1. Gavin Smith, “Of Metaphors and Purpose,” Film Comment, May/June 1999, 21.
2. Douglas Kennedy, “From New York to LA,” The Listener, 16 March 1989, 36.
3. Nichols did, however, direct one film during this hiatus, a concert film of Gilda Radner’s comic stage show, called Gilda Live (1980).
4. Sean Mitchell, “The One They Ask for By Name!” Empire, February 1991, 67.
5. Gavin Smith, “Without Cutaways,” Film Comment, May 1991, 32.
6. John Lahr, Show and Tell, 283.
7. Joan Juliet Buck, “Live Mike,” Vanity Fair, June 1994, 81.
8. David Thomson, The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, 5th ed., 705.
9. Lee Hill, “Mike Nichols and the Business of Living,” Senses of Cinema, July 2003.
10. Smith, “Without Cutaways,” 27.
11. Thomson, 127.
12. A. O. Scott, “Who’s Returning to Virginia Woolf?” New York Times, 28 November 2004.
13. Smith, “Of Metaphors and Purpose,” 21.
14. Joseph Gelmis, The Film Director as Superstar, 359.
15. Caryn James, “Death, Mighty Thou Art; So Too, a Compassionate Heart,” New York Times, 23 March 2001.
16. Buck, 70.
17. Mel Gussow, “Mike Nichols: Director as Star,” Newsweek, 14 November 1966, 98.
18. Smith, “Of Metaphors and Purpose,” 26.
19. Timothy Bewes, Reification: Or, The Anxiety of Late Capitalism, 252.
20. Bewes, 253.
21. Bewes, 270.
22. Bewes, 255.
23. Bewes, 255.
24. Smith, “Of Metaphors and Purpose,” 26.
25. John Lindsay Brown, “Pictures of Innocence,” Sight and Sound, Spring 1972, 102.
26. Peter Applebome, “Always Asking, What Is This Really About?” New York Times, 25 April 1999.
27. Smith, “Without Cutaways,” 36.
28. Benjamin’s “future” is here extrapolated from the larger context of the 1963 source novel, by Charles Webb.
29. “Some Are More Yossarian Than Others,” Time, 15 June 1970, 68.
30. Leslie Aldridge, “Who’s Afraid of the Undergraduate?” New York Times, 18 February 1968.
31. Bewes, 270.
32. Scott.
33. Lahr, 253.
34. Scott.
35. Interviewed on Charlie Rose, April 28, 1998, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
36. Caryn James, “Death, Mighty Thou Art; So Too, a Compassionate Heart,” New York Times, 23 March 2001.
37. Brad Goldfarb and Patrick Giles, “The Angels Have Landed,” Interview, December 2003/January 2004, 171.
38. Tony Kushner, “The Art of Theater No. 16,” The Paris Review, Summer 2012, 117–118.
39. James Fisher, Understanding Tony Kushner, 55.
40. Goldfarb and Giles, 172.
41. Goldfarb and Giles, 171.
42. Lahr, 279.
43. Mel Gussow, Edward Albee: A Singular Journey, 239.
44. Andrew Sarris, The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929–1968, 218.
45. A. H. Weiler, “Nichols Meets Jules Feiffer,” New York Times, 26 October 1969.
46. Howard Taubman, “In Pursuit of Laughter,” New York Times, 8 April 1968.
47. Barbara Goldsmith, “Grass, Women and Sex: An Interview with Mike Nichols,” Harper’s Bazaar, November 1970, 143.
48. See especially Chapter 2, “Post-Graduate,” for a review of the critical literature reflecting the film’s problematic reception.
49. Nora Ephron, Wallflower at the Orgy, 219.
50. Smith, “Without Cutaways,” 31.
51. Hill.
52. Richard T. Jameson, “Mike Nichols,” Film Comment, May/June 1999, 10.
53. Jameson, 10.
54. Thomson, 705.
55. Gerald Nachman, Seriously Funny: The Rebel Comedians of the 1950s and 1960s, 353.
56. Hill.
1. Sam Kashner, “Who’s Afraid of Nichols & May?” Vanity Fair, January 2013, 102.
2. Robert would also distinguish himself in later life, following a path closer to their father’s, as a doctor at the Mayo Clinic.
3. Henry Louis Gates, Faces of America, PBS DVD, 2010.
4. John Lahr, Show and Tell, 260.
5. Peter Applebome, “Always Asking, What Is This Really About?” New York Times, 25 April 1999.
6. A. O. Scott, “Who’s Returning to Virginia Woolf?” New York Times, 28 November 2004.
7. Gates.
8. Mike Nichols, “Playboy Interview,” June 1966, 73.
9. Nichols, 73.
10. Lahr, 283.
11. Nichols, 73.
12. Lahr, 283.
13. Lahr, 261.
14. Kashner, 99.
15. Robert Rice, “A Tilted Insight,” The New Yorker, 15 April 1961, 60.
16. Gerald Nachman, Seriously Funny: The Rebel Comedians of the 1950s and 1960s, 327.
17. Nachman, 327.
18. Jeffrey Sweet, Something Wonderful Right Away: An Oral History of The Second City & The Compass Players, 85.
19. Nachman, 338.
20. Sweet, 77.
21. Sweet, 75.
22. Sweet, 78.
23. Lahr, 268.
24. Nachman, 341.
25. Sweet, 78.
26. Lahr, 271.
27. Lahr, 273.
28. Nachman, 342.
29. Nachman, 342.
30. Adam Gopnik, “Standup Guys,” The New Yorker, 12 May 2003, 108.
31. Nachman, 333.
32. Kashner, 102.
33. Leslie Aldridge, “Who’s Afraid of the Undergraduate?” New York Times, 18 February 1968.
34. Rice, 68, 70.
35. Gavin Smith, “Without Cutaways,” Film Comment, May 1991, 29.
36. Gavin Smith, “Of Metaphors and Purpose,” Film Comment, May/June 1999, 21.
37. Sweet, 80.
38. Nachman, 350.
39. Nichols’ acting talent has been his most neglected gift during his professional life. Peter Rainer writes that Nichols’ rare appearance, as Jack, in The Designated Mourner (David Hare, 1997), is “one of the most extraordinary monologues I’ve ever seen anywhere. […] On the basis of that performance alone, Nichols stands as one of our finest actors” (“Sitcoms,” New York, 13 March 2000, 87).
40. However, Nichols and May remained friends and unofficial colleagues throughout Nichols’ working life: “I never made a movie without spending a couple of days listening to her, or having her talk to me and the writer,” Nichols says in his foreword to May’s published screenplay of The Birdcage. “The best scene in Heartburn came from Elaine asking Nora Ephron questions about her father. In the scene with her father in which he says to her, ‘you want fidelity, marry a swan,’ that all came from Elaine’s questioning of Nora about her real father. On Wolf, Elaine […] did a fantastic rewrite job. But she very rarely takes credit on movies, and I’m sort of proud she took a credit on The Birdcage” (xv).
41. Nachman, 351.
42. Lahr, 274.
43. Smith, “Of Metaphors and Purpose,” 16.
44. Lahr, 251.
45. Lahr, 277.
46. Lahr, 277.
47. Lahr, 282.
48. Lahr, 285.
49. Lahr, 282.
1. Mel Gussow, Edward Albee: A Singular Journey, 239.
2. Commentary by Nichols and Steven Soderbergh on the Warner Bros. Two-Disc Special Edition DVD, 2006.
3. Gussow, 241.
4. Gussow, 241.
5. Commentary by Nichols and Soderbergh, DVD.
6. Commentary by Nichols and Soderbergh, DVD.
7. Gussow, 236.
8. Commentary by Nichols and Soderbergh, DVD.
9. Commentary by Nichols and Soderbergh, DVD.
10. Harry M. Benshoff, “Movies and Camp,” in American Cinema of the 1960s: Themes and Variations, ed. Barry Keith Grant, 161.
11. Gussow, 237.
12. Benshoff, 162.
13. Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger, Furious Love: Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, and the Marriage of the Century, 144.
14. In her review for The New Yorker, Edith Oliver observes that “the most important change of all in the move from stage to screen is that Martha’s play has become George’s movie.” This resonates with the decisions George makes for the two of them at the climax of the evening’s games.
15. Commentary by Nichols and Soderbergh, DVD.
16. Bosley Crowther, “Who’s Afraid of Audacity?” New York Times, 10 July 1966.
17. Kashner and Schoenberger, 148.
18. Commentary by Nichols and Soderbergh, DVD.
19. Commentary by Nichols and Soderbergh, DVD.
20. Timothy Bewes, Reification: Or, The Anxiety of Late Capitalism, 255.
1. Mark Harris, Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood, 418.
2. Qtd. in Peter Biskind, “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” Premiere, March 1994, 60.
3. Bosley Crowther, retiring from his post as film critic at the New York Times at the end of 1967, was a prominent early supporter, comparing Nichols to Preston Sturges; his final article for the Times was a second, longer rave for the film.
4. Harris, 394–395.
5. Gavin Smith, “Of Metaphors and Purpose,” Film Comment, May/June 1999, 18.
6. Richard T. Jameson, “Mike Nichols,” Film Comment, May/June 1999, 10.
7. Richard Corliss, Talking Pictures: Screenwriters in the American Cinema, 362.
8. Lyndon Johnson, “The Great Society,” in The Times Were a Changin’: The Sixties Reader, ed. Irwin Unger and Debi Unger, 40.
9. Andrew Sarris, The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929–1968, 218.
10. John Lahr, Show and Tell, 280.
11. Stephen Farber and Estelle Changas, “Review: The Graduate,” Film Quarterly, Spring 1968, 39.
12. Rob Feld, “Trouble in Mind,” DGA Quarterly, Summer 2010, 22.
13. Joseph Gelmis, The Film Director as Superstar, 370.
14. Peter Bart, “Mike Nichols, Moviemaniac,” New York Times, 1 January 1967.
15. Lee Hill, “Mike Nichols and the Business of Living,” Senses of Cinema, July 2003.
16. Søren Birkvad, “Hollywood Sin, Scandinavian Virtue: The 1967 Revolt of I Am Curious and The Graduate,” Film International 9.2 (Issue 50), 2011, 50.
17. Leslie Aldridge, “Who’s Afraid of the Undergraduate?” New York Times, 18 February 1968.
18. Feld, 22.
19. Murray Pomerance, “1967: Movies and the Specter of Rebellion,” in American Cinema of the 1960s: Themes and Variations, ed. Barry Keith Grant, 191.
20. Smith, 26.
21. The film I’ve just described here is exceptionally rare as a narrative ambition, in or beyond Hollywood.
22. Roger Ebert, “The Graduate,” Chicago Sun-Times, 26 December 1967.
23. Feld, 23.
24. Birkvad, 52.
25. Gelmis, 375.
26. Farber and Changas, 39.
27. Smith, 24.
28. Birkvad, 51.
29. Pomerance, 192.
30. Paul Monaco, History of the American Cinema: The Sixties, 1960–1969, 183.
31. Jacob Brackman, “The Graduate,” The New Yorker, 27 July 1968, 60.
32. Dan Georgakas, “From Words to Images: An Interview with Buck Henry,” Cineaste, Winter 2001, 5.
33. Aldridge.
34. John Lindsay Brown, “Pictures of Innocence,” Sight and Sound, Spring 1972, 102.
35. Pomerance, 192.
36. Georgakas, 5.
37. Paul Monaco quotes a letter written to the Saturday Review, 27 July 1968, by Sandra A. Lonsfoote of Niskawaka, Indiana: “[The Graduate] speaks to us, a generation of young people who refuse to accept the plastics, extramarital sex, and booze given to us by our ‘elders.’ We, as Benjamin, want more than what many of our critics suspect: we want truth, with all its crudeness, shock, and beauty” (184).
1. Mel Gussow, Edward Albee: A Singular Journey, 237.
2. Dan Georgakas, “From Words to Images: An Interview with Buck Henry,” Cineaste, Winter 2001, 5.
3. Chuck Thegze, “I See Everything Twice: An Examination of Catch-22,” Film Quarterly, Autumn 1970, 8.
4. Stephen Farber, “Catch-22,” Sight and Sound, Autumn 1970, 219.
5. Gavin Smith, “Of Metaphors and Purpose,” Film Comment, May/June 1999, 26.
6. “Some Are More Yossarian Than Others,” Time, 15 June 1970, 67.
7. Joseph Heller, Catch As Catch Can, 308.
8. Commentary by Nichols and Steven Soderbergh on the Paramount DVD, 2006.
9. Lee Hill, “Mike Nichols and the Business of Living,” Senses of Cinema, July 2003.
10. Commentary by Nichols and Soderbergh, DVD.
11. Commentary by Nichols and Soderbergh, DVD.
12. Georgakas, 6.
13. Hill.
14. “Some Are More Yossarian Than Others,” 74.
15. Thegze, 12.
16. Tracy Daugherty reports in Just One Catch: A Biography of Joseph Heller that a total of 18 vintage B-25s, half of Nichols’ original demand of his properties department, received loving (and expensive) refurbishment (309), and that one of the planes has taken up permanent residency at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum (314).
17. In The Graduate’s “drifting” sequence, Benjamin Braddock’s associative mind conflates various kinds of activity: floating in the pool on his raft, floating through his affair atop Mrs. Robinson, and floating through his life mutely watching television and staring at the television; cf. John Lindsay Brown, “Pictures of Innocence,” Sight and Sound, Spring 1972, 102.
18. Nora Ephron, Wallflower at the Orgy, 209.
19. Ian Freer, “Nicholsodeon,” Empire, November 1998, 88.
20. Gavin Smith, “Without Cutaways,” Film Comment, May 1991, 29.
21. Farber, 218.
22. Thegze, 13.
23. Thegze, 15.
24. Commentary by Nichols and Soderbergh, DVD.
25. Commentary by Nichols and Soderbergh, DVD.
26. Commentary by Nichols and Soderbergh, DVD.
27. Farber, 219.
28. Like, for instance, David Lynch presenting, in a “realistic” context during the coda of Blue Velvet (1986), shots of a robin on a branch just beyond the kitchen window, in which the robin is clearly animatronic, its movements unconvincingly automated and wooden. The falseness of the robin ironizes the “happy ending” the film has attached to a vision of horror beneath the surface of an idyllic small town with its white picket fences, rose gardens, and “robins.” In addition to its grounding in the Expressionist extremes of noir and European surrealism, Lynch’s film is yet another narrative inspired by the vivid suburban palette of The Graduate.
29. Heller, Catch-22, 440.
30. Heller, Catch As Catch Can, 309.
31. Commentary by Nichols and Soderbergh, DVD.
32. Heller, Catch As Catch Can, 315.
33. Heller, Catch-22, 435.
34. The chaplain’s reply has an added subtextual poignancy because the part is hauntingly inhabited by Anthony Perkins, who wrestled with his own socially proscribed demons as a closeted homosexual in Hollywood’s image factory.
35. Thegze, 11.
36. Heller, 453.
37. Thegze, 12.
38. Ephron, 188.
39. Smith, “Of Metaphors and Purpose,” 21.
1. Commentary by Nichols and Steven Soderbergh on the Paramount DVD release of Catch-22, 2006.
2. Harry M. Benshoff, “Movies and Camp,” in American Cinema of the 1960s: Themes and Variations, ed. Barry Keith Grant, 164; and David A. Cook, Lost Illusions: American Cinema in the Shadow of Watergate and Vietnam, 1970–1979, 99.
3. Peter Biskind, “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” Premiere, March 1994, 61.
4. Patrick Marber, Closer, 110.
5. Ernest Callenbach, “Carnal Knowledge,” Film Quarterly, Winter 1971–1972, 56.
6. Commentary by Nichols and Soderbergh, Catch-22 DVD.
7. Gavin Smith, “Of Metaphors and Purpose,” Film Comment, May/June 1999, 26.
8. Biskind, 61.
9. Smith, “Of Metaphors and Purpose,” 26.
10. A. H. Weiler, “Nichols Meets Jules Feiffer,” New York Times, 26 October 1969.
11. Paul D. Zimmerman, “Love in a Blind Alley,” Newsweek, 5 July 1971, 71.
12. Vincent Canby, “‘I Was Sorry to See It End’: ‘Carnal Knowledge,’“ New York Times, 4 July 1971.
13. Gavin Smith, “Without Cutaways,” Film Comment, May 1991, 32.
14. Gavin Smith, “Without Cutaways,” Film Comment, 34.
15. John Lindsay Brown, “Pictures of Innocence,” Sight and Sound, Spring 1972, 103.
16. Jacob Brackman, “Carnal Knowledge,” Esquire, October 1971, 46.
17. Brackman, 45.
18. Commentary by Nichols and Soderbergh, Catch-22 DVD.
19. Feiffer identifies the new time period as “the early sixties” in his published screenplay (1971), 60.
20. Julian Jebb, “Carnal Knowledge,” Sight and Sound, Autumn 1971, 222.
21. Zimmerman, 71.
22. Jebb, 222.
23. Zimmerman, 71.
24. Feiffer screenplay, 108.
25. David A. Cook, in the volume on 1970s Hollywood in the University of California Press History of the American Cinema, calls Carnal Knowledge “epoch-making” (324).
26. Canby.
1. Christopher Sandford, Polanski, 137–154.
2. Vincent Canby, “Underwater Talkie: Scott Stars in Nichols’s ‘Day of the Dolphin,’” New York Times, 20 December 1973.
3. Pauline Kael, “The Day of the Dolphin,” The New Yorker, 31 December 1973, 50.
4. In his 1978 Twayne monograph on Nichols, H. Wayne Schuth quotes Levine as calling Nichols a “‘genius’“ (126), while Mark Harris in Pictures at a Revolution quotes Nichols as describing the association begun with Levine on The Graduate as “‘scraping the bottom of the barrel’” (71).
5. Henry wryly laments in a featurette on the Image Entertainment DVD of The Day of the Dolphin that his “career” voicing animated animals was ruined by this early type-casting.
6. Henry in the Image Entertainment DVD featurette.
7. John Lahr, Show and Tell, 283.
1. Gavin Smith, “Of Metaphors and Purpose,” Film Comment, May/June 1999, 29.
2. Smith, 29.
3. Peter Biskind, Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced America, 200.
4. Mel Gussow, “Nichols, Fortune Made, Looks to the Future,” New York Times, 3 June 1975.
5. Jacob Brackman, “Carnal Knowledge,” Esquire, October 1971, 46.
6. Brackman, 46.
7. H. Wayne Schuth, Mike Nichols, 60.
8. Paul D. Zimmerman, “Madcap Murder,” Newsweek, 26 May 1975, 84.
9. Lee Hill, “Mike Nichols and the Business of Living,” Senses of Cinema, July 2003.
10. Caryn James, “Mike Nichols Surveys the American Dream,” New York Times, 25 February 1990.
1. Cathleen McGuigan, “War, Peace & Nichols,” Newsweek, 17 December 2007, 63.
2. Leonard Quart and Albert Auster, American Film and Society Since 1945, 142.
3. Lee Hill, “Mike Nichols and the Business of Living,” Senses of Cinema, July 2003.
4. Peter Biskind, “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” Premiere, March 1994, 61.
5. Mainstream critics like Vincent Canby, writing in the New York Times, and Richard Schickel writing in Time excoriated the film’s imprecisions with the facts; Nichols himself wrote to the New York Times in a letter dated December 28, 1983, responding to Canby’s attack by reminding Canby that his own review initially praised the film as drama before attacking its reportage.
6. Tom Doherty, “Silkwood,” Film Quarterly, Summer 1984, 25.
7. Quart and Auster, 142.
8. Quart and Auster, 142.
9. David Denby, “A Life on the Line,” New York, 26 December 1983–2 January 1984, 97.
10. Lee Hill, “Mike Nichols and the Business of Living,” Senses of Cinema, July 2003.
1. Nora Ephron, The Most of Nora Ephron, 239.
2. Ephron, 240.
3. Ephron, 240.
4. Ephron, 240.
5. Ephron, 240.
6. Mark Harris, Pictures at a Revolution, 360.
7. Harris, 359. Simon submitted original songs for the soundtrack of The Graduate, but Nichols ultimately reverted to previously recorded Simon and Garfunkel tracks with the exception of some passages from “Mrs. Robinson.” The rejected songs appeared on the 1968 Simon and Garfunkel album Bookends.
8. Gavin Smith, “Of Metaphors and Purpose,” Film Comment, May/June 1999, 21.
9. Walter Goodman, “Romance Narrows the Gap Between Generations,” New York Times, 10 August 1986.
1. This does not include the aborted collaboration with Neil Simon on Bogart Slept Here, which was to be Nichols’ next film after The Fortune but which barely made it out of pre-production before stalling.
2. Vincent Canby, “Simon’s ‘Biloxi Blues,’ Coming of Age in the Army,” New York Times, 25 March 1988.
3. David Denby, “Skirting Trouble,” New York, 28 March 1988, 98; Jack Kroll, “Basic Training of Neil Simon,” Newsweek, 4 April 1988, 72.
4. Richard Schickel, “Making a Memoir Memorable,” Time, 4 April 1988, 77.
5. Lee Hill, “Mike Nichols and the Business of Living,” Senses of Cinema, July 2003.
6. In an aside at the end, Eugene acknowledges that a “sane, logical, and decent man” replaces Toomey for the remainder of the camp, but they come to miss Toomey: “one should never underestimate the stimulation of eccentricity.” Although delivered for a laugh, the line prizes Toomey’s distinct personhood, ironically that very thing he’d hoped to drain out of the “boys” in his charge, and which got him unceremoniously dismissed. Nichols reflected this by casting the most indelibly “eccentric” actor in this antagonistic role.
1. Deron Overpeck, “Movies and Images of Reality,” in American Cinema of the 1980s: Themes and Variations, ed. Stephen Prince, 197.
2. Leonard Quart and Albert Auster, American Film and Society Since 1945, 159.
3. Overpeck, 196.
4. Overpeck, 197.
5. Douglas Kennedy, “From New York to LA,” The Listener, 16 March 1989, 37.
6. Richard Combs, “Slaves of Manhattan,” Sight and Sound, Spring 1989, 78.
7. David Denby, “Trading Places,” New York, 2 January 1989, 45.
8. Combs, 78.
9. Denby, 45.
10. Overpeck, 198.
11. Combs, 78.
12. Overpeck, 198.
13. Overpeck, 198.
14. Oddly, neither David Denby, who adored the film, nor Pauline Kael, who predictably despised it, saw the ending for what it was, a slyly ironic demonstration of the perils of fantasy wish-fulfillment within a corrupted value structure.
1. Richard Corliss, “Spin and Sizzle,” Time, 17 September 1990, 70.
2. Carrie Fisher provides running commentary on the film, courtesy of the 2006 Columbia Pictures DVD.
3. 2006 Columbia Pictures edition.
4. Fisher on the 2006 Columbia Pictures DVD commentary track.
5. John Lahr, Show and Tell, 273.
6. “Trivia” section of Internet Movie Database entry on Postcards from the Edge.
7. Sean Mitchell, “The One They Ask for By Name!” Empire, February 1991, 67.
1. Gavin Smith, “Of Metaphors and Purpose,” Film Comment, May/June 1999, 21. Georgia Brown also acknowledges this thematic trend in Nichols’ work, though she savages Regarding Henry in her Village Voice review of 23 July 1991.
2. Janet Maslin (New York Times, 14 July 1991) writes that Regarding Henry functions as “a companion piece” to Working Girl, in that “what [Tess] wins through this relentless effort—an executive position, a nice office, her own secretary—is precisely what Henry Turner needs to be freed from.”
3. Regarding Henry received the worst reviews of Nichols’ film career, by far. Even without Pauline Kael weighing in with her typical prejudices against Nichols, the vitriol that this film provoked in critics was mystifying and wrong-headed. Critics largely gave Abrams a pass based on callow youth, reserving the brunt of their attacks for Nichols, whom they thought should have known better than to depict a changed mind and heart via brain damage. Several critics (including David Ansen, Georgia Brown, and David Denby) actually stooped to extremely poor-taste jokes about whether the filmmakers, the audience, or the critics themselves would benefit more from being shot in the head than being made to watch the film; they wailed that the pre-trauma Henry was preferable to the post-trauma Henry, a provocative critical miscalculation if ever there were one, calling into question the moral aesthetics of their critical eye.
4. Gavin Smith, “Without Cutaways,” Film Comment, May 1991, 36.
5. Smith, 42.
1. Gavin Smith, “Of Metaphors and Purpose,” Film Comment, May/June 1999, 21.
2. Anthony Lane, “Howl,” The New Yorker, 11 July 1994, 84.
3. David Ansen, “Jack Cries Wolf,” Newsweek, 20 June 1994, 59.
4. Peter Biskind, “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” Premiere, March 1994, 58.
5. Georgia Brown, “Where the Wild Things Are,” The Village Voice, 21 June 1994, 50.
6. David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, 302.
7. Janet Maslin, “Wolf Bites Man; Man Sheds His Civilized Coat,” New York Times, 17 June 1994.
8. The lapses in the internal logic of the film’s genre narrative suggest how at sea comedians of social manners like Nichols and May found themselves in polishing Harrison’s story. While Will’s ears are so good he can hear conversations or ringing phones behind closed doors, he cannot hear Stewart as he steals up on the guards or on Laura herself. More important, he cannot scent Stewart’s approach. Thus he can’t warn Laura, who has her dramatic dialogue with Stewart on the barn steps before Stewart attempts to rape her inside the building, before Will’s eyes. Most incredibly, the man who knows someone has been drinking because he “can smell it a mile away” does not have any inkling of the severed hand he’s been carrying in his jacket pocket since his romp in the park the previous night.
9. Brown, 50.
10. David Denby, “Beastly Boys,” New York, 20 June 1994, 77.
11. Smith, 21; cf. Joan Juliet Buck, “Live Mike,” Vanity Fair, June 1994, 81.
12. Lane, 95.
1. David Denby, “The Beach Boys,” New York, 11 March 1996, 50.
2. Richard Corliss, “The Final Frontier,” Time, 11 March 1996, 66.
3. Terrence Rafferty, “Seeing Straight,” The New Yorker, 18 March 1996, 111.
4. Denby, 51.
5. Gary Susman, “The Birdcage,” The Village Voice, 19 March 1996, 70.
6. Rafferty, 111.
7. Corliss, 68.
8. Nichols, xvi.
1. Lee Hill, “Mike Nichols and the Business of Living,” Senses of Cinema, July 2003.
2. J. Hoberman, “Running for Cover,” The Village Voice, 24 March 1998, 65.
3. Gavin Smith, “Of Metaphors and Purpose,” Film Comment, May/June 1999, 30.
4. Hendrik Hertzberg, “Upset Victory,” The New Yorker, 23 March 1998, 86.
5. Hill.
6. David Thomson, The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, 5th ed., 705.
7. David Ansen, “Good Guy/Bad Guy,” Newsweek, 23 March 1998, 63.
8. Denby, “Young Rascals,” New York, 23 March 1998, 147.
9. James Kaplan, “True Colors?” New York, 2 March 1998, 26.
10. In an interview with Jeffrey Ressner for the Fall 2006 issue of DGA Quarterly, Nichols expressed his admiration for Stevens’ mythic Western and calls Stevens’ A Place in the Sun (1951) the single most influential movie on his experience as a director.
11. Leslie Aldridge, “Who’s Afraid of the Undergraduate?” New York Times, 18 February 1968.
12. Hoberman, 65.
13. Interviewed on Charlie Rose, 28 April 1998, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Nichols also cast Rose, playing himself, in Primary Colors, interviewing Fred Picker (Larry Hagman).
14. Kaplan, 29.
1. David Ansen, “Love from Another Planet,” Newsweek, 6 March 2000, 68.
2. Gavin Smith, “Of Metaphors and Purpose,” Film Comment, May/June 1999, 21.
3. “Elaine May in Conversation with Mike Nichols,” Film Comment, July/August 2006, Web only: www.filmcomment.com/article/elaine-may-in-conversation-with-mike-nichols.
4. Elvis Mitchell, “Sent to Earth with Powers and Abilities Far Below Those of Mortal Men: What Planet Are You From?” New York Times, 3 March 2000.
5. Bruce Newman, “Relatively Comfortable on the Planet Shandling,” New York Times, 5 March 2000.
6. Timothy Bewes, Reification: Or, The Anxiety of Late Capitalism, 255.
7. Though not intended as a direct quote from an earlier classic, the suspension of Harold and Susan’s child in the secure blue light-zone at Graydon’s headquarters recalls the star-child in the final shots of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). That newborn, the next evolutionary phase “beyond Jupiter” for astronaut Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea), is both an end to a journey and the most literalized of new beginnings of Kubrick’s famous film. This reflects Nichols’ own essential understanding of his narratives as centered in “transformation.”
1. Lee Hill, “Mike Nichols and the Business of Living,” Senses of Cinema, July 2003.
2. Caryn James, “Death, Mighty Thou Art; So Too, a Compassionate Heart,” New York Times, 23 March 2001.
3. Marc Peyser, “From Broadway to Boob Tube,” Newsweek, 19 March 2001, 56.
4. James.
5. Bernard Weinraub, “Little Screen, Big Ambition; Serious Films by Cable Networks Fill a Void Left by Hollywood,” New York Times, 3 January 2001.
6. David Thomson, The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, 5th ed., 705.
7. John Leonard, “The I. V. League,” New York, 26 March 2001, 125.
8. Leonard, 125.
9. Margaret Edson, Wit, 69.
10. Nichols and Thompson could easily have clarified that it is a “real” visit by having Susie show her into the room, but since Vivian has long been in medical isolation, there is no reason to think of this scene as anything but Vivian’s last—and successful—attempt at metaphysical Wit.
1. Tony Kushner, Angels in America, 284. All my quotations from the film, when Kushner has adapted them verbatim from his play, use Kushner’s presentation of syntax and punctuation in the published one-volume edition of the play.
2. Susan Cheever, “An Angel Sat Down at His Table,” New York Times, 13 September 1992.
3. Ken Nielsen, Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, 89–90; Daniel Mendelsohn, “Winged Messages,” The New York Review of Books, 12 February 2004, 42–43.
4. Alex Abramovich, “Hurricane Kushner Hits the Heartland,” New York Times, 30 November 2003.
5. Richard Stayton, “Flights of Angels,” Written By, December 2003, 50.
6. John Lahr, “Angels on the Verge,” The New Yorker, 15 November 2010, 96.
7. Brad Goldfarb and Patrick Giles, “The Angels Have Landed,” Interview, December 2003/January 2004, 172.
8. Jeffrey Ressner, “Working Man,” DGA Quarterly, Fall 2006.
9. Stayton, 52.
10. Alessandra Stanley, “Finally, TV Drama to Argue About,” New York Times, 30 November 2003.
11. Thompson as the Angel is cover-girl to the Theatre Communications Group edition of the published play tied in to the Nichols production, as well as the figure who graces the front of the HBO DVD slipcase.
12. Stayton, 52.
13. Nielsen, 88.
14. John Leonard, “The I. V. League,” New York, 26 March 2001, 125.
15. David Ansen, “City of Angels,” Newsweek, 17 November 2003.
16. Other stage doublings would have made less sense cinematically; Martin Heller (Brian Markinson in the Nichols version), who plays an Ed Meese stooge and one-time Roy Cohn protégé, is often performed on stage by the actress who plays Harper; while there may be interesting insights to be made about the feminizing of Martin, there is no need for Nichols to slavishly reproduce all stage effects, some of which (like Parker in male drag) would be unnecessarily (rather than fruitfully) distracting to the cinematic audience.
17. James Fisher, Understanding Tony Kushner, 50.
18. Fisher, 43.
19. Mendelsohn, 43.
20. The political evolution of the Soviet Union, for instance, has reality in the play only through the allusions of Rabbi Isidor Chemelwitz to Lithuanian Jews languishing in the “shtetl” and in the endlessly opinionated Louis’ references to late 1980s current events, particularly the fall of the Berlin Wall.
21. Mendelsohn, 43.
22. Mendelsohn, 44.
23. Mendelsohn, 44.
24. Fisher, 52.
25. Kushner, Angels in America, 142.
26. Fisher, 52.
27. Goldfarb and Giles, 171.
28. Nielsen, 90.
29. Frank Rich, “Angels, Reagan, and AIDS in America,” New York Times, 16 November 2003.
30. Mendelsohn, 42.
31. Richard Goldstein, “Angels in a Changed America,” The Village Voice, 26 November–2 December 2003, 33.
32. Lahr, 96.
33. James Poniewozik, “Heaven on Earth,” Time, 8 December 2003, 81.
34. Ansen.
35. Fisher, 44.
36. Kushner, Angels in America, 9.
37. It is possible to infer—from Harper’s obsession with babies, her description of the invasive hand of God, and her chronic depression—that Harper feels guilt for an abortion or rage at a God who has allowed her to miscarry or forbid her to conceive.
38. Kushner, Angels in America, 9.
39. Fisher, 47.
40. Cheever.
41. Kushner, Angels in America, 259.
42. Nancy Franklin, “America, Lost and Found,” The New Yorker, 8 December 2003, 127.
43. Stayton, 54.
44. Andrew O’Hehir, “Wings of Desire,” Sight and Sound, March 2004, 6.
45. Nielsen, 88.
46. Qtd. in Nielsen, 46.
47. Stanley.
48. Tony Kushner, “The Art of Theater No. 16,” The Paris Review, Summer 2012, 139.
49. Charlie Kaufman would later use wintry beach imagery to convey similar spiritual extremity and alienation in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry, 2004).
50. Kushner, Angels in America, 257.
51. In his Paris Review interview, Kushner reveals that he, too, is in Streep’s thrall; upon meeting her on Nichols’ set, he asked if she would play Brecht’s great Mother Courage if Kushner translated the play for her, and she did, in 2006 (133).
52. Kushner, Angels in America, 11.
53. Indeed, it would actually make more sense for the actress playing Harper to play this cameo, since Harper’s derangement moves her perilously close to vagrancy during her adventure at the Brooklyn Arboretum, and Thompson the street person’s final words to Hannah are a prophecy of a future of rampant insanity. Nichols and Kushner likely felt the audience might be confused by Hannah not recognizing her own daughter-in-law.
54. Goldstein, 33.
55. Kushner, “The Art of Theater,” 118.
56. Kushner, “The Art of Theater,” 118.
57. Kushner, “The Art of Theater,” 119.
58. Kushner, “The Art of Theater,” 117.
59. Mendelsohn, 42.
60. Franklin, 126.
61. Sara Cedar Miller, Central Park, An American Masterpiece, 63.
62. Miller, 39.
63. Miller, 33.
64. In their detailed The Park and the People: A History of Central Park, Roy Rosenzweig and Elizabeth Blackmar note that the late–1960s counter-culture (including the gay liberation movement) came to adopt the Park—and in particular the Bethesda Fountain—as its public locus in the city: “A park originally designed to exemplify the city’s official culture now opened its gates to powerful alternative and oppositional ‘countercultures’” (493–494).
65. Kushner, Angels in America, 277.
66. Fisher, 55.
67. Stayton, 54. While not remotely like the Mormons in dogma, the Mennonites nonetheless project a clannish separation of themselves from secular majority culture that Nichols and Kushner mean to reflect in Hannah, who is on the cusp of an evolution away from such isolation, and in Joe, still paralyzed in place between the closet and the truth of himself.
68. Mendelsohn, a thoughtful gay cultural critic, objects to this treatment of Joe, arguing for Joe as the play’s “only truly tragic” character and accusing Kushner of betraying Joe for the sake of the play’s structure, in which both Louis and Joe must be condemned for abandoning their lovers (46–47); while Mendelsohn is right to contrast Joe’s sexual awakening with Louis’ inconstancy, he puzzlingly forgives Joe’s devastating legal opinions as the natural consequence of the closet and, most important, conveniently forgets Joe’s “desert” temptation of Louis on the wintry beach to forsake Prior, as Roy once tempted Joe to forsake Harper. Joe has the right to assert his sexuality; he does not have the right to suborn Louis’ continued infidelity just as Louis is finding his conscience.
69. Goldfarb and Giles, 171.
70. Chris Nashawaty, “Life of Mike,” Entertainment Weekly, 16 March 2012, 48.
1. Colin Kennedy, “Love Hurts,” Empire, February 2005, 74.
2. Kennedy, 75.
3. Daniel Rosenthal, “Commentary and Notes,” Closer, Student Edition, lxxvi.
4. Rosenthal, lxxxiv.
5. Dennis Lim, “Closer,” The Village Voice, 1 December- 7 December 2004, 47.
6. Sam Davies, “Closer,” Sight and Sound, February 2005, 46–47.
7. Anthony Lane, “Settling Scores,” The New Yorker, 24 December 2007, 151.
8. Gavin Smith, “Of Metaphors and Purpose,” Film Comment, May/June 1999, 21.
9. Logan Hill, “Mr. Nichols and the Vicious Circle,” New York, 13 September 2004, 51.
10. Lim, 47.
11. Rosenthal, lxxxvi.
12. Patrick Marber, Closer, 110.
13. Rosenthal, lxxvii-lxxviii.
14. Rosenthal, lxxvii.
15. Anthony Lane, “Partners,” The New Yorker, 13 December 2004, 108.
16. Chris Norris, “Closer,” Film Comment, January/February 2005, 72.
17. Sean Smith, “Coming Attractions,” Newsweek, 30 August 2004, 46.
18. Lim, 47.
19. Rosenthal, xxiii.
20. A. O. Scott, “Who’s Returning to Virginia Woolf?” New York Times, 28 November 2004.
21. Marber, 7, 13.
1. Helen O’Hara, “Patriot Games,” Empire, January 2008, 84.
2. A. O. Scott, “Good Time Charlie, and His Foreign Affairs,” New York Times, 21 December 2007.
3. Scott.
4. The movie tie-in edition of Crile’s book reproduces this image, but doctored: Bonnie is out, Gust in.
5. David Edelstein, “It’s a Gusher!” New York, 24 December, 2007, 100.
6. Gavin Smith, “Of Metaphors and Purpose,” Film Comment, May/June 1999, 21.
7. From “The Making of Charlie Wilson’s War,” a featurette on the 2008 Universal Pictures DVD.
8. “Charlie Wilson,” The Economist, 20 February 2010, 84.
9. Smith, 21.
1. Andrew Sarris, The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929–1968, 218.
2. Sarris, 218.
3. Peter Biskind, “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” Premiere, March 1994, 63.
4. Bernard Weinraub, “Mike Nichols Plans a Career Finale,” New York Times 15 March 1993.
5. “Elaine May in Conversation with Mike Nichols,” Film Comment, July/August 2006, Web only: www.filmcomment.com/article/elaine-may-in-conversation-with-mike-nichols.
6. Søren Birkvad, “Hollywood Sin, Scandinavian Virtue: The 1967 Revolt of I Am Curious and The Graduate,” Film International, 9.2 (Issue 50) 2011, 53.
7. I discuss this debt at length in Chapter 16, “The Legacy of The Graduate,” in my 2011 monograph, Appraising The Graduate: The Mike Nichols Classic and Its Impact in Hollywood (McFarland).
8. Chris Nashawaty, “Life of Mike,” Entertainment Weekly, 16 March 2012, 49.
9. A. O. Scott, “Who’s Returning to Virginia Woolf?” New York Times, 28 November 2004.
10. Scott.
11. Biskind, 63.
12. Scott.
13. Biskind, 63.
14. The only possible exception is Pakula’s All the President’s Men. Pakula gave compelling imagery to a story nearly everyone already knew and was compelled by; Nichols took a story almost no one knew and made it iconic.
15. Biskind, 60.
16. Biskind, 63.
17. Mitchell Zuckoff, Robert Altman: The Oral Biography, 217.
18. H. Wayne Schuth, Mike Nichols, 160.
19. Joseph Gelmis, The Film Director as Superstar, 359.
20. Fisher, 39.
21. Fisher, 40.
22. Chris Nashawaty, “Life of Mike,” Entertainment Weekly, 16 March 2012, 48.
23. Gavin Smith, “Of Metaphors and Purpose,” Film Comment, May/June 1999, 21.
24. Sam Kashner, “Who’s Afraid of Nichols & May?” Vanity Fair, January 2013, 170.
25. This is a phenomenon I examine briefly in Chapter 3 but at book-length in Appraising The Graduate: The Mike Nichols Classic and Its Impact in Hollywood (McFarland, 2011).
26. It is odd that an audience will forgive distant-future science fiction any sort of preposterous premises about technological evolution, but as The Day of the Dolphin proposed the unlikely idea of 1973 inter-species communication with dolphins as a narrative metaphor, it was ridiculed in the critical and popular imagination. If one allows the premise and story to proceed, Dolphin becomes a fascinating dystopian story of objectification’s insidious, invasive toxins.
27. Weinraub.
28. David Thomson, The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, 5th ed., 705.
29. Cathleen McGuigan, “War, Peace & Nichols,” Newsweek, 17 December 2007, 63.
30. John Lahr, Show and Tell, 285.