POLL: Elaine May

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

imo most criticisms of the 3 comedies are generally hard to argue with, but if you can bargain with yourself to overlook the flaws the movies have interesting & funny pleasures to offer. pretty far from masterpieces though.

my main problem with mikey & nicky is that it looks like crap. i know she's more of a script/character director than a visual stylist, but i don't understand how she shot thousands of hours of footage and there are still scenes in the movie that are blatantly out of focus.

but yeah even though i didn't love any of her movies, there was definitely stuff i liked and/or thought was interesting in each. i just couldn't completely connect to any of them. not saying she's not worthy of discussion or reappraisal.

I think the grimy run & gun look of Mikey & Nicky works for the material.

The grainy, low-light effect really helps you feel that you're caught up in this gross night with these two seedy creeps.

yeah, i definitely appreciate the scuzzy lo-fi-ness of Mikey and Nicky but i get the complaint.

agreed 100% about the opening chunk of Ishtar. when i saw it in a full theater it was KILLING up until they actually get on the plane. there were a few solid laughs afterwards, iirc largely thanks to Grodin, but a lot more failure.

i'm really glad i saw A New Leaf in a similar packed-house environment. i'm sure i would have a lot less affection for it if i'd watched it at home in quarantine... comedy can survive the small screen, but compromised/flawed comedy is obviously gonna have a tough time...

Ishtar is probably the one that suffers most from May's lack of interest in framing or visual storytelling, as well as leaning into improv. Hoffman just isn't interesting enough as a creator (or actor imo) to craft anything revelatory in the moment - the film would probably have been better sticking to May's script and letting the cinematographer do the pretty set-ups she argued against.

(Hoffman also thought in advance that the script should never have left New York, and that the first half-hour of the final movie is still great.)

the first acts of movies are a hell of a lot easier to script and pace successfully than the second and third acts are.

Co-sign on the first half hour of Ishtar. The rest is unwatchable, barely above Spies Like Us.

Curious to read the new Nichols blog though, just to read the Elaine May stuff

the first acts of movies are a hell of a lot easier to script and pace successfully than the second and third acts are.

Not usually an issue with May - we can't tell anything about the act structure of A New Leaf with a 90-minute middle act thrown out by the studio and a judge, but as great as the "I'm pooooooor" sequence is, the later parts all work onscreen. The first act in Heartbreak is perfunctory, with chaos ramping up in the 2nd-through-fifth. The structure and pacing of M&N has nothing to do with scripting. And The Birdcage may have stuck to the pace of La Cage (idk), but is very close to the escalating-farce family-conflict structure of Heartbreak Kid.

agreed that the second half (or whatever) of A New Leaf works onscreen, but for me it works more like a collection of incredible sketches, than as pieces of a larger comedy... but of course it's impossible to know how it was all supposed to work. Birdcage is definitely great evidence that she knew her way around scripting and pacing a comedy, for sure.

the Ishtar problem is just that the North African material isn't funny, while watching Beatty and Hoffman try to write songs together is hilarious. the rare movie that arguably peaks (into true all-time brilliance imho) while the opening credits are still being doled out. the pause and delivery of the word "Why?" in that songwriting session cracks me up just thinking about it.

There are funny elements and bits in the African material, but structure-wise, a big problem is that it loses the thread of the leads' own aims for far too long. It's a bathetic triumph when they get up and perform a whipped-into-shape version of that terrible opening-sequence number. But the thing would hang together better if the story had enabled their getting caught up in CIA missions to also sustain a stronger throughline, sneaking off to find places to perform along the way & such.

(If she'd been allowed to shoot the desert stuff in the US, perhaps they could have thrown more of it out and focused on the New York narrative? But having been forced to go to Morocco to use up Coca-Cola's trapped-in-the-country money, the impetus to use as much as possible would have been strong...)

In general it seems she might have been better served as part of a directing team, to riff ideas on set and vibe with the actors, but with a more practically-minded partner to balance that and run comms with the crew. (Apparently she wrote lots of Reds in the edit with Beatty, too?) But her never giving a fuck about film directing in the first place was probably the biggest strike against her finding a more productive way of doing it, within the system or otherwise.

In general it seems she might have been better served as part of a directing team,

From the full post-Ishtar-screening discussion with Nichols:

Now tell us a little about the people who you made your movies with. People like our friend Anthea Sylbert, who was a great costume designer and an inspiring and remarkable person—how important is a person like that?

There’s about five of them. And when you meet them, they’re sort of like friends, you want to keep them. On Heartbreak Kid, I had no idea what these people would wear. Anthea said: “Well, cotton underwear is what the girl would wear, that’s what those blondes wear.” She was just perfect. She was just a true artist. And in A New Leaf, she said: “Have you thought about what’s in your purse?” Man, I hadn’t thought about my part. I had no idea. And every once in a while you get a fantastic art director, and Sylbert was wonderful. I do miss that. Those wonderful people who work with you on a movie, and who tell the story with you. That’s the best part of making movies, I think. It’s the only thing where you can work in a group where five or six people all tell the same story in their own specific voice. The music person has a voice. The makeup person makes you up to tell the story… And they all tell the same story. And I miss that because you can’t really do it on the stage.

On first directing:

I know nothing. I actually remember calling you and I said, “Well, how should I say action? Firmly or…?” I began sort of on one foot and just continued that way.

I think the real secret of movies is putting a crew together. And it takes about 25 years to get it right. That’s not an exaggeration. And you have to do it steadily because you can’t ask anyone. Everybody will say about everyone you ask, “He’s a very good man.” Nobody will ever tell; you have to find out. And when you have that many people that can you depend on, everything changes.

You’ve never seen a movie with that many mistakes in it. My editor was a really nice man who had a drug problem. And the first cut he did, he did flash forwards, so that I would watch the scene and there would be a piece of the next scene in it. He’d never edited. It was his first movie. And I said, “There’s a piece of the next scene in this,” and he said it’s a flash forward. I didn’t know what to do. And fortunately, well he didn’t OD, but he took too many drugs and left, and the apprentices and I sort of took out the flash forwards.

And I managed to learn on that movie, while shooting it I made so many mistakes that I actually learned a little bit about how to make a movie. I didn’t learn—I had such a good focus puller I didn’t know there was such a thing as focus until the next movie.

July: https://www.powerhousefilms.co.uk/collections/frontpage/products/ishtar-le

89.

Happy Birthday to Elaine May - Directing A NEW LEAF in 1971 pic.twitter.com/u5wyndoTbc

— Hill Illustration (@charliehillart6) April 21, 2021

Honorary Oscar!

Mikey and Nicky is annoying the fuck out of me. I'm just sad Mikey is going to end up getting killed for this doofus

Ok, not so keen on Mikey now either

Yah that’s a difficult one to get through

I like movies with shitty people in them but Nicky is such a pain in the ass, dumbfuck. It's innervating.

I've now seen all of these movies bar a new leaf and I don't really like any of them. Heartbreak kid is my favourite

The copy on Amazon Prime seems to be stretched horizontally. I agree with comments above that it also looks like crap. Not just the darkness but also e.g. starting with a freeze-frame of a door because they didn't shoot enough coverage.

not shooting enough was famously the biggest problem with Mikey And Nicky