The weekend after What Planet Are You From? opened, Nichols and Sawyer hosted a dinner party for eight people, including her ABC colleagues Charles Gibson and Jeffrey Toobin and their spouses. The timing couldn’t have been worse. Canceling would have been even more embarrassing than going through with it; in either case, there was no way for anyone to pretend they hadn’t heard the verdict on the movie. “He was furious,” Toobin says, “and sort of baffled in the face of complete failure. I think people knew not to discuss it too much, but he did. He hated Shandling at that point, and he was not taking the high road or brushing it off.”
At sixty-eight, Nichols would have to remake his career once again. There was no longer anything surprising to him about the anger, the self-pity, the obsessive recapitulation of what went wrong that could engulf him in the wake of a flop—or about what followed: the listless days spent at home, with no desire for anything but solitude and cocaine, a habit with which he had long struggled. The desire for the drug had not left him; he once told a young colleague that if he knew the world was about to end, he would just lie back on his couch and freebase. “We would talk about it, as addicts do,” says Aaron Sorkin, who met him at a party in the early 2000s, soon after being arrested himself for cocaine possession, and was disarmed by how frank Nichols was about his own history. “He had read about what happened to me, and he made a point of taking me aside. It’s very hard to talk about those things with non-addicts, because to them it sounds unfathomable that you’d be out looking for drugs at four in the morning. He told me about his own problem because he wanted to reach out and lend a hand to me. I couldn’t believe that he would do that.”
What Nichols would not do, even when mired in what he ruefully called “darkness, my old friend,” was lie to himself. More than anything, he wanted to understand his own behavior, and his distress about the way he had acted during production of What Planet Are You From? sent him back into therapy. Soon after the movie’s release, he saw Bening at a party. John Lahr had written a long the profile of him for The New Yorker that included considerable detail about the problems on the set, and she had been forthright about a few of the issues. “John was completely ethical,” Bening says, “but I felt so guilty, because I had never before said anything publicly that was remotely negative. So I went up to Mike and said, ‘I’ve got to tell you, I’m really sorry,’ and he said, ‘No, no, no. You were right. I feel terrible about what I did. There was something in Garry that brought up my own fear that all I was was a hack Jewish comic.’ He was working so hard to process it, and he felt bad. It was very touching.”
Nichols had long believed that the only way to rebound from a professional disaster was with a small-scale labor of love. Twenty-five years earlier, he had rediscovered his passion for directing after a string of failures by throwing himself into Streamers. This time, he would turn to Chekhov. He went to Meryl Streep, who had not appeared onstage in decades, to see if she would be interested in playing the vain, destructive actress Irina Arkadina in a revival of The Seagull. To his surprise, she said yes. She wanted the production to run at the Delacorte, the 1,800-seat open-air theater in Central Park where the vast majority of tickets every summer were free to anyone who stood in line long enough. She and Kevin Kline were eager to work together on the play, but she wouldn’t be available until the summer of 2001, fifteen months later.
Streep had recently turned down another high-profile part. Producer Cary Brokaw had offered her the lead in the film version of Margaret Edson’s Pulitzer Prize–winning play Wit, an intimate, devastatingly sad drama about a terminally ill poetry professor, an expert in the work of John Donne, who gradually comes to terms with her mortality. Vivian Bearing was a showcase role for any actress, but Streep had received an Oscar nomination just a year earlier for playing a mother with cancer in One True Thing. “I’ve died in too many movies lately,” she said. “I just don’t want to do this.”
Wit was not planned as a theatrical release; it would be made for HBO, at the time the sole home for the kind of prestigious dramatic film that network television had largely stopped making. HBO’s reputation had risen sharply with the premiere of The Sopranos a year earlier, and its movies dominated the Emmys every fall, but HBO Films president Colin Callender was still fighting a perception among top-tier actors and directors that cable was a step down. He and Brokaw were elated when Emma Thompson agreed to star in the film and Rob Reiner agreed to direct. But Thompson, who had just had a baby daughter, wanted Wit shot in London; Reiner, whose wife was pregnant, didn’t want to leave Los Angeles.
“Emma said she’d had a great experience with Mike on Primary Colors,” Brokaw says. “And Colin and I were like, ‘Yeah, Mike Nichols—in our dreams.’ It was our good luck that he had just had a significant failure. He was not in director jail, but he was close to it, reevaluating things and licking his wounds.”
“What drew me to Wit was the question we’re all gonna face one way or the other,” Nichols said. “[Dying] is the ultimate test: Can you bring honor to it? Can you find something to be proud of yourself for? Is it possible to have some kind of courage about what’s coming?”
Edson was an elementary school teacher when she wrote the play. Before the movie rights were sold, Wit’s first producer told her, “You can either be completely involved or not at all. But you can’t be a little bit involved.” She wasn’t sure, she said, how a play that “is so much direct address, with the main character speaking to the audience, could be translated to film—and if you take that away, it’s just a sad story. So I decided to be not at all involved. I didn’t want to spend three years learning how to write a screenplay. So I said, ‘I’m just going to hand this to you.’”
Nichols was unfazed. “Emma’s a writer,” he told Brokaw, “and I can do it with her.” The screenplay that resulted, which eliminated many of Vivian’s disquisitions on Donne but otherwise preserved Edson’s structure and language, was credited to Nichols and Thompson, although “we didn’t write it in any way,” says Thompson, “and I’m sure Mike would agree with me. It was written by Margaret. What the two of us did had more to do with editing, actually. We sat down to look at what we needed to take out. We had this shared credit, but it was because of something incredibly prosaic that had to do with people’s contracts, and Margaret was too untroubled by egotism to care about it.”
Wit was the first of three consecutive adaptations of plays that Nichols would film, and he approached it curatorially, handcrafting every moment to enhance rather than conceal its inherent theatricality. He did not alter Vivian’s monologues; they would be delivered conversationally to the camera instead of to an audience. But he gave more thought to how cinematography could shape the story than he had in many years. As Vivian drifts through her memories, alternating between lucidity and reverie, he worked out a way to render her stream of consciousness in cinematic terms, with the camera panning seamlessly from her sickbed to her office, classroom, or childhood home. Sometimes she would appear in a flashback as her healthy self. Then, with one cut, she would be back in a hospital gown, her hair gone, IV tubes in her arm, but still in the same scene, interacting with someone from her past. It was a concept that required his creative team to be in sync from the start, and he worked closely with his new production designer, Stuart Wurtzel, and editor, John Bloom, to achieve it.
Wit became a kind of laboratory in which Nichols could put into practice everything he had learned about what he needed to make a production congenial and obtain a worthy result. Thompson fulfilled his first requirement—a creative partner he trusted who would be there every day. Her presence freed him to fill out the small cast idiosyncratically. He asked Harold Pinter to play Vivian’s father, and Eileen Atkins, herself a cancer survivor (years earlier, he had offered her his home as a place to recover when he learned she was ill), to play Vivian’s mentor. His other choices were all counterintuitive: Audra McDonald as a nurse, in one of her first dramatic screen roles; Christopher Lloyd as the presiding physician; and Jonathan M. Woodward, a twenty-six-year-old newcomer, as a callow resident.
The brief shoot at Pinewood Studios began in September 2000. It was the first time Nichols had directed a movie outside the United States in thirty years, and he was working with a much smaller budget than he was used to. He made only two demands—that HBO hire his longtime script supervisor Mary Bailey and assistant director Mike Haley, and that rehearsals be built into the schedule. “We had plenty of time,” says Woodward. “Mike was mapping out the shots, which were very specific, at the same time that he was mapping out the human interaction to make sure that all those dynamics were in place before we started shooting.”
Anyone on Wit who expected a grim slog through a painful play during a chilly London autumn was soon disarmed by the esprit de corps Nichols and Thompson worked to create. He would take Woodward or McDonald out to the theater at night; she would cook Saturday lunches at her home for the cast and any other American strays. “I mean, Harold was not a cheerful person,” says Woodward. “He came to the table read the first morning and announced, ‘I’ve written a poem. It’s called “Death.”’ But everyone else was. Mike and Emma took the approach that we should treat everything with joy and spirit, that you don’t play tragedy as tragedy but as comedy with fewer jokes.”
“I turned up at Pinewood,” says Atkins, “and coming towards me in one of those [golf carts] were Mike and Emma, who already had her head shaved, and they were screaming with laughter. That was the mood—that it was all going to be lovely—and that was Mike.”
“It was glorious,” says McDonald. “He became a dad to all of us, and even though it was such dark material, we had a ball. What was so unique was that you didn’t feel the direction. He did it so subtly that it felt like he was just lightly touching a ball that was already rolling down a hill. When it was great, he just said, ‘Oh, man.’ And when it wasn’t, he would say, ‘I’ll tell you what . . .’ and then he’d go into a story or he’d have a discussion with you, as if he wanted to figure out the moment with you.”
“What I remember him saying is ‘This moment is like this,’” says Woodward. “Everything was a story or a metaphor or an analogy. If I was pushing too hard, he would say, ‘Why are you trying to give a prostitute an orgasm?’ And the other thing was, he wanted everything to be surprising.” In one scene, Woodward and McDonald are catheterizing Vivian, who lies between them, unconscious. “In rehearsal, it had been very moving,” says Brokaw. “But when Mike blocked it and filmed it, he said, ‘This is completely flat. It’s not working; it’s dead on its feet. Everybody take a break, we’re going to regroup.’ A few minutes later he said, ‘I know what I want to try.’ He called in Audra and Jonathan and said, ‘All the lines are the same, the staging is the same, but play it as if you’re looking at each other—really looking—for the first time ever.’”
Nichols then took Woodward aside and told him, “Hospitals are the sexiest places in the world. People are desperate to do it, because otherwise it’s horrible all the time. Sex is how they console themselves.” He sent a runner to his hotel to fetch a bottle of his cologne, then pulled Woodward into a corner and told him to dab it on without letting McDonald know. “Suddenly there was an extra element for us to have fun with,” says Woodward. “That was his style.”
One morning, as they were driving to the studio, Nichols asked Brokaw what else he was working on. Brokaw said he had been trying to get a film version of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America off the ground for the past seven years. Nichols had seen the first part of the play, Millennium Approaches, on Broadway in 1993 but had missed part two, Perestroika. “I’d really like to read it,” he said.
“I got my office to send me an autographed bound copy of the play,” Brokaw says, “and I gave it to Mike as we went to the set on a Friday. Diane was supposed to fly to London for a long weekend with Mike—Monday was a bank holiday—so I wasn’t expecting a fast reaction. His attitude was more ‘I’ll read it when I can.’ The next time I saw him was Tuesday—it had been a typical rainy London weekend, and he had a grin on his face. ‘Diane got sick and didn’t come,’ he said. ‘I had nothing to do all weekend but read. I love it!’”
Nichols was not ready to commit himself. He had never met Kushner, and he was no longer interested in working on any film without a writer he liked at hand. He was also trying to keep his head completely in the work he was doing. Throughout production, he and Thompson checked in with each other constantly, almost subliminally. “We’d do a take, then one of us would lift an eyebrow or make a little move with their mouth, and we’d do it again, or we’d nod and move on,” says Thompson. “It was very instinctive. We talked a lot, but this other thing was ineffable. His love of exploration is what I remember. He never got tired of the text or of the actors. The myriad ways in which a human being can respond at any moment fascinated him endlessly.”
When production ended, “Mike made a big emotional speech, as he always did, about how this was the best crew he had ever worked with,” says Thompson, “and then he thanked everyone—absolutely everyone—except me. When I pointed that out, which of course I did, he grabbed me and said, ‘Oh my God, you know why? Because you are blood of my blood, and bone of my bone.’ I understood that completely. We had worked so closely that we didn’t separate at all.”
For once, there had been no mitigating circumstances; Nichols had made exactly the movie he wanted to make—a poem about death. To him, Wit had felt not like a demotion, but a reclamation of what he cared most about. “In the end, this awful, tragic story made us all very happy to work on [it],” he said. “I loved having something small that you can concentrate on and get as right as you can. It’s not a giant, sprawling thing.”
Angels in America was a giant, sprawling thing, one that Kushner had all but decided could never become a movie by the time he walked into Trattoria Dell’Arte, a restaurant in Midtown Manhattan that was one of Nichols’s favorites, for an introductory lunch in late October. There had been interest in a two-part movie version of the seven-hour, eight-actor play ever since its Broadway run. Kushner had written a pair of Nashville-like scripts for Robert Altman that departed from the stage version radically; at one point, Altman started to think about a cast that might include Jodie Foster, Robert Downey Jr., and Al Pacino as Roy Cohn. But the challenges of mounting two very long movies about AIDS, gay men, Mormons, Roy Cohn, the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg, and an angel in 1980s Manhattan were more than any studio was interested in. New Line, where Altman had hoped to make the film, said no to a $25 million budget, and no again when Brokaw reduced it to $20 million; in 1995, HBO Films said even $12 million was too rich. After Altman drifted away, other directors, from P. J. Hogan (My Best Friend’s Wedding) to Neil LaBute, expressed interest, but nothing came of it. “Once in a while, Cary and I would have lunch,” says Kushner, “and he’d have index cards in the breast pocket of his jacket with names of directors on them. But I had pretty much given up.”
Going into the lunch, “my main question,” says Kushner, “was would we be politically compatible? Was he going to find me this irritating doctrinaire lefty, and was I going to think he was this entertainer who really didn’t want to do something political?” They talked for three hours—about Kushner’s childhood and Nichols’s ancestry, food and Brecht, movies and theater. “There were a couple of things that made me feel I was absolutely going to let him do this, which I knew I was by the end of the meal,” says Kushner. “One was, I talked to him about how Altman and I had tried to reinvent the play. Bob had said, ‘The play is written like a screenplay, so it’s extraordinary onstage because it has cinematic form, but if you make a movie of it, then it’s just a screenplay.’ I had thought that was a great insight, but Mike was skeptical. He said, ‘I don’t know that that’s true. I want to do the play, and what I love about it is the relationships, who those people are and what they want and need from each other.’”
Nichols eventually combed out some of the more hallucinatory scenes that had been written for Altman—one in which the stricken Prior Walter, on his way to heaven, passes through an African AIDS ward, and another in which Cohn, delirious and on his way to the hospital, briefly imagines himself in a police van with the handcuffed Ethel Rosenberg. But at that first meeting, Kushner was most struck by his willingness to depart from strict naturalism; Nichols told him he wanted to keep the play’s doubling. (Angels is staged with actors playing multiple roles: The same actress plays Ethel, the acerbic Utah Mormon Hannah Pitt, and an ancient rabbi.) “He said, sort of as a joke, ‘I want to see Meryl play all those parts,’” says Kushner. “But he was the first person to suggest that the theatricality of it—even the artificiality—could be part of the fun rather than something to overcome.”
Angels was not going to happen quickly. Even if HBO Films, which was now under new leadership, could be reapproached, a fresh budget would have to be drawn up and a new script would need to be written from scratch, with both plays divided into three hourlong installments that would allow the network to air the resulting miniseries any way it wanted—in two intermissionless blasts, hourlong episodes over six consecutive nights, or an hour a week every Sunday.
But HBO wanted to keep Nichols in the family; late in 2000, David Chase even gave him a role in what turned out to be a pivotal episode of The Sopranos, as the psychiatrist who warns Carmela Soprano that she has morally compromised herself, perhaps irretrievably, in staying married to her husband and tells her to “take only the children—what’s left of them—and go.” “Yes, I was Mrs. Soprano’s shrink for half a week when I fired myself,” he said. “I said, ‘You need another Jew—I’m the wrong Jew for this particular shrink.’” (He was right; Chase replaced him with an actor named Sully Boyar whose Old Testament severity gave the series one of its most memorable scenes.) “David Chase and I became friends through that self-firing,” Nichols said. “That should be the title of my biography—‘The Wrong Jew.’”
The relationship between Nichols and HBO was cemented by the network’s handling of Wit, which it treated like a theatrical feature, sending it to the Berlin International Film Festival in February and throwing a premiere at an East Side movie theater before it aired in March. Edson—who didn’t sit down for lunch with Nichols and Thompson until that day and saw the film for the first time with its premiere-night audience—said she thought Nichols’s work was “beautiful” and was impressed by how much it “challenged the idea I had always had that the direct address was a problem rather than something that could work in a movie.” Critics were unanimously complimentary; in New York, John Leonard wrote that the movie “deserves not only an Emmy but our baffled gratitude,” and Variety praised its “subtle yet crucial shifts from theatrical to film conventions” and “Nichols’s measured, top-of-his-game direction . . . [His] legendary way with actors is in evidence again.” To many critics, Wit represented not just a return to form, but a return to his roots, in particular the shrewdly intuitive handling of stage material with which he had begun his film career.
A recent success almost always erases the stain of a less recent failure, and it would not have been difficult for Nichols to leverage the acclaim for Wit into a return to features. He wasn’t interested; he was too happy about the fact that “there was no opening weekend to worry about, nothing else except the piece itself.” Wit could have served as an elegant curtain call, but retirement held no interest for him. He wanted to work, and that meant rooting himself in New York and, for the first time in a decade, going back to theater.
Streep’s participation alone would have made The Seagull one of the year’s defining New York theater evenings, but she and Nichols had also gotten commitments from, among others, Kline, Christopher Walken, John Goodman, and Natalie Portman, whose role in the then-ongoing second Star Wars trilogy turned the play’s five-week Central Park run into an event that saw teenagers camping out for tickets and required the hiring of additional security staff. (Nichols was distantly amused by the hubbub around Star Wars, which to him was truly a galaxy far, far away; he had cast Portman based on her work on Broadway in The Diary of Anne Frank.) Months earlier, he had done a reading with Cynthia Nixon as Masha and Wes Bentley as Arkadina’s son, Konstantin (Kostya). “But Cynthia was doing Sex and the City, so she wasn’t available, and Wes Bentley was not a good fit,” says the show’s casting director, Rosemarie Tichler. The part of Masha went to Allison Janney and then, when she had to drop out, to Marcia Gay Harden. For Kostya, Nichols took his most daring leap, casting Philip Seymour Hoffman, who had impressed him in a Broadway revival of Sam Shepard’s True West. The character was generally played as a darkly romantic, dramatically self-tormenting artist, but Nichols had seen the British actor Simon Russell Beale play Kostya as a depressed shlub and found it revelatory. “Mike had the best casting sense of any director I ever worked with,” says Tichler. “He wanted a neurotic, frightened guy, someone uncomfortable in his own skin, to play that part, and he thought Philip had the soul of the role.”
Nichols had not been in a rehearsal room for a long time when he assembled his cast to begin work. The production of The Seagull was both down-to-earth—all the actors would rehearse at the Public Theater, be paid $646 a week, and share dressing rooms in the cramped underground tunnels of the Delacorte—and impossibly elite, with every night’s audience composed of those free enough to spend a summer day waiting for a seat and those connected enough to obtain one by other means. His return to theater marked the beginning of what Matthew Broderick called “the grand-old-gentleman phase of his career,” a mode of warm benignity and discursiveness that delighted some actors and frustrated others. Those who had not worked with him before—and even some who had—were surprised by his initial reticence. “The first week he barely said anything,” Kline says. “He loved actors—he was thespiphilic, even though there’s no such word. But I said to Meryl, ‘Is he always like this when he directs? He says so little.’ And she said, ‘No, it’s odd.’”
“In fact, I was one of those people backstage who was kind of whining, ‘Well, when is he going to start directing it?’” says Streep. “He was really willing to trust his actors and to let them find their way.” Nichols didn’t walk into the production with an argument he wanted to make about what The Seagull meant or how it should be played; as days passed, it became clear that his plan was to have the production be the sum of its performances rather than the realization of a vision. “He would say that casting is destiny, casting is everything,” Kline says. “So in the room, he would let the actors follow their impulses, and then, rather than direct in any dictatorial sense, he would sort of edit.”
Nichols wanted the scenes to be both naturalistic and theatrical, sad and funny—“he would always say that the problem with New York theater was that everybody forgot it needed to be fun, and the audience was filled with couples who would rather be anywhere except with each other at home,” says Portman. Most of all, he expected his actors to “tell the story”—an instruction that became a mantra. He wanted a relaxed ensemble atmosphere that would allow everyone to ease into the casual lassitude that opens the play. His troupe, he felt, should be a family—he even gave Streep’s son, Henry, a small role. (“He was wildly in love with Natalie,” Streep says. “Who wasn’t?”)
“I remember all of us sitting around the table,” says director Trip Cullman, who was then assisting him, “and Mike anecdotalizing for hours on end. I was thinking, When are we going to work? It took me a while to realize that he was creating trust. It was such an enormous lesson—that you don’t have to start controlling everything right away.” (When Nichols felt lost, he would turn to Cullman, who had had Konstantin Stanislavski’s directorial notes for the play’s original Moscow Art Theatre production translated, and whisper, “What did he do?”)
To his actors, Nichols presented himself as a man who had, after a lifetime of trying, vanquished his demons. His drug use was in the past; the cigarette habit that even Sawyer could not get him to break was his darkest remaining vice. He told them of the “no assholes” rule he had insisted on since working with Walter Matthau and George C. Scott, but, says Portman, “he added that there were many times when he didn’t figure out he was the asshole until it was too late.” One night, during a round of secret-sharing over Russian vodka, he startled his cast by saying, “Someone at this table had a cocaine problem that almost killed him.”
“I was like, ‘Chris Walken,’” says Portman. “And he said, ‘No.’ I kept guessing, because there was no shortage of suspects, until I think I had guessed literally everyone, and I said, ‘Meryl?’ And Mike said, ‘No. Me.’”
“He became, at that point, so supportive and appreciative,” says his friend Jack O’Brien. “He told me, ‘I was a terrible person for a long time.’ I don’t think he was, but it was clear that the drug period was bad and that he felt he had been mean to people. I mean, there was a lot of broken crockery behind him.”
Not every actor on The Seagull received the same degree of affection or attention. Performers like Stephen Spinella, Marcia Gay Harden, and Debra Monk, who had signed on hoping to experience his vaunted specificity about performance, were left to fend for themselves, without the performance notes and adjustments that many actors crave; some of them grew frustrated. (“It’s not you,” Harden was told. “Mike just doesn’t like characters who are losers.”) He focused almost exclusively on four actors. He was always available for Streep and Kline, although he knew they would find their own way. (“I like the reins off, just being allowed to roam,” says Streep, “and Kevin does as well, so that was heaven.”) He worked closely with Hoffman, whose psychological and emotional commitment was exceptionally intense; he arrived armed with grave, thoughtful questions for Nichols every day. And he took great care with Portman, the least experienced principal cast member, who was playing Nina before returning to Harvard in the fall. The role of a beautiful young actress who must be shallow and vapidly insensitive in The Seagull’s first half and moving and mature in its second can present an insurmountable challenge. “It’s the Juliet problem,” says Tichler. “If you’re young enough to be cast as Nina, you’re probably too young to play her.”
“I was nineteen,” says Portman, “and I hadn’t done anything I had needed to research except for Anne Frank. I’d watch Phil write down question after question in his notebook, and Meryl would make up songs to sing and put them in her pocket just in case her character suddenly wanted to burst into song.” She feared she was out of her depth and turned to Nichols, whom she found to be not only a sensitive director but also “the only older man who mentored me without there ever being a creepy element in it.” It was a need that Nichols would fill for many actresses—not just Portman, but Emma Thompson, Julia Roberts, Mary-Louise Parker, and Whoopi Goldberg. With men, “there would be a period of light shining on you,” says Matthew Broderick, “and then it would shine on someone else, not because it was fake but because there were always new, talented people to meet.” But once Nichols loved an actress, his devotion was constant; he would see them through breakups and health crises, legal problems and career mishaps, pivotal decisions and disappointments, serving as everything from kindly uncle to levelheaded adviser to sympathetic shoulder to reliable source for the best lawyer, doctor, or psychiatrist. “I think he was a genuine feminist,” says Portman. “There was nothing, nothing, nothing there except him seeing you as a creative, interesting, talented human. It is the rarest, finest quality, and not many directors of his generation had it.”
Nichols’s jovial, energetic production of The Seagull opened on August 12, 2001, after a few weeks of previews. Many critics were moved by the work he had done. “For three brief, captivating, unforgettable hours,” Linda Winer wrote in Newsday, “it is possible to see what an American national theater might have been if Hollywood and New York were in the same place.” But what Winer called “an exquisitely integrated ensemble of star turns” struck other critics as spotty and uneven, although there was a great deal of praise for the anguished intensity of Streep’s and Hoffman’s scenes. “It was a real mishmash of acting styles,” says Kline. “You had Philip Seymour Hoffman, who was doing something that I thought at the time was very middle-American, but fine and unexpected. And Meryl and I were doing the mid-Atlantic, Juilliard-Yale-training version of Chekhov, where you can’t sound like you have any accent. And Chris was doing Chris, which was inimitable and riveting. But I remember reviews saying it was all over the place.”
Ticket demand was so overwhelming that discussions began about an eight-week transfer to Broadway, but the schedules of various actors would make it impossible. When it became clear that the show would not have a life after its scheduled close at the end of August, Kline suggested that they wrap up with a free come-one, come-all screening on Central Park’s Great Lawn. “I would leave the theater and see people waiting with sleeping bags and tents for the next day’s tickets. It was insane,” Kline says. “I said, ‘Why don’t we get ten cameras, film a performance, and put up a big screen and show it?’ And Mike said, ‘No, the whole point of Chekhov is that you have to be able to see everything, every character, in one picture. You can’t do a close-up of this thing or that thing. His plays are one big master shot.’”
Nichols did consent to have the production filmed for the theater archive at the Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, where he had started to pay regular visits, watching a tape of George C. Wolfe’s Broadway production of Angels in America over and over to see how it had worked. He would spend the next two years working on the miniseries. “You have to prepare like a maniac,” he told Cullman. “Research and research and research. Know everything there is to know. And then, on that first day, be willing to throw it all away.”