Nichols had spent the better part of a year hoarding projects that could serve as the final fireworks display of his abilities when he revealed them en masse in early 1993. In some ways, his estimation of what he could accomplish was correct; he would, in fact, direct six more movies over the next twenty years (as well as a TV movie, a miniseries, and despite his insistence that he was through with theater, four Broadway shows). But the work that would fill the long and prolific last act of his career would bear almost no resemblance to the sextet of movies he announced. One of them, a film version of a romantic thriller called The Impersonator, by Diana Hammond, was never mentioned by him again. Most of the others were also literary adaptations—Scott Smith’s A Simple Plan, Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses, and Robert Harris’s what-if-the-Nazis-had-won-World-War-II suspense novel Fatherland; he would develop and then walk away from all three. And he had already produced the fifth project, The Remains of the Day, which would be released at the end of the year.
The sixth film on Nichols’s list was the only one he would actually direct, and he had already been working on it for two years. Wolf had begun as a brainstorm during a bender, a half-formed idea concocted by Jack Nicholson and Jim Harrison, a rugged novelist whose work explored myth and masculinity and whose appetite for hunting, fishing, food, and alcohol was bottomless. The idea that had come to them over one long, hard-drinking weekend was an updated werewolf story that producer Douglas Wick described as “Willy Loman Eats Spinach,” about a sad sack, tamed and beaten down by the modern world, whose transformation gives him access to the primal male energy he has long suppressed.
Harrison worked on the concept for years. By the early 1990s, the success of finding-your-inner-wild-man books like Robert Bly’s Iron John had given it some momentum, and Nicholson’s involvement sparked the curiosity of a number of directors, Milos Forman and Peter Weir among them. But Harrison was not a natural screenwriter, and could never crack the plot. “I told Mike the ambitions of the story—a civilized guy connecting with his id,” says Wick. “He was fascinated. But he also said, ‘We have to put the main character in a world that I can bring the details to.’”
For Wolf to work, Nichols knew it would have to combine the high stakes and high concept of a genre film with something more idiosyncratic. But he and Harrison were oil and water; he was not about to put on waders, go fly-fishing in a Montana stream, and then sit around a campfire and talk about the beast within. “Mike was torn,” says Wick, “because he loved Jack, and he thought it might be a gigantic commercial enterprise.” But he felt no connection to the heart of the film. “A movie’s artistic success depends on the metaphor that is the central engine,” he said. “If the audience knows why they’re there, you can soar. If [they] don’t . . . no amount of cleverness with the camera or talent on the part of the actors can lift it.” And he had one worry he couldn’t ever set aside: “Werewolves are a lousy metaphor,” he said, “because they’re not a metaphor for anything that happens to people.”
Wick disagreed. “The movie was about the celebration of oblivion—losing yourself, getting fucked up,” he says. “I realized in retrospect that Mike could not see it as celebratory—he could only see it as loss. When he talked about it, he talked about AIDS and the friends he had lost. I was trying to sell him more on how great it is to leave the burden of your brain behind.” To keep Nichols on board, Wick brought in Wesley Strick, an experienced, adaptable screenwriter who had written Martin Scorsese’s remake of Cape Fear. Strick found Harrison’s draft “exceedingly dense” and “impenetrable”; Harrison himself later said it would have resulted in “a three-hour horror movie with blood coming off the fucking walls.” “Please give me some scenes that I can direct,” Nichols said.
Strick worked on the film for months, changing the profession of Nicholson’s character, Will Randall, from white-shoe lawyer to mild-mannered literary editor; Nichols had just depicted a high-powered law firm in Regarding Henry and felt that he could bring fresher observation to the world of publishing. But he still couldn’t find Wolf’s deeper meaning, if any existed. “Is it really about AIDS?” he would ask Strick. “Or the death of God?” Was being a werewolf a stand-in for politically incorrect thought, for rape fantasies, for unacceptable impulses? “Free-associating with Nichols always felt like a privilege, a hoot,” Strick wrote, adding, “and a grand waste of time.”
Several drafts later, the script had progressed—Will’s journey from man to werewolf and the idea of his professional interactions becoming increasingly feral had been more playfully developed. But neither Nichols nor Strick had given much thought to the female lead—“sometimes she was Nicholson’s love interest, sometimes she was his sister,” Strick wrote. Columbia wanted to put Michelle Pfeiffer opposite Nicholson, but she passed, saying the part was thin and underconceived. “It was ‘the girl,’” she said. “I hadn’t done that in a long time.”
With production nearing, a script that he didn’t feel was yet shootable, and no lead actress, Nichols took a deep breath, picked up the phone, and called the collaborator he still trusted more than any other.
At sixty-one, Elaine May had not been afforded the opportunities or second chances that Nichols had. She had received an Oscar nomination for co-writing Heaven Can Wait, and she had directed four movies. The noisy failure of the most recent, Ishtar, had ended her career behind the camera. But it had not tarnished her status as Hollywood’s most valuable invisible woman—a stealth rewriter whose reputation in the industry was unrivaled. Handed a broken screenplay, May knew how to diagnose the problem and find a fix; she would work fast, pocket a substantial paycheck, and always decline credit. Nobody knew how many scripts she had improved, solved, or saved. “It’s like some Taoist thing with her,” said a clearly impressed Jim Harrison. “Very mysterious. Come in, do the work, take the money, leave no tracks.” After thinking about Wolf for a weekend, she told Nichols, “Mike, you have a story about a guy who wants to become a wolf, so he becomes a wolf. I think this is going to be a very short movie.”
“I read it and thought, I can’t lick this,” she says. “To want to be a wolf—to give up thought and human nature—what kind of a cluck would do this? ‘Oh, good, I’m becoming a wolf’ is not a story, and a movie almost always has to have a story. A play doesn’t, but a movie does. But it was going to be made, so he was stuck with it.”
Nichols begged her to try some rewrites anyway. She agreed to step in. Strick and Harrison would share screenplay credit; her name would appear nowhere on Wolf, although Nichols could not resist including a callback to one of their best-loved sketches by using her in one scene as the voice of a telephone operator.
Their renewed bond would end up reshaping the next several years of his working life. “There were old friendships that informed a lot of the things we did [on Wolf],” he said. “And at the heart of it was Elaine and me. Because we rekindled something we hadn’t done—except for inaugurations and stuff—for 35 years. That was very emotional for us. And very exciting.”
May first concentrated on the female lead. She made Laura—who was now the daughter of Will’s boss—a sharp-tongued, self-sufficient, unflappable sparring partner; Pfeiffer read her redraft and signed on. And she dug deeper into the acerbic comedy of the publishing-house scenes, giving a cast that included Christopher Plummer, David Hyde Pierce, and James Spader a bit more to do. These were Band-Aids, not solutions—the material that she and Nichols enjoyed still alternated uncomfortably with scenes in which their star would have to howl at the moon. But there was no time to do more: Nicholson had a limited window of availability, and Wolf, with a $70 million budget that included shoots in Vermont, New York, and Los Angeles, needed to start by March in order to make a Christmas 1993 release date.
Over the next twenty years, a rush to production with rewrites done on the fly would become typical for large-scale studio movies. But it was alien to the way Nichols had always worked, and Sam O’Steen, who would not edit another of his movies after Wolf, was annoyed. He felt Nichols had been negligent by declining to storyboard the shots and by forgoing any meaningful rehearsals with his cast: “Mike was just not well prepared when he started shooting. He said, ‘I like coming on the [sound]stage and [having] it all sort of come to me.’ I think he was just being lazy.”
Nichols may have believed that he and Nicholson would generate ideas on the spot, as they had done since Carnal Knowledge. Instead, he faced a leading man who seemed surly, distracted, and unhappy to be there. Nicholson’s role was arduous; he spent long mornings in the makeup chair, and shooting days could stretch to seventeen hours. He was in the middle of a split with his girlfriend, Rebecca Broussard—they had two children under three at the time—and would often arrive in a foul temper and stay that way. “Everyone was scared to death of him,” O’Steen said. “He was in such a horrible mood, even with Nichols. Poor Michelle—she’d be waiting on the set for Jack to show up . . . She was ignored because Jack consumed so much of Mike’s time, and Mike was intimidated by Jack’s moods.”
“It was a great disappointment to Mike,” says script supervisor Mary Bailey. “Jack wasn’t the Jack that he remembered, the pal that he had been on their previous projects. Mike would talk about how great that had been a lot.”
The shoot took longer than Nichols had anticipated. The December release date gave way to March, and then to June, and an awareness that the film was in trouble pervaded the set. “We all kind of knew that this movie wasn’t up to Mike’s A-1 scratch,” Plummer says, “or indeed any of ours. But he never showed his displeasure or impatience. It was as if he had put the movie in a kind of slot, and told himself, ‘All right, I’ll work from that and shut up about the problems.’ He never looked for a second like he was struggling. We adored him for that.”
“In Wolf, I had to eat breakfast with Jack Nicholson,” says Kate Nelligan. “I was the wife he was going to cheat on, so I couldn’t be too glamorous. So I ate, normally, and Mike came over and said, ‘Kate . . . She’s a beautiful woman, eating ravenously.’ He wanted me to look ugly while I ate. A lot of directors don’t know what to do in that moment—they don’t know how to ask for that. Mike knew exactly how to ask. Ravenously.”
Nichols let the mask drop just once. “I remember going to the snack table, which drew him like a moth to a flame,” says Nelligan. “I knew he wasn’t happy, and I said, ‘How are you doing, Mike?’ He said, ‘It’s like Vietnam. I got in, and now I can’t get out.’ He said it like Eeyore, quietly. With a normal director, you’d be alarmed. With Mike, it was just hilarious.”
Soon after Wolf wrapped, the news broke that Nichols was leaving Cohn for CAA. The New York Times cited the Remains of the Day flap but also said he was “intent on earning far more money by making potential blockbusters” and “seeking to expand his reach into producing.” The story seemed to frame the still-unreleased Wolf as a final misstep rather than a stride in a new direction. Postproduction did not go smoothly; Nichols had made a picture poised uneasily between sophisticated satire and horror—one that needed a lot of work. “There was a good deal of rancor between the studio and Mike,” says Bo Welch, Wolf’s production designer. “It was the first time I worked with him, and on that one, there was hardship.”
“We did a preview in Dallas, where we got some bad laughs,” says Wick. “So we trimmed some of the wolfman stuff that was playing funny. And the score seemed to tell people that Jack’s character was having a dream, where we wanted it to be scary. We did two days of reshoots—a bunch of little things to re-steer it—and for the first time, Mike was in his element. He knew exactly what he wanted to do. But until then, everything had been makeshift. Given its ambitions, we were all disappointed.”
“We were more worried about the ending than anything,” said O’Steen. After trying several alternatives, Nichols settled on one in which Will reveals himself as a werewolf and Laura consents to join him in his new life. “I’m thinking, ‘Jesus, she’s going to go off and fuck this wolf? Come on,’” said O’Steen. “The ending was terrible. Mike never even previewed it. I bet that cost them $40 million [at the box office].”
Wolf received mixed reviews, many of which praised the performances and the workplace comedy while noting that it all fell apart by the end. Nichols was by no stretch an action director, and many of the shots in the werewolf scenes and the climactic fight sequence are presented in ultra-slow motion, an indicator of how little usable footage O’Steen had to work with. For its first half, Wolf plays as the movie Nichols wanted to make—an acid look at the savagery that lurks within even a profession as outwardly genteel as publishing, and about the need to become a predator in a predatory era. But it gives way to the movie he had to make: an effects-driven thriller shot with little flair and a tired and unfocused star.
Nichols insisted that Wolf ’s June 1994 premiere, at New York’s Ziegfeld Theater, also serve as an AIDS fundraiser. The film reached screens not long after movies like The Flintstones and City Slickers II, and most critics gave him the benefit of the doubt for at least trying to do something adult in an increasingly infantilized movie season. “Audiences may well have forgotten the joys to be had from this brand of sophisticated confection, rich and dark, laced with bitter little jokes,” wrote Anthony Lane in The New Yorker. “From The Graduate on, he has relished the spectacle of Americans at one another’s throats, but this is the first time he has introduced sharp teeth and long claws into the process, and it’s not really his field.” The film grossed $65 million, enough to place it among the year’s top twenty. It neither threatened nor improved Nichols’s place in an ever more competitive industry.
“A lot of very good work went into Wolf,” he said. “[But] it didn’t matter. The metaphor didn’t sail. We had to start pushing and pulling. And once you start doing that, it is usually too late.” Nonetheless, he was elated that the film had brought him back together with May. Soon after Wolf was completed, they performed at a New York Public Library benefit where they had planned to read passages from Nabokov. According to Bob Morris, who covered the event for The New York Times, “It had seemed like such a worthy literary idea when they had planned it. But then, during dinner, they started noticing how glum everyone looked . . . ‘Can I see you?’ Ms. May asked, taking Mr. Nichols’s arm with a charming smile about to shatter into a million pieces . . . Not long after that, Marshall Rose, the library’s chairman, was announcing, ‘There are two people whose talents have placed them in the upper stratosphere of show business.’ Then they were front and center, taking a backward plunge into the comfort of the familiar. ‘Hello?’ Mr. Nichols said, shedding 35 years as he picked up an imaginary telephone. ‘Hello, Arthur,’ Ms. May said. ‘This is your mother. Do you remember me?’”
“We’re really excited,” Nichols said. “We’re two people who increase each other when we work. So we’re nuts not to work together.”
He was being wooed for several projects, including a remake of Billy Wilder’s Sabrina that would have reunited him with Harrison Ford. He wasn’t interested. He only wanted to collaborate with May again.
Nichols had been living through a moment that felt valedictory. His peers were entering their lifetime-achievement-award years—he had just presented one to Nicholson, at the American Film Institute—and he had lost two old friends within a month of each other: Saint-Subber, his first Broadway producer, and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who was just a year older than Nichols and had died at sixty-four. He and she had remained so close that he was asked to do a reading of scripture at her private funeral mass.
It felt too soon for so many goodbyes. The idea of planning a well-choreographed last act suddenly lost any appeal it had for him. With May’s reentry into his life, talk of retirement was off the table. He wanted to work, and a new film was foremost in his mind. In the almost fifteen years since Allan Carr had fired him from The Queen of Basin Street, Nichols had not lost his enthusiasm for La Cage aux Folles. The musical had been a big hit on Broadway, and Carr wanted to turn it into a film, but he had a problem: Because he didn’t own the rights to the original movie, he would be unable to use any of the plot elements the filmmakers had invented—including the comic centerpiece in which the two gay protagonists, Albin and Georges, strip their home of its outré decor and transform it into a virtual monastery to impress their priggish in-laws-to-be.
John Calley had just taken over United Artists and was trying to revitalize the label—and UA had, it turned out, bought the American remake rights fifteen years earlier as part of its deal to distribute La Cage in the United States. Nichols had Calley quietly renew the option, and then announced it as his next film: He would direct and, for the first time, serve as sole producer, and May would write the script. In one stroke, he had thwarted Carr’s plans. “The best route to revenge,” he said, only half joking, “is to sit around and wait.”
May knew exactly how she wanted to adapt the plot: Georges—now Armand—would still run a nightclub with a locally famous drag show. Albin—now Albert—would be his partner of twenty-five years and the club’s star attraction. Mindful that almost no studio had put gay characters front and center in a mainstream comedy, she and Nichols repeatedly insisted that the movie would not be political—“It’s about family” was the agreed-upon talking point, a not uncommon approach at the time. But May made some changes to reflect the bigotry and hatred that was then making headlines. Albert and Armand’s prospective in-laws would now be an outspoken Moral Majority politician and his wife. This version of La Cage—Americanized as The Birdcage—would be the unmistakable product of a moment in which gay people were in peril, and it would clearly identify those who demonized them. The script included a brief acknowledgment of the AIDS crisis and a reference to right-wing anti-choice politics; it retained the broad farce of the original while being blunt about the stakes—and the Pat Buchanan–like villains.
“We had a twinge about this,” said Calley. “But Mike . . . said, ‘By the time the movie comes out, you won’t be able to parody these guys anymore—they’ll be parodying themselves’ . . . And he was right.”
Nichols’s first impulse was to cast his two Waiting for Godot stars—he saw Robin Williams as the hysterical, self-dramatizing Albert and Steve Martin as the restrained, forbearing Armand. But Martin felt he was wrong for the material (“He didn’t think he could do the camping that goes with [the role],” Nichols said), and Williams didn’t want to play Albert. “Robin decided, because of Mrs. Doubtfire, that he had already been in a dress, and perhaps the other part would open up a different kind of challenge for him. And that,” says Nathan Lane, “is where I came in.” Lane was, at the time, a much-loved stage actor who was appearing on Broadway in Neil Simon’s Laughter on the 23rd Floor; he was stunned when Nichols went backstage and asked him to play Albert.
“It seems crazy, but I had to turn the movie down,” Lane says. He was committed to return to Broadway in the lead in a revival of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum that Scott Rudin was producing. “After that, I’d get a call from Mike and he’d say things like ‘Well, I talked to Kevin Kline, but I just keep thinking you’re the person who should do this.’ That’s how Mike was with actors. He fell in love with you, and like all great men in love, he made you feel like you were the most important person in the world.” Finally, Nichols called Rudin, who postponed Forum for a year so that Lane could make the movie.
Despite his demurrals, every choice Nichols made on The Birdcage was, to some degree, political, and he was alert to danger zones regarding sexuality and race in a way he had not been before. He had struggled with how to portray Black servants as far back as The Little Foxes, and had used actors of color in comical housekeeper roles in Postcards from the Edge. For The Birdcage, a film that would be largely about stereotypes, he knew he would have to think differently. Originally, he planned to cast a Black actor, as the French film had done, in the role of Albert and Armand’s drag-queen maid; he was especially interested in Adrian Lester, a young British actor he had spotted in an all-male production of As You Like It.
“I came in, I did the lines, and then we started talking about what it would mean to have a Black actor play that role,” Lester says. “‘I have to be honest,’ I said. ‘It feels like the lines don’t give him enough depth for us to see past the slapstick elements, and it starts to be a bit negative.’ And Mike said, ‘Yes, I think we’re past that. It doesn’t feel right. It feels like we’re pointing at something that is not an eye-opener and not informative—it’s the opposite.’ Never in my life had someone opened up that kind of honest conversation about why I shouldn’t play a part, and still left me feeling positive and confident. I was bowled over.”
Nichols asked May to reconceive the role; she merged it with another character, Albert’s dresser, and Nichols cast Hank Azaria. “I worked up different versions,” Azaria says. “One was more understated, barely obviously gay, almost a street tough. And one was the character that ended up in the movie. Both felt real to me—I had grown up with Puerto Rican street queens who were very effeminate and flamboyant and others who weren’t. I tried both versions out for a friend who was a drag queen, asked which one he liked better, and got his seal of approval.”
Lane was the only gay actor cast in a major role in The Birdcage. He had never addressed his sexual orientation publicly; when the film was released, he would come out by telling an interviewer, “I’m forty, I’m single, and I work in musical theater. You do the math.” But in preproduction, it was a subject Nichols declined to broach, whether out of awkwardness, uncertainty, or tact. “There was a point when Robin Williams was not certain he was doing it,” Lane said. “And Mike would say, ‘What do you think of Billy Crystal as your husband?’ or ‘What do you think of Robert Redford?’ I joked, ‘Well, if you can make that happen, all my dreams will come true!’ So he knew. And then Robin came in, and he was just a sensitive, beautiful soul, generous and kind from the get-go. I think that Mike cast me in part because he knew it would probably be good to have an actual gay person in the midst of this old-fashioned French farce. But we didn’t talk about it—and I didn’t talk about it with Robin, either.”
On The Birdcage, Nichols reverted to the habits that had served him best: He threw himself into research, flying with May and Bo Welch to drag shows in Chicago, Savannah, and, at Welch’s behest, South Beach, a trip that inspired him to change the movie’s setting from New Orleans to Miami. He cast only actors he loved, including Gene Hackman, Dianne Wiest, and Christine Baranski. He treated May as a full creative partner, keeping her by his side throughout the process. And he built three weeks of rehearsal into the schedule. “He would say, ‘Don’t worry about laughs. Just tell the story,’” says Lane. “And he was very protective of Elaine—she would be at the catering table eating something and if there were crumbs on her blouse, he would gently brush them away. You could tell it was a real reunion.”
Nichols was protective of May’s script as well; improvising was fine, but the final decision on what to use would be his and May’s—and would be locked down by the end of rehearsals. “Mike said, ‘I want you guys to know exactly what you’re doing by the time we shoot,’” says Azaria. “‘Elaine’s going to take down all of your ad-libs, and we’ll decide what to use together, but once we’re shooting, we’re not going to try nineteen different versions.’”
In rehearsals, Williams let his instincts carry him anywhere; Lane eventually felt comfortable enough to join him. That process yielded one of Williams’s most inspired moments, a scene in which Armand is choreographing a number and shows Albert what he wants by doing a furiously compressed history of modern dance, from Michael Kidd to Twyla Tharp to Bob Fosse to Madonna. “Stop!” Nichols yelled, choking with laughter. “I don’t want to see this again until we’re doing it! How does it end? How do we get out of it?” It was Lane who provided Williams with the punch line that ends the scene: “But you keep it all inside.”
Nichols and his cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki, had mapped out an opening shot about the joy of giving yourself over to a well-executed visual illusion that could be seen as a thesis statement about both moviemaking and drag. The camera would glide, Miami Vice style, over water toward the Florida coast, then, as if the cameraman had simply hopped off the prow of a boat and kept going, push across a busy street full of revelers and up to, then through, the doors of the club, where a group of performers are onstage lip-syncing to the song that’s been playing (also a thesis): “We Are Family.”
The playful but elaborate shot was characteristic of the precision with which Nichols undertook The Birdcage. He planned every detail—with one glaring exception. “Bo [Welch] was really good,” says May. “But he had designed a home for Albert and Armand that was more a gay set than a family house. It was supposed to be where they had raised a kid, cooked meals, their private space. And it wasn’t. Mike said, ‘I have to change it, don’t I?’ And I said, ‘You really do, because if you don’t, then the visual story is that they had orgies here while the kid was growing up.’ Everything in a movie has to tell the story—the clothes, the performances, the sets. With this one set, we had forgotten that. Maybe because he and I knew so well what we wanted to do that we just assumed everyone did.”
The occasional tentativeness Nichols and May brought to depicting homosexuality in The Birdcage was characteristic of a moment when gay culture was about to go mainstream with remarkable speed but had not done so yet. There was a vast chasm between the independent film realm, where New Queer Cinema was thriving, and the world of studio movies and network TV, where Ellen DeGeneres was still looking for a boyfriend on her sitcom and gay characters were either marginal or nonexistent. Nichols was not uncomfortable with the material or with gay men. For forty years, they had been his friends, mentors, confidants, and colleagues, and his own possible bisexuality had long been a subject of speculation. In an era when other directors of his generation simply avoided the subject, Nichols had not—homosexuality was central to Streamers and Biloxi Blues, he had included a lesbian character in Silkwood, and at the time he made The Birdcage he was developing a biographical drama about Oscar Wilde. For him, gay characters had long been part of the canvas, whether they were a pair of bored cater-waiters in Heartburn or the man in Postcards from the Edge who adoringly tells Shirley MacLaine’s character that he does her in his act. But The Birdcage was different: Gay men were the canvas.
Nichols drew on what he knew, even if some of it was from an earlier era. At one point, Azaria was struggling with a scene in which Agador has to contend with Albert’s pre-performance meltdown. “I said, ‘Mike, I don’t know how to play this—this must happen every time, so why is Agador treating it as a disaster?’ And Mike said, ‘No, no, dear boy’—only Mike could get away with calling me that—‘your character is partly based on Judy Garland’s dresser. Judy would panic before every performance and her dresser would panic with her, and then panic more than her, so that she’d have to be the one to tell him to calm down. That was their ritual.’ I was like, ‘Brilliant!’ No other directors say things like that to you, at least in my experience.”
Nichols later called The Birdcage “one of the happiest times of my life”; he would laugh so hard while filming that his monitor had to be moved to a separate room, where a blanket was thrown over him to keep his irrepressible giggles away from the microphones. But there were a few moments when a generation gap between Nichols and May and the younger actors became apparent. “The script used the word ‘fag’ a lot. ‘Well, Alexander the Great was a fag,’ like that,” says Lane. “The day we had to shoot it, I said, ‘I’m a little uncomfortable saying fag.’ We had this long discussion about why he wanted to use the word, and ultimately I said, ‘Yeah, but as the only fag in the room, let me tell you. It’s making me uncomfortable. Can we try other things?’ He said, ‘Absolutely.’ He still used it in the movie, though. It was interesting. The word was not as offensive to them because it had been a punch line for years. They were two of the smartest, most sophisticated people in the world, but they couldn’t quite let go of it.”
Ultimately, Nichols and May assigned the most notable use of the word not to Lane but to Williams. “Yes, I wear foundation,” May has Armand say. “Yes, I live with a man. Yes, I’m a middle-aged fag. But I know who I am. It took me twenty years to get here. And I’m not gonna let some idiot senator destroy that. Fuck the senator. I don’t give a damn what he thinks.”
Throughout production, Nichols would sit before his monitor and repeat to himself quietly, “Never underestimate the audience. Never underestimate the audience.” He kept his eye out for what he called “the expensive laugh”—the joke that came at the cost of believability, consistency, or emotional honesty—and would often rethink a scene if he saw it going in that direction. “There were no rules,” Azaria says, “but when he changed something, he would always err on the side of making it small and real and human.”
Nichols did not view The Birdcage as his last chance to make a hit comedy, but he did view it as his best chance, and he went into the first preview concerned. “He’d gone through a rough period,” says Lorne Michaels, who accompanied him. “He said, ‘You go in for meetings with the studio people. They’re all much younger, and they talk to you about your famous work, which they grew up on. They all assume you’re in the Hall of Fame. They think, Why would you still want to be doing this when you’ve already achieved the thing we’re all aiming for? They don’t understand that you’re not desperate. It’s just that this is what you do—and suddenly, decades have gone by without you realizing it, and people think you’ve had your moment and you should stop.’ After the preview, which just destroyed, Mike said, ‘I’m so happy. It’s going to be a hit.’”
The Birdcage opened on March 5, 1996, with a strong endorsement from the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD), which praised the movie for going “beyond the stereotypes to see the characters’ depth and humanity” and urged people not only to buy tickets but to write letters of support to United Artists. Critics mostly saw the film as an effective, expertly handled update of dated material—Variety tallied twenty-two positive, eight mixed, and one negative review. Among gay artists and activists, The Birdcage was more divisive; in a long and angry essay titled “Why Can’t Hollywood Get Gay Life Right?” the essayist Bruce Bawer decried it as “strained, awkward, synthetic.” “I saw the movie with a gay friend,” he complained to Entertainment Weekly, “and we sat there in horror and disbelief, while the straight audience around us was just laughing it up . . . They don’t get anything outside of a narrow Hollywood idea of gay life.”
“That poor schmuck,” Nichols said. “He says this isn’t how gay people act? Let him hang out with RuPaul for a couple of days. They’re not the nice couple that works in the agency and goes shopping together in their horn-rimmed glasses and khaki suits. We’re not just talking about gays—we’re talking about drag divas, theatrical stars!”
But many gay writers rose to the film’s defense, including Larry Kramer, who called it “proof-positive evidence that if you have two male stars shown having an honest gay love affair, it would be dynamite box office.” Kramer was right; The Birdcage opened in first place, stayed there for four weeks, and grossed $125 million, more than any of Nichols’s films since The Graduate. “Who would have guessed that we live in a country where Robin Williams and Nathan Lane are a sexier box office pair than Robert Redford and Michelle Pfeiffer [in Up Close & Personal]?” wrote Frank Rich in an essay called “Beyond the Birdcage” in which he speculated that “same-sex marriage could be the next bloody battleground of the culture wars.” In a way, the picture was Nichols’s Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner—a breakthrough that was revolutionary not in its content but in the degree to which its instant mainstream acceptance signaled a shift at America’s center.
As his sixty-fifth birthday approached, Nichols could write his own ticket once again. He had known it was coming ever since he showed the film’s creative team his final cut on Martha’s Vineyard. As they celebrated at lunch, he sat quietly, surprised at his own emotions. “I couldn’t speak,” he said. “I realized I’d had no inkling of my anger at the people who had written me off. My reaction, instantaneously, was ‘Fuck you bastards! You thought I couldn’t do this anymore? Well, look at this.’”