think david cares about that more than griffin.... just reflects their different personalities, training, relationship to the industry etc.

yeah, I like it lots too. though I mostly listen when I'm interested in the film or director, it's to hear the speakers' reactions, not to learn more.

it does make you want them to know what they're talking about. and getting lots of individually minor things wrong does kinda work against that, and when you're an expert on something, it's frustrating to hear someone with a huge audience getting shit wrong.

agreed - as I said, many of her corrections are valid (but mostly v. minor), and I'd rather they get their research right than half-remembered. but many of hers were inaccurate and the overall tone (inc eyerolling weeks before the miniseries about how she was going to hate listening) was not a productive way of adjusting against their rhetorical excesses.

the conceit that they did NOT know what they were talking about

I really enjoyed Avery Edison's disappointment this week, as a long-time listener and first-time guest, that America's Finest Film Critic was not present in the third chair.

as someone who has seen all the elaine may movies and didn't love any of them, their enthusiasm is making me reassess the movies and feel like i wasn't viewing them through the proper lens or something

I watched The Heartbreak Kid earlier this year and genuinely liked it. I felt less enthusiastic about A New Leaf, which I watched a couple of weeks ago, but thought it was at least trying to do something interesting. The Blank Check episode made me appreciate it more, even if I still don't find it quite as funny as they do.

As NA knows because we watched it together, I don't really like Ishtar apart from the opening scenes in New York. I'm going to watch Mikey and Nicky sometime this week.

yeah the first 10 minutes or so of Ishtar are my favorite part of her filmography