A couple of months before The Birdcage opened, Nichols was given thirty minutes on the phone to sell himself to a stranger. The auction for the movie rights to Joe Klein’s novel Primary Colors was one of the oddest in the history of publishing. Klein, a political journalist for CBS and Newsweek, had written a barely disguised fictional account of Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign that hit stores in the middle of Clinton’s reelection bid, and, because he was still covering the presidency as a journalist, he had decided to conceal his identity. The instant bestseller dug into everything readers could want to know about candidate “Jack Stanton,” from his insatiable appetite to his troubled partnership with his intelligent, frustrated wife to his compulsive and clumsy infidelities—and the words “By Anonymous” on the cover created an additional wave of publicity. Primary Colors was a tell-all that was also a whodunit, and thus a very hot property.
Amateur sleuths were already using computer programs to compare the book’s phraseology and sentence structure to the work of journalists who had covered the Clintons, but at the time of the auction, Klein’s identity was still a secret. Nichols chased the book hard, pitching himself to direct and produce and May to write. He had met the Clintons four years earlier and liked them, but he had not let personal relationships get in the way of Heartburn or Postcards from the Edge. He decided to take a gamble. He would go up against movie studios and major producers, attempt to buy the rights with his own money, and, if he obtained them, make back his investment and then some by selling the property, with himself attached, to a studio. The bidders each had half an hour to convince a listener whose identity they still didn’t know. “I had an advantage,” Nichols said. “I knew what I wanted to do with the [book]. I said, ‘It’s about honor.’ In my view . . . it’s deep in the heart of almost any serious movie, because it’s always the issue at stake.”
Klein said Nichols won him over during the call by expressing his belief that the novel had no villains. “I’d never met him, but I felt safe,” he said. “He wouldn’t turn the satire into burlesque. He would treat the characters with respect.” He sold Nichols the rights for $1.5 million.
Guessing games about casting began right away. Stanton’s wife, Susan, was seen as a natural fit for Meryl Streep, Glenn Close, or Emma Thompson. Tom Hanks led most lists, including Nichols’s, to play Jack. Klein’s third main character was Henry Burton, the idealistic young operative who joins the campaign and whose journey toward disillusionment as he observes Stanton forms the story’s main arc. The character was Black; several news outlets, including The New York Times, suggested that the easiest course for Nichols would be to make Henry white so that someone like Michael J. Fox could play him.
Nichols had no intention of changing Henry’s race, but casting him would have to wait. While May worked on the screenplay, he would be busy with a commitment so unlikely that he surprised himself by making it. Wallace Shawn, whose writing he had long championed, had recently gathered a group of friends at Richard Avedon’s apartment for a read-through of his new play, The Designated Mourner, a knotty, challenging three-character drama, told in monologues, about cowardice and culpability under a fascist regime. Shawn and his companion, Deborah Eisenberg, gathered around a dining room table with Avedon, David Hare (who had agreed to direct the play in London), and designer Bob Crowley. Shawn had enlisted the poet Mark Strand to read the part of Howard, a dissident writer who becomes a target of the murderous government, Julianne Moore played his daughter, and Nichols read Jack, an envious academic who is the play’s central (and most compromised) character.
“When Mike read the script, it was so extraordinary,” Shawn says. “It had a kind of naturalness, spontaneity, and intimacy that you would not really expect. It seemed uncannily as if it was written to fit his vocal patterns. On top of that, he wept at the end of it.”
“The part has to be done by somebody comfortable with convoluted, long sentences, with the convoluted thought behind them and the convoluted emotional quality they contain,” says Eisenberg. “Watching Mike throw around those languid, self-justifying skeins of self-deception . . . it was like he turned himself inside out to become his own evil twin.”
“Debbie and Hare and I conferred for about two seconds before we asked Mike if he wanted to do it,” Shawn says. To our great surprise, he said, ‘How long do I have before you need a decision?’ We said, ‘Two weeks.’ He took the full two weeks and then said yes.”
Nichols agreed to star in a twenty-five-performance run of the play at the Cottesloe, a small stage at London’s National Theatre. He said up front that he would be too busy with Primary Colors to repeat the performance if the play moved to New York, and that he would probably need either an earpiece or a hidden prompter to get through the massive, text-heavy role, which required him to do most of the talking for two hours. “There was no reason under the sun for him to take this incredibly arduous job as an actor, which was something he had not done for years,” says Eisenberg, “in a play that is demanding of the audience, accusatory, assaultive, intellectual, rarefied, unbelievably painful. I thought of Mike as anything but a risk-taker. I mean, he was a risk as a human being—he was so alive to possibilities that every second of his life, in a way, was an experiment. But in his work, not.”
“I wanted to do something scary. Something that can’t do me any possible good,” said Nichols, who made his decision after Sawyer and May both urged him to take the role. “I can’t go skydiving or climb Annapurna, but I can do this.”
In April 1996, he began rehearsals in London. “Mike said that as a director, when he listened to actors, he would always think, Why can’t you make it sound more like life? and that’s what he did,” says Hare. “Because of his background in improvisation, he was trained to make everything sound spontaneous. Once I wanted him to do a line differently, and he said, ‘Well, why don’t you do it the way you want it done?’ I walked over, in what Wally describes as the longest ten seconds of his life, and did it. Mike said, ‘Oh, that’s what you want,’ and did the line exactly as I had done it. It didn’t bother him at all. He had no vanity as an actor.”
“He could have been such a diva,” says Eisenberg, “but he was unbelievably well behaved.” Shawn adds that “his theater discipline was a thousand percent. He never came late, never said, ‘I’m going to have to step out to take this call.’ And once performances began, all of London was at his feet, really.” Critics were dazzled; the Evening Standard wrote that his “meticulous performance of this vast role is a triumph of creation.” Streep flew over to see him work; so did May. “He gave one of the greatest performances I’ve ever seen,” May says. “He just went right to the audience with it, and it went to him.”
The reception delighted Nichols, who agreed to spend three days repeating the performance at Pinewood Studios, without an audience, for what he understood to be a record of the play that would be shown only on British television; when it was released theatrically in the United States, he was as furious as if his private letters had been published, and refused to participate in publicity. “The film didn’t make me happy,” he said. “The play was a very specific event between the three of us actors and the living audience . . . I played a monster who was able to charm the audience, and just as they began to realize he was a monster, he could get them to laugh one more time . . . During that process, they began to wonder if they were in any way like this monster, which was both the purpose of the play and the fun of the performance . . . If you take that away, the film isn’t a complete [record of the play]. But the play was an experience.”
When Nichols returned to New York, Primary Colors was still on the bestseller list, and in the news: Klein, after several denials, admitted he was its author, and his journalistic colleagues, with not a little schadenfreude, rebuked him for playing both sides of the fence. Nichols didn’t see what the fuss was about. “My wife had to explain it to me,” he said. “I said, ‘What’s so terrible? If you say you’re anonymous and you’re hiding, of course you would say, “No, it’s not me.” Isn’t that the point of being anonymous?’ And she said, ‘You don’t understand. It’s like if there’s a vice cop, he has to answer the question, “Are you a cop?”’”
Nichols shrugged it off. May was close to finishing a draft—“I didn’t fully know what to do with it,” she says, “but I think it had a story by the time I was done”—and his roll of the dice was about to pay off spectacularly. Primary Colors was once again the subject of a bidding war, this time with Nichols as the object; the winning buyer, Universal, agreed to pay him $8.5 million, against 12.5 percent of the gross, to direct and produce.
By June, he had a cast—or thought he did; Variety reported that the film would star Hanks, Thompson, Jack Nicholson, and John Malkovich. Of those four, only Thompson would make it to the first day of shooting. “Maybe I erased it, but I don’t think he ever talked to me about it,” says Streep. “It was always Emma—he had just seen the movie she wrote [Sense and Sensibility] and was so in love with her for the role.”
Thompson’s commitment was firm. “We had been talking about doing a very funny Elaine May script about a woman who kidnaps a politician and strands him in the middle of a field,” she says. “Then Mike said, ‘Look, can we ditch this and do Primary Colors?’ I said, ‘Sure.’ I loved the book. I thought it was so perspicacious about politics and power structures in general, never mind about the Clintons and our deep naivete about sexuality in politics and all of that.”
Hanks was cagier. In August, just days after it was reported that he was all but signed to play Stanton, he told Nichols he was out. Nichols was shocked. “He didn’t say anything like ‘Oh, okay, I understand,’” says Hanks. “He literally said, ‘Why? Why is it suddenly no longer for you?’” Nichols later said he believed that Hanks, who was coming off back-to-back Oscars for playing intensely sympathetic characters in Philadelphia and Forrest Gump, had not wanted to play a philanderer or to alienate the Clintons. Hanks says it was more complicated. He wanted to star in Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, which would shoot at the same time, and he also felt uncomfortable about the phenomenon the novel had become. “Primary Colors, at first, felt almost like this counterculture thing, a little subversive,” he says. “And it transmogrified into something mainstream. It was ‘Oh, this is the movie about Bill Clinton.’ And I’ve always felt, if you’re going to do that story, do the real thing, find out what really happened. I didn’t want to do all this work and have an asterisk on it, like ‘This is Tom Hanks’s version of this book’s version of Bill Clinton.’”
In addition, Hanks, at forty, wasn’t sure he had the gravitas to play Stanton, and didn’t necessarily want to acquire it. “I didn’t think I could pull off a viable president, or even a candidate,” he said. “I viewed myself as a kind of out-of-shape young man—but a young man. I said, ‘I’m just not hungry to do this,’ and he said, ‘Well, that’s a thing. Don’t do it if you don’t want to throw yourself into it.’ I wasn’t on some kind of shit list with him for dropping out, but he thought I was wrong.”
Hanks’s participation in the movie had been crucial to Universal; when he walked away, the studio told Nichols the deal was off. Nicholson and Malkovich moved on to other projects. For much of the rest of the year, Primary Colors was in serious peril.
Then Nichols met John Travolta. “We had lunch in his trailer,” Nichols said. “We had all his favorite things, turkey and stuffing—it was his favorite meal.” It was also Nichols’s. They were two of Hollywood’s most famous on-set gourmands—Travolta had a chef prepare special meals for him on his movies, and Nichols felt a catering table should be a groaning board of treats. They bonded quickly. “I said, ‘Have you read Primary Colors?’ And he said, ‘No, no one sent it to me,’ which I thought was the perfect movie-star answer,” Nichols said. “I did, he read it, he liked it.” With Travolta in place, Universal was back on board, but cautiously. The studio, worried about the film’s lack of overseas appeal, forced Nichols to reduce the budget from $80 million to $65 million.
By early 1997, Nichols had cast Billy Bob Thornton in the James Carville part, Kathy Bates, and Adrian Lester (who ended up beating out Cuba Gooding Jr., then hot off the success of Jerry Maguire, for the role of Henry). The movie was under a microscope before a foot of film was shot; a New York Observer story pointed to Nichols and Sawyer’s place in “the Martha’s Vineyard power crowd,” of which the Clintons had become a part, and noted that Carville, former Clinton press secretary Dee Dee Myers, and George Stephanopoulos, the reported inspiration for Lester’s character, had all turned down offers to serve as consultants. “If somebody told you that Mike Nichols was gonna be directing a film about you and an Oscar nominee was gonna play you, you’d watch,” said Carville. “It’s another thing to be pulling for it.” And Nichols had to fend off whispering campaigns from both flanks—some insisted he would use the movie to trash the Clintons, others said he would use it to placate them.
Nichols again insisted on extensive rehearsals. For Travolta, it was a new experience. “So much of filmmaking is winging it, because you don’t have the time to dig in the way Mike did,” he says. “He treated his actors like royalty. The days weren’t too long. We were rested, we knew our staging, we talked through everything we were going to do, and we were certain about every move we made.” Lester recalls rehearsing one scene in which he had to come out of a shower and change into clothes that were on a bed. “We rehearsed, and Mike said, ‘Okay, let’s do it again.’ These two prop guys stepped forward to reset my clothes. I stopped them and did it myself. Then Mike asked to do it a third time. He was just watching quietly, and when the guys stepped forward again, his hand moved and indicated, ‘Don’t. Leave Adrian alone.’ He knew I needed to do it myself, and that by doing it, I was trying to make it my own. That was his theater instinct.”
When the film started shooting in April, May was once again at his side. “Every morning, they would tell each other the story of the movie,” says Mary Bailey. “‘This is a movie about a man who wants to do this. Then he meets these people. Then there’s this setback.’ If they couldn’t remember something, that was a red flag for them—a scene that needed to be fixed or a story point that wasn’t in the right place. For them it was an exercise about seeing both the details and the big picture.”
“They were wonderful to watch,” says Thompson. “Between the two of them, there’d been so much blood under the bridge by then. Elaine is not the world’s most social creature, but I was never so happy as when we were all together.”
Nichols’s two stars took sharply different approaches. Thompson didn’t want to try an impression of the first lady. “Hillary was much less imitable at the time,” she says, “and in any case I wasn’t interested in that—to me it was not a story about the Clintons, but politics and the press. John was interested.” Travolta wore a frosted wig, adjusted his vocal pitch and body language, and eased into a gently Clintonian accent. “I was doing a literal interpretation,” he says—one that landed him and the film on the cover of Time with the words “Yep, he’s Bill.” “It felt right for the movie and for me, and Mike was very supportive.”
Travolta was, in some ways, a challenge for Nichols—a star used to having his way, who didn’t hesitate to push for it. Ann Roth wanted to put him in cheap, Men’s Wearhouse–style suits to emphasize that Stanton was running as an outsider. “There was a particular pale blue-gray suit that Clinton wore, from a guy in Fayetteville. Travolta was darling, but he didn’t want that, and I kept bitching about it. He wanted Donna Karan, and Mike gave it to him,” says Roth. “I hated, hated, hated it.” And while “May was adamant that we not ad-lib,” says Kathy Bates, “which was fine, because there was really no need to screw up her writing,” Travolta didn’t always stick to the script. When a line didn’t sit easily, he says, “I would play Mom and Dad against each other—I’d go to Elaine and say, ‘I don’t want to say this and Mike is making me,’ and she’d say, ‘Mike, don’t make him say it,’ and he’d say, ‘Oh, all right, fine.’ It worked!”
“I always feel that a really good director is a scout,” Bates says. “They know every inch of the landscape, and if you don’t know how to get there, it’s okay, because they know how to get you there.” Her role—a brash, foulmouthed, mentally unstable lesbian who becomes the movie’s tragic conscience—was a potential tour de force, and Bates credits Nichols for the strength of her performance. She had two big scenes—one in which she realizes that the Stantons are willing to resort to blackmail, and another in which, sitting in a truck, she reveals that the knowledge has shattered her.
“I knew the character was gay,” says Bates, “but I thought she was let down because the Stantons revealed themselves as greedy and vicious. I didn’t go deeper until Mike said, ‘This is personal for her. She’s gay. Their behavior is a betrayal of who she is.’ Suddenly it clicked. Usually a director will say, ‘You know, it needs to be more emotional—maybe you cry.’ He didn’t direct like that. With Mike, it was about discovering who the character was and what was important to her, and helping you to make that discovery. After I got to that place, he mimed tears coming out of his eyes. He didn’t say anything. He just looked over with his fingers on his face, and I knew I had accomplished that for him.”
In January 1998, two months before it was to open, Primary Colors was hit with two unpleasant surprises. The first was the arrival of Barry Levinson’s topical satire Wag the Dog, which had jumped into Oscar season at the end of the year and was entering wide release. The film—about an administration and a Hollywood producer who manufacture a war to divert attention from a presidential infidelity—was getting a warm response from critics and audiences; at a moment when the packaging of politics as a TV show was becoming a subject of discussion, it felt savvy and topical.
A week later, the world was introduced to Monica Lewinsky, and the Primary Colors team knew they were in the kind of trouble from which a movie might not recover. A film that suggested Americans were both hypocritical and hysterical about White House sex scandals was not going to play well while every night’s newscast led with the biggest such scandal in history. Overnight, the film went from current to dated. “This girl went down on him in the Oval Office, and just like that, it became a tame movie!” says May. “That was really all we thought—you couldn’t wait another two months?”
“We were all in L.A.,” Thompson says. “I remember Mike calling a meeting and all of us sitting down. Mike and Elaine and I were eating rice and beans out of polystyrene containers, and John had, you know, a sixty-five-course meal laid out for him, and the conversation was ‘What are we going to do? Life would appear to be imitating art at this moment, and it’s going to make selling this movie incredibly hard.’ And we were right. It did.”
Primary Colors became grist for endless rumors about recuts, frantic changes, last-minute appeasements—in Nichols’s words, “a shit magnet.” Universal stuck with its plan for a March release—“We’re staying the course, with our heads high,” insisted the studio’s chairman, Casey Silver—but The New York Times quoted a rival studio head as saying, “I would hang myself.” Nichols put on a brave face. “It’s not about Clinton, but about the ‘Clinton thing,’” he claimed. He talked about his fantasy that the Clintons would see the movie (“I would hope that they would be able to see past some of the specifics and know how much the movie . . . feels for them,” he said, while insisting, “I don’t think we’ve prettified anything”), and he pointed to positive reactions at test screenings. But shortly before the film opened, he admitted, “It’s the only time in my life I cannot imagine what will happen.”
What happened came close to the worst-case scenario. Critics were respectful, and sometimes more; Variety’s Todd McCarthy called Primary Colors “frequently funny, wonderfully performed, eerily evocative of recent history and gratifyingly blunt in its assessment of what it takes to get to the top.” But even the kinder reviews felt almost like condolence notes; the intimate look inside the life of the president that the film had teased was now available for free, and ad nauseam, on TV around the clock. The bad reviews pulled no punches. “Primary Colors is old news,” Rex Reed wrote. “Who cares what happened in 1992? We’re too busy trying to get through 1998 . . . The movie is two and a half hours long, and you can’t wait to get out of there to see what happened while you were sitting in the dark.” The film won Oscar nominations for Bates’s moving performance and May’s screenplay, but it faded fast, grossing $39 million in the United States and just $13 million in other countries.
“I liked the book, I made the movie. Them’s the breaks—I have to take my lumps,” Nichols said. “When the movie came out, I was [at] the big Time magazine party where everyone who had ever been on the cover was gathered. I remember getting my picture taken with Gorbachev and Sophia Loren—that’s the kind of party it was. At the beginning, the president and first lady were coming in and I thought, I can’t do this to them. I have to stay out of their way. I thought we had treated them with great sympathy, but of course, it’s not true—they’re accused of monstrous things. As they were passing, I turned to pretend to be talking to the person on the other side of me. And when I thought it was safe to turn back, I was face-to-face with Hillary. Her manners were perfect. She asked how I was. And I said, ‘Nervous—I have a picture opening.’ And she said, ‘Yes, well, there’s nervous and then there’s nervous.’”
There was no reason for Nichols to rush into his next movie, and he didn’t. He and May were considering an Americanized update of the 1949 dark comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets, but without any particular urgency. After years of indecision, he finally dropped All the Pretty Horses; during the Primary Colors shoot, he had talked up the project to Billy Bob Thornton and convinced him to take over as director. At one point, he read American Beauty and put himself forward to Steven Spielberg and David Geffen as a possible director, but Spielberg was already well down the road with a newcomer to movies, Sam Mendes, and although he regretted having to tell Nichols no, he was also mindful of what hiring him would do to the projected $15 million budget. Nichols immediately backed away and wished Mendes well. (“From the beginning,” producer Dan Jinks says, “we all said, ‘We want the next Mike Nichols. Who is that?’”)
For a while, Nichols was content to dabble, scheduling promising meetings with interesting people that kept him in the game but committed him to nothing. Barbra Streisand wanted to know if he would direct her farewell tour. Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman had seen a play by Patrick Marber called Closer and were thinking of buying the film rights; Nichols also liked the play, so perhaps he would bid against—or partner with—them. Anthony Minghella wanted to write and direct an adaptation of the German novel The Reader; did he want to produce?
Nichols could pass months that way, but at sixty-seven, he could not afford another long stretch of indolence and hesitation. It was too late in his career to pull another disappearing act and expect the industry to welcome his return whenever he decided he was ready, and too early to drift into a twilight of discarded projects and retrospective honors. (He had just been selected as the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s career achievement award recipient.) It was fun having his portrait painted by Eric Fischl, or driving around Martha’s Vineyard with Candice Bergen in search of the island’s best oysters, or arriving home at the Fifth Avenue apartment he and Sawyer had finally bought to find a box of desserts from Nora Ephron, who was always discovering New York’s best brownies or the perfect chocolate chip cookie. There were new restaurants to try, new plays to drag Sawyer to, new people to have dinner with afterward, whether from her world or his.
But their lifestyle was about to change. At the end of 1998, Sawyer, at ABC’s urging, agreed to step in as co-anchor of Good Morning America, a decision that would necessitate a drastically altered schedule. Time together would be harder to find. Her alarm would go off at 4 a.m. five days a week. Their late evenings out and about—in fact, evenings, period—would now be a treat reserved for weekends. (The move resulted in such a dramatic upswing in the struggling show’s fortunes that Sawyer became ABC News’ most valuable player, and what was intended to be a temporary run lasted ten years.)
Nichols knew it was time to get back to work. He dreaded a return to shooting in Los Angeles. “There’s a virus I have no protection against if I’m there,” he said at the time. “How am I perceived? You can do whatever you like—put towels at the bottom of the door, not read the trades . . . [but] if you’re vulnerable to the virus, you’ve got to stay away from its matrix.” When he finally made a decision, it was an unfortunate one; he picked the movie that would make him the most money. Calley, who had taken over Sony in 1996, brought him the script for a Garry Shandling sex comedy, an extended sketch called What Planet Are You From?, in which Shandling would play an alien sent to find an Earth woman to impregnate. Calley offered his old friend $8 million to direct. He said yes.
It was not an entirely cynical decision. Nichols was an avid fan of Shandling’s cable comedy The Larry Sanders Show, which had just ended an acclaimed six-year run. “Mike got crushes,” says Douglas Wick. “He was going through a bit of a downturn, and suddenly this script came along from someone he thought was good, and Calley said, ‘We’ll pay your full price.’” His entire career had been predicated on going with his gut; if he couldn’t trust his first instinct, he couldn’t trust anything.
His involvement instantly changed the movie’s nature for the worse. Shandling was friends with Warren Beatty and Annette Bening; he had been developing the screenplay with them in a series of readings. “Unlike many comedians, in a day-to-day setting, Garry was this lovely guy—not a tortured, unhappy person,” Bening said. “But the screenplay, we all felt, was this quirky, eccentric thing that perhaps didn’t need to be big.” With Nichols’s involvement, it went from being the kind of off-kilter indie that might have attracted someone like Spike Jonze or David O. Russell to a scaled-up studio movie. His paycheck alone would make the film costly enough to require stars; those stars would all demand that they be paid their asking prices, because their director was. What had been conceived as a $12 million movie would, by the time Nichols stepped onto the set, be budgeted at $53 million. “I said, ‘Garry, do you remember saying that if you ever were to do movies, they would be small and personal, like Albert Brooks’s? What’s happening to this movie? It’s changing!’” says Ed Solomon, one of the screenwriters. “But I don’t think he wanted it to go back to what it was supposed to be.”
Nichols’s Lincoln Center gala took place on May 3, 1999. Three thousand people attended the evening at Avery Fisher Hall, in which clips of his movies alternated with tributes from Bergen, May, Streep, Ephron, Buck Henry, Harrison Ford, Nathan Lane, Matthew Broderick, Paul Simon, and Art Garfunkel. The tone was occasionally roast-like—Bergen insisted that he was more than “the man who washes out Diane Sawyer’s underthings”—but mostly adoring. Nichols, who joked that they must have “run out of geezers” in order to pick him, wiped tears from his eyes as he got up to speak. “Where the hell was Dustin Hoffman?” he joked. “It’s like the monster not showing up at a tribute to Dr. Frankenstein . . . I have half a mind to cut him out of The Graduate and use Harrison Ford.” He told the story of his Atlantic crossing, with the two-sentences-of-English anecdote that he had, by then, polished until it gleamed; he spoke in unusually personal terms of his upbringing and his parents’ stormy marriage, and he lavished individual praise on every speaker. “All this would be hollow,” he finished, “without the person who is my life and without whom I would be—as Dustin would be without The Graduate—merely an aging Jew, my wife, and without those three people who give my existence meaning, Daisy, Max, and Jenny Nichols.”
Then he reeled off a short list of jokes about what directing films had taught him, ending with “There is absolutely no substitute for genuine lack of preparation.” As the audience rocked with laughter, he said, “Tomorrow I go to L.A. to start a new picture. I’m making it for the same reason I made the others: Movies give us a chance to live other lives, and we walk on the set every morning thinking, Anything can happen.”
The shoot was a disaster. Nichols wasn’t kidding; he had indeed underprepared. Physically, he had never been in worse shape; he had gained a great deal of weight after the failure of Primary Colors and may have been on steroids to treat what had become chronic lung inflammation. He had scheduled a week of rehearsal, which wasn’t enough; worst of all, he had no real connection to Shandling, who, it turned out, could not have been a poorer match for him. “Garry was very limited in terms of his acting,” says Solomon. “He tried so hard, he took classes, he worked to be real, but he didn’t have the technical skill. He never forgot the moment after the first shot when Mike looked at the playback and saw Garry and rolled his eyes. He saw that, and he was devastated.”
“I got to the set,” Nichols later told Cary Brokaw, who would produce his next three movies, “and I thought, Oh my God. What do I do? Who do I have to fuck to get off this movie?”
Nichols’s aversion to Shandling was so visceral that, to many of the actors and crew members, it felt personal. From his perspective, it was a doomsday scenario—a TV series had tricked him into believing that a non-actor was an actor. Years earlier, Elaine May had told him, “If an actor isn’t good by the end of the fifth day, fire him—they never get better.” But this was Shandling’s movie; there was no replacing him.
A month into the shoot, Nichols stepped onto a piece of canvas that was covering a hole in the floor of a raised soundstage. “I saw him fall right through,” says Mary Bailey. “He had to spend the rest of the shoot on crutches. After that, it never got even a little better. It only got worse.” Nichols had always been a physically active director; if he saw that a moment wasn’t working, he would jump out of his chair and walk over to the actors, sometimes demonstrating what he wanted in broad gestures, sometimes telling a story, sometimes just putting an arm around a performer’s shoulders and whispering a word of guidance. Now he was virtually immobile and had to use a “God mic”—a personal microphone connected to speakers on the set through which everyone could hear him. He didn’t even bother to temper his harsh moods. “He couldn’t walk around, so he was booming into it like the director in A Chorus Line,” says Wick, who visited him on the set. “He was shooting something with Annette Bening, and hair and makeup came in for final touch-ups, and suddenly Mike yelled, ‘Scat, dwarves!’ He was more miserable than I’d ever seen him.”
By then, he and Shandling were at each other’s throats. Shandling wasn’t shy about saying something when he thought Nichols was ruining the tone of a scene; and Nichols, who referred to him as “Shambling” to a visiting reporter, “went totally nuts” when he made a suggestion about how Bening should play her character. “Her clothes are kooky, the sets are kooky, her lines are kooky—you want her to act kooky, too?” he shouted at Shandling. “Why don’t you come in prepared and do your own work?”
“I find it hard to talk about,” says Bening, who intervened and told Nichols privately that she couldn’t stand to see him behave that way toward a colleague. “I’m sad to say that Mike just treated Garry terribly, in a way that I had never seen. He was humiliated. And it was more upsetting because Mike was a hero to us—we all knew how much he loved actors.”
“It was hysterical on the page,” says Bo Welch. “But honestly, Mike was not the right guy for that job, and Garry was not the right lead, and they were a terrible combination. It was brutal, but especially for Garry.”
“Garry was a very honest person,” says Nora Dunn, who appeared in the movie. “He was extremely insecure, and he did talk about those insecurities a lot, which is something I don’t think Mike Nichols had any time for on a set. We knew the relationship wasn’t working because at six o’clock Mike would say, ‘All right, that’s it for the day,’ and Garry’s face would go white. I just thought, Boy, he’s kind of written this off. I think we all did.”
On December 31, 1999, two months before What Planet Are You From? opened, Nichols made a list of all of his wishes for the new century. He and his wife were at the home of Rose and Bill Styron on Martha’s Vineyard. They spent Y2K eve together, ready to hunker down if all the computers broke and the lights went out. All four contributed to the list, filling it with their hopes for a better world. “We put it in some kind of container,” says Rose Styron, “and we buried it at the roots of a tree, but I can’t remember where. I called Diane and she didn’t remember, either. The trees have all blown down now. We’ve had such terrible storms, I don’t know where to look. It’s a shame.”
The fights between Nichols and Shandling were widely reported; they were too numerous and public for stories of discord not to leak. It was not until well after Nichols had completed the movie that he realized the reason for his disproportionate rage and his cruelty. In Shandling, a congenitally nervous comedian, insecure about his attractiveness to women, terrified that people were smirking at his hair, he had seen a nightmare version of his own reflection. For his entire life, he had worked to compose a surface self, an impeccably polished “Mike Nichols” capable of concealing any insecurity with an epigram, a decisive piece of direction, or a brilliantly inscrutable, wide-eyed grin whose infinite variations could mean anything from “How true” to “What a terrible idea” to “Only you and I know that we’re on the Titanic.”
Shandling had no such veneer; on the set, he had been all worry, anxiety, naked need. “Garry gave away the secret of everything Mike was afraid people might be thinking,” says Hannah Roth Sorkin, who assisted Nichols. By the time Nichols recognized how his own insecurities had contributed to their friction, it was too late. What Planet Are You From? opened in March 2000. Reviews were merely indifferent, but the public’s verdict was devastating. The film grossed just over $6 million before vanishing from theaters; it lost Sony almost $90 million. And with no immediate prospects for a project that might rehabilitate him in an increasingly unforgiving industry, Nichols suddenly found himself at what looked like the end of his run as a feature film director.