By the Sunday after the awards, Nichols was back in New York with Gilliatt and her young daughter. Edmund Wilson had recently published a glowing “open letter” in The New York Review of Books in which he implored the young prodigy on whom he doted to flee “the fleshpots of Hollywood steeped in which so many fine talents have foundered.” But after all, he had just won an Oscar, and who would pass up a chance to see one of those up close? Wilson and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. came over to the penthouse to offer their congratulations. While they were there, they stood at his window for a while and gazed down at Central Park, where a memorial march for Martin Luther King Jr. was slowly moving along the paths.
“He is living in more or less luxury,” the apparently perplexed Wilson wrote when he got home. “[He] has a large young Great Dane bitch and a little fuzzy white dog that belongs to the rather odd-looking small butler, perhaps a Puerto Rican.”
Nichols had only a few days in New York and was trying to cram in as much as he could. Later that afternoon, he went to see Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, which had just opened. He was awed. He immediately called Buck Henry and told him he had to go. He was thinking big, ready at last to give his full attention to the film that would consume him for the next two years. Playwrights, including Neil Simon, sent him their new work; he turned them all down, telling them he anticipated being busy on Catch-22 until the end of 1969. Henry was at work on the screenplay, and Nichols was planning a film the scale and cost of which would dwarf anything he had directed. The following Sunday, he won his third Tony as Best Director, for Plaza Suite, but he was gone; he had flown to Rome to scout locations. With him were Dick Sylbert, who had come to serve as a kind of overall visual consultant for him, and Catch-22’s producer, John Calley, with whom Nichols would forge one of his closest lifelong friendships.
On its surface, the story Joseph Heller told in Catch-22 was simple: Yossarian, his protagonist, is a bombardier in an Army hospital in Italy during World War II who is caught between two strategies: insisting that he’s too crazy to fly and trying to complete enough missions to be permitted to stay on the ground—a threshold that keeps being raised so that it’s always just out of reach. In the novel, which was promoted with the advertising tagline “What’s the Catch?” when it was first published, Heller defines “Catch-22” as the paradox that any flier who refuses dangerous missions on the grounds of insanity is by definition sane enough to undertake them. The only way to prove you’re unfit to fly is to fly.
Catch-22 had received several admiring reviews when it came out in the fall of 1961—in The Nation, Nelson Algren called it “the strongest repudiation of our civilization, in fiction, to come out of World War II”—but it did not reach bestseller lists until a year later, when a seventy-five-cent paperback edition was released. Within a few months, the novel had sold more than a million copies, the title had entered the vernacular, and Hollywood had bought the film rights and signed Heller to write the first draft of a screenplay.
But in the years since then, the project had stalled; Heller had no idea how to turn his novel into a movie, and neither did anyone else. Catch-22 presented an array of nearly insurmountable problems for any director or screenwriter who dared to tackle it. The novel runs to five hundred pages and features more than fifty characters. Its narrative proceeds on two braided time tracks between 1942 and 1944, repeatedly looping backward to a bomber crash that, by degrees, explains part of Yossarian’s existential dilemma. Heller’s storytelling is both repetitive and episodic, with so many barely connected vignettes illustrating different absurdly comic aspects of the futility and despair of life during wartime that Norman Mailer complained, “One could take a hundred pages anywhere from the middle . . . and not even the author could be sure they were gone.” Still more daunting for a screenwriter was what Mailer had identified as the novel’s own Catch-22: The “surprisingly powerful” last fifty pages couldn’t work without the excess that preceded it. “Heller,” he concluded, “is carrying his reader on a more consistent voyage through Hell than any American writer before him . . . It’s the rock and roll of novels.” Paramount’s attraction to Nichols was natural, as was his own attraction to the material—the book can be read as a series of sketches, something with which he had ample experience both as a performer and a stage director.
Henry was too smart to try to create a “greatest hits” version of Catch-22 by simply stringing together its most extreme and widely discussed episodes—an extended interaction between a GI named Huple and his possibly homicidal cat, a ceremony in which Yossarian shows up stark naked to accept a medal from General Dreedle, the recurring appearances by a deranged assassin known only as “Nately’s whore.” Instead, he chose a more punishing approach: He mapped the novel on hundreds of index cards that noted every plot point, character, entrance, and death, arranged them into an exact chronology he could reshuffle as he pleased, and wrote a draft that encompassed the entire book. His first attempt at a screenplay ran to 385 pages—the equivalent of a six-and-a-half-hour film.
While Henry rewrote, Nichols started feeling his way toward a vision for the movie. “Catch-22 is about dying,” he said as he began work. “That’s really all I know right now. It presents terrific technical problems—25 bombers, 60 speaking parts. But that doesn’t worry me as much as finding the proper metaphor—what the experience is of either knowing or not knowing you’re dying . . . It’s something that happens with Vietnam, that it becomes an abstraction—some think, ‘Those aren’t real people getting killed’ . . . Everybody on television is getting killed and people can possibly no longer distinguish between the ones that will rise again for next week’s segment of the series and the Vietnamese, who will not . . . I think it changes the idea of death, and I think the only way to live your life is to know all the time that it’s going to end.”
Nichols thought Catch-22 would have to feel “somewhat dreamlike, not quite real—either something remembered or a nightmare. That’s very hard to do with living actors with pores and noses, because they’re so definitely there.” Together, he and Henry made their first important decision—that the fever dream of the hospitalized Yossarian would lead to many of the flashbacks and that, as Henry said, “the picture [would] be cut as if Yossarian’s delirium were cutting it.” With that idea as their north star, they worked on three subsequent drafts until they had cut two hundred pages and eliminated thirty characters.
Eventually they had a script they felt was viable—but nowhere to shoot it. Nichols’s scouting trip to Rome had been a bust. He, Sylbert, and Calley had gone on to Sicily, Corsica (where Heller had been stationed during the war), and Sardinia for a visit with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, who were there filming Boom!, one of several ill-advised projects they had taken on since Virginia Woolf. Everywhere, the story was the same. “We asked in our failing Italian, ‘Where is World War II?’” Sylbert said. It was gone. The highways, factories, and apartment buildings of the new Italy made it impossible to simulate wartime conditions.
The production needed a town that looked untouched by time but had space to build an airstrip big enough to house the vintage planes the team was acquiring. By June, they had found a remote patch of land—“10,000 desolate acres of scrub and cactus,” Henry called it—twenty miles outside of Guaymas, a small city in northwestern Mexico, about 250 miles south of the Arizona border. Gilliatt warned Nichols that it would be hard flying in and out of such a remote location, but Nichols worried that if they didn’t make a decision soon, the movie would stall—cameras were now unlikely to roll until January 1969—and Paramount seemed willing to throw money at any problem. By the time production started, the studio had spent $180,000 to build a highway from Guaymas to the location, $250,000 to create a working mile-long landing strip that would serve as a major outdoor set, and $200,000 to assemble a squadron of vintage B-25s from various private collectors.
Paramount also spent $1 million up front to secure Nichols’s services for the duration, with a promised share of profits on the other side. It was an unheard-of sum for a director with a two-film résumé. Nichols spent much of that fall preoccupied with casting. Over the years, Heller had been approached by everyone from Jack Lemmon to Zero Mostel, but Nichols wasn’t taking requests: The ensemble he put together was a combination of friends (Buck Henry and Anthony Perkins), people he had worked with (Richard Benjamin, Austin Pendleton, Bob Balaban, and Art Garfunkel, who had never acted but whose baby face and innocent demeanor Nichols thought would be right for Nately), and a handful of up-and-comers, among them Charles Grodin, Stacy Keach, Martin Sheen, and, in the showy role of the hypercapitalist entrepreneur Milo Minderbinder, Jon Voight—a part Dustin Hoffman, Voight’s costar in the forthcoming Midnight Cowboy, also wanted. And John Calley got Orson Welles, then short on money, to play General Dreedle. (Nichols joked that in his fantasy, “he’d start to say a line and then instantly I would say, ‘No, no, no, Orson!’”)
“We saw loads of actors,” says Alan Shayne, the movie’s casting director. “He was wonderful with everyone—he gave them space, he encouraged them.” Nichols could switch from sleeves-rolled-up director to pampered prince in a blink; Shayne says they “would stop suddenly if Calley would arrive with a beautiful leather or suede jacket for Mike to try on, or he would rush out to go look at a new Mercedes convertible.” But most of the time, he kept his mind on the job.
Nichols didn’t get everyone he went after—he was high on Al Pacino, a young New York theater actor with no movie experience, but they never connected, and George C. Scott, who already had Patton in his sights, read Henry’s script and turned Nichols down flat, saying, “No way . . . It’s just awful!” For Yossarian, Nichols resisted the studio’s suggestions to pursue Paul Newman and instead cast Alan Arkin. Their working relationship on Luv had not been easy, but “Arkin was in my mind from the beginning,” Nichols said. “Yossarian is the little guy caught in the middle, and [he and] Arkin’s deliberate witty inexpressiveness seemed to go together so well.” Arkin himself called Yossarian “the only part I’ve ever worked on that didn’t demand a conception, because there isn’t much difference between me and Yossarian.”
As production neared, Nichols returned to Plaza Suite, making sure no moment in the play got slack or sloppy. He had no intention of letting it fall apart the way The Odd Couple had. At one point, Maureen Stapleton said, “I lost a solid built-in laugh. I tried everything I knew to get it back, but it wouldn’t come. I called Mike and asked him to . . . see if he could figure out what I should do. Mike came to a performance and afterward said, ‘Just take the second half of the line an octave lower.’ I did what he told me and like music to my ears, the laughter rolled over the footlights.”
“Mike was the conductor of those laughs, and that roar from the audience became part of your expectation as an actor,” says Lee Grant, who replaced Stapleton on Broadway before starring in the play’s Los Angeles production. “And you couldn’t deviate with a word—Neil’s writing was almost rigidly musical. When I was first rehearsing, I went through a scene and Mike said, ‘Of! But! Two! For!’ Those were the words I had left out, and it shocked me. But once I had it down, it was total freedom.”
Nichols needed the show to be rock solid. He expected to be gone a long time. Before heading south, he and Henry flew to California and visited the Orange County airfield where the B-25s were being refurbished and stunt fliers were being hired. He climbed into an old bomber and crawled around, taken aback by how cramped the interior was and how hard it would be to film in a space that small. It was a taste of how little on Catch-22 would go according to plan. “I think it’ll work,” he finally said to Frank Tallman, the flying supervisor. “Look—we mount the camera here, in the entrance to the cockpit. We can shoot across Garfunkel in the pilot’s seat and [Peter] Bonerz in the copilot’s seat. There’s just enough room for the camera crew back there—and I can lie down here on the floor between the camera and the actors.” Tallman looked “puzzled,” said Henry.
“Something wrong with that idea?” said Nichols.
“Uh, Mike . . .” said Tallman. “Who’s going to fly the plane?”
On January 2, 1969, the cast and crew of Catch-22 flew from Los Angeles to Mexico to start work. At 8 a.m. on January 11, after a week of rehearsal, production began. Nine hours later, production wrapped for the day. Not a single foot of film had been shot. The count remained the same: 187 pages and 445 shots to go. David Watkin, the British cinematographer Nichols had hired based on his work for Tony Richardson on The Charge of the Light Brigade, had spent much of rehearsal week “lying on his back and staring through a dark filter at the sky,” Henry wrote. He had “the disarming habit of, when being asked a direct question, answering with, ‘Well . . .’ and then leaving the room,” but he had a plan Nichols loved—to shoot the entire movie with backlighting. On the first day of filming, he told Nichols what that would mean: No exterior shots would be possible between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m., when the sun was high. “I loved him,” said Nichols. “He wasn’t the guy that I need[ed] as my partner, but he was a wonderful man.”
At first, Nichols, who would weather every setback on the film with a despairing smile, as if he had become one of the novel’s characters, was “kind of amused,” says Richard Benjamin. But after the first week, he called Benjamin over and said, “Here’s a little secret. I haven’t seen anybody’s face. Watkin says it’s all there, but with the projection equipment we have down here, we can’t see anybody.” That weekend, Nichols and Calley had to drive hours to the nearest airport, fly to Los Angeles, drive to Paramount, and run the dailies in a screening room to confirm that Watkin was, in fact, correct: The actors’ faces were visible. They flew back to Mexico to begin week two.
That was the first indication of just how long Catch-22 was going to take. The second came a week later, when Nichols announced that he was throwing out everything they had shot so far and starting again. By then he had been diagnosed with a hernia, Sylbert had contracted hepatitis and flown home, the plane shuttling the dailies to and from Los Angeles had been delayed at least once, one of the B-25s had lost control on the runway and sent the extras in its path scrambling for safety, and, according to Henry, Arkin was “lapsing into a coma-like depression.” None of those issues were the problem; Nichols just hated all the footage he had filmed. Originally, says Peter Bonerz, “the idea was to fill up the background with young airmen. So he got hundreds of extras from Tucson or somewhere. I was at dinner with Mike and Buck—they’d just come back from the rushes, and Mike said, ‘You know, there’s something wrong here.’”
“I was really scared,” said Nichols. “I knew it was a screwup and that it wasn’t working. It looked like an Air Force movie.” Clive Reed, his first assistant director, said, “What if we didn’t have the extras?” Within days, Nichols sent them home. (It hadn’t helped that the local government, which both resented the Hollywood intrusion and knew how much money was to be made from it, threatened to arrest any extra found in possession of marijuana, which in 1969 was basically all of them.)
“Mike said, ‘It’s not supposed to look real. It’s Yossarian’s version of reality,’” Bonerz says. “‘And in a dream, or a nightmare, you don’t have extras.’”
“As soon as they were gone,” Nichols said, “it began to be Catch-22.” By then he had also fired one of his actors—Stacy Keach, who was to play Colonel Cathcart, the ambitious functionary who keeps forcing Yossarian to fly again. As with Gene Hackman on The Graduate, Nichols blamed himself, saying Keach, at twenty-seven, was too young for the role; he replaced him with Martin Balsam, who was more than twenty years older.
But Keach and many of his castmates felt something else was at play. Catch-22 was a shoot with endless downtime, and a hierarchy had swiftly been established; actors like Arkin and Perkins and Benjamin, who felt comfortable shooting the breeze with Nichols, who were versatile enough to improvise and play word games to pass the hours, were in favor. They “would sit around doing bits to make Mike laugh,” said Keach, who was furious about his firing. “He digs that sort of game. But I couldn’t make that scene.”
As the weeks in Guaymas rolled on, some actors found it more bearable than others. “Sitting around in Mexico on camp chairs with Mike and Buck was the time of my life,” says Bonerz. “I got a salary plus a per diem. What the fuck is wrong with that? Buck and I would invent games—picking up pebbles and tossing them into coffee cans. I played a lot of tennis with Arkin. And there was a lot of drinking.” But many of the actors felt trapped. “The nearest airport was in Hermosillo, which was then a [long] drive away,” says Balaban. “There were literally three flights a week, so it wasn’t like you could say, ‘Oh, I’m not working for a few days—I’ll go to L.A.’”
“All that waiting, all those delays—it was very debilitating,” said Perkins. “There’s nothing worse than a bunch of actors with nothing to do but sit around and talk about all the work they’re not doing. The drinkers all drank, and the nondrinkers wished they could cultivate the habit.”
“We make bets,” Bob Newhart told Nora Ephron, then a young reporter who came down to observe Nichols for The New York Times Magazine, “on who’s going to go insane or has already gone insane . . . We have no norm here. We have no way of judging.”
When the boredom was interrupted, it would be for such a high-stakes shot that sometimes the actors themselves couldn’t believe what they were doing. Nichols relished every chance to try to pull off the miraculous, including what may have been the most elaborate shot in his entire body of work. “Martin Balsam walking down this airstrip in Mexico, me talking to him,” said Jon Voight. “This plane was supposed to come in behind us, its undercarriage in flames, pass by out of camera, crash and we’d go on walking, pass it still talking, get in a jeep, sweep out, there’s an explosion off camera where the plane really went up, then we’d go off down the airfield. All in one shot. We did it twice. The man who flew the plane was risking his life and we were in danger, too. I got very nervous. What happens if I go up on my lines? . . . It was crazy stuff.”
“It’s such a powerful memory,” said Nichols. “Catch-22 was a nightmare to make, physically. And everybody on it was unhappy except me. All the actors kept bitching because they couldn’t leave. I was as happy as a clam. I had the sixth-largest air force in the world. I didn’t think it was going very well—it wasn’t my kind of picture—but I was happy anyway.” Gilliatt came and went; like most visitors, she was so exhausted by the logistics of getting there that by the time she had recovered, the trip was over. Nichols didn’t mind; he had begun an affair with a young woman he had met on the set. “She stayed,” he said, “and I was so happy with her.”
For Nichols, Catch-22 was a chance to drop out of his own life at just the moment his post-Graduate celebrity had become overwhelming. He was almost desperate to escape; serving as the symbolic leader of a fake army in a foreign country felt easier to him than, say, managing his calendar. “It was good to be away from phones and traffic and dinners and acquaintances,” he said. “And I had something to concentrate on the whole time . . . It’s impossible to make a picture without tensions, angers, fears and all the strong emotions and technical crises that go into it. It’s simply that I would rather do it than not do it.”
His seeming serenity baffled even those closest to him: Did he believe everything would work out, or was he in so far over his head that he had given up and could only shrug? Or was he high? The last was a real possibility; drug use on sets had, by then, become a matter of course. Some of the actors were regularly dropping acid, and Nichols, on Catch-22, became a fairly avid user of marijuana and, for the first time, cocaine.
“When Nichols is unhappy,” Henry wrote in his somewhat sanitized set diary, “he lights another of the cigarettes that he chain-smokes, stares vacantly into space for a while, whistling softly, then begins wandering about the set, tripping relentlessly over whatever cable, rope or wire lies in his path . . . Sam O’Steen . . . swears he once saw Nichols trip over the shadow of the microphone boom.”
“I’m certain he felt the pressure,” Bonerz says. “Every once in a while John Calley would fly down with a bunch of guys with big briefcases, and they’d go and huddle. You sort of knew that was about money.”
“I couldn’t get ahold of the scenes the way I usually do,” Nichols said. “It was a trancelike thing where you just moved forward and trusted the scheme of the overall action. It was very hard. Arkin was unhappy because I spent so much time with the technical aspect of it, plotting the planes going past him. He said, ‘You could have spent a little more time with us,’ and he’s right. But the technical stuff was very daunting.”
When Orson Welles arrived, the cast’s mood changed from weariness to open revolt. Welles stepped off the plane with a small entourage (including Peter Bogdanovich, who was interviewing him) and a large chip on his shoulder. He immediately asked to be taken to wardrobe and given his general’s uniform, which he wore on and off camera for the duration of his stay in Mexico. Unbeknownst to Nichols, Welles had tried and failed to secure the rights to Catch-22 several years earlier; now, almost thirty years after Citizen Kane, he was to be directed by someone who had come out of the gate with a big hit that he immediately followed with a bigger one. Welles did not handle the moment graciously.
“He did his best to utterly sabotage those two weeks,” says Pendleton, who played the general’s son-in-law and shared all of his scenes. “He was a terrible lens hog,” says Bonerz. “Whenever Mike did a master shot”—a take in which all actors in a scene are visible—“Orson would mess up his lines so that they would have to be done in close-up. Not only that, but sometimes he would look at the camera in the middle of one of his own lines and say, ‘Mike, I’m sure you’ll be on someone else here, let’s just move on.’”
“Day after day, he told fascinating stories,” Ephron wrote. “He also told Nichols how to direct the film, the crew how to move the camera, Sam O’Steen how to cut the scene, and most of the actors how to deliver their lines. Welles even lectured Martin Balsam for three minutes on how to deliver the line, ‘Yes sir.’” He insisted on multiple takes of the medal-of-valor scene, despite Arkin’s evident embarrassment at appearing nude, except for a modesty pouch, in front of a large cast and crew. He couldn’t remember his lines. And when Nichols asked for alternate takes, Welles would decline, saying that he didn’t want to give “some drunken editor” the chance to choose badly. “Who the fuck is this fat asshole,” O’Steen thought, “who hasn’t made a good picture since . . .”
At one point Nichols said, “Okay, in this take, Orson, you get out of the jeep because it’s a better cut—”
“What do you mean, ‘it’s a better cut’?” said Welles. “You think I haven’t cut pictures before?”
After a few days with him, many of the actors were barely concealing their hostility. When Welles turned to Pendleton after one take and said, “Are you sure you want to say the line that way?” Pendleton glared at him and snapped, “Yes.”
“The Welles situation . . . was almost identical to what was written in the script,” said Bonerz. “We were all under the thumb of this huge, cigar-smoking general. The discomfort we were feeling was real.”
Nichols never lost his temper or evinced a hint of annoyance. “Not only was he forced to take a part because he needed money, but he was being directed by this pipsqueak, and he was humiliated. He was a pain in the ass on the set,” Nichols said. But “I was very moved by Welles . . . Where the camera is and what it does [was] so much a part of his life—how is he suddenly supposed to ignore it? If you know that much, what are you supposed to do with it?”
Welles rebuffed all of Nichols’s overtures until the end of his time in Mexico, when he accepted his invitation to dinner. “He said beautiful, startling things,” Nichols said. “He said, ‘You know, I’ve always thought lives are either an ascent from where you started or they start on a high and are just a slow descent. Obviously mine is the second kind, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.’” He couldn’t resist leaving Nichols with a warning about success: “Better late than early.”
Reporters came and went, including Ephron, who bonded with Nichols over the treats he had flown in weekly from Zabar’s and Greenberg’s in New York. The logistical nightmares of the production were detailed in stories that ran more than a year before the film’s planned release. The cost rose from $11 million to $15 million, and then to $20 million. The mood on the set became so toxic that people started calling the production “Kvetch-22.” Nichols did take after take of a grisly scene in which a plane cuts a man standing on a raft in two and his legs stand there for a while before falling over. “It was this wonderful, ghoulish thing,” says Balaban, “but every time the plane did it, the impact of the piano wire on the dummy caused a puff of smoke to come out of him. He must have shot it a million times.”
It took two long nights of work just to get a single shot of Arkin running toward a burning building as a B-25 landed—a moment that took up one-sixteenth of a page in the script. “That was good terror, Alan!” Nichols said at 4 a.m. on the second night. “That was real terror, Mike,” Arkin replied. On another evening, after eighteen thousand sticks of dynamite detonated on cue and an actor blew his lines, Nichols calmly said to Henry, “You carry on. I’m taking my life tonight.” At the beginning of the shoot, some of the actors had believed that Nichols must have had the whole movie in his head. Now they doubted it; more than one had heard him say, after watching the dailies, “My God. It just sits there.”
Word drifted back to Hollywood about a production careening out of control. Some people were hungry for a comeuppance. To those outside Nichols’s orbit, what was happening in Mexico sounded like arrogance. At one point, John Wayne, who was looking to buy property adjacent to the location, came to visit. Wayne was, at that point, viewed by the emerging New Hollywood generation as the embodiment of reactionary, pro–Vietnam War hawkishness. He expected a star’s greeting; instead, not a single actor came out to meet him. Wayne was angry and hurt; alone in the local hotel bar, he drank himself into a fury and trashed the place until he toppled over and broke a couple of ribs. At the time, Henry responded dryly, “We are trying to make up for it by getting a print of The Green Berets and showing it to the crew. In the meantime, we’ve just been sitting around here, watching the days go by and waiting for him to come back and bomb us.”
“We were such prigs,” said Nichols later, “such righteous schmucks when he landed. Buck and I were both furious at ourselves for years and years.”
Principal photography in Guaymas ended in late April; there was still a month of aerial stunt shooting needed, but Nichols was so far behind that he left the task to his second unit director. His main aerial cameraman was John Jordan, a forty-four-year-old daredevil who had lost a leg three years earlier when he fell into a helicopter blade while filming a stunt for the James Bond movie You Only Live Twice. A month after Nichols and the actors left, Jordan, who refused to wear a harness, was leaning out of one airplane in order to film another, lost his grip, and fell to his death in the Gulf of Mexico.
Nichols was in Rome by then, shooting a few street scenes with Garfunkel; Paul Simon, waiting for him to be done so they could finish their next album, had grown irritated by “the presence of Mike Nichols” as a “disconcerting” figure who kept interrupting their real careers, and finally, tired of waiting, drafted “The Only Living Boy in New York,” a song about his sense of abandonment, for their next album, Bridge Over Troubled Water. Rome was, said Nichols, “like a holiday,” in part because David Watkin told him there were only two hours a day when the light was right for filming. It took them two months to shoot a relatively small portion of the movie.
Catch-22 would wrap with what was supposed to be a month of work on a Hollywood soundstage; by then, nobody was surprised when it turned out to take twice that long. They spent two weeks just trying to figure out how to hang a partial replica of a B-25 from the ceiling so that Nichols could film the crucial recurring “Help him! Help the bombardier!” flashbacks that punctuate the movie. In late June, Nichols fell twenty feet off a ladder on the soundstage and dislocated his shoulder. Paramount executives, increasingly angry, would come down to the set and say to Sam O’Steen, “Can’t you do something?”
“He finishes when he finishes,” O’Steen replied.
Jon Korkes, the young actor who played the maimed and mangled bombardier, spent several days with Arkin in the plane; Nichols put him in a flight suit torn open so that he could be covered in sheep intestines that were kept refrigerated and immersed in chemicals most of the day. “Mike would not let me see it beforehand,” he says. “I guess he was afraid I would get squeamish, but I was having the time of my life. Every time we did a portion of that sequence, I’d be covered with chemical blood and crap. They would unhook me and pick me up and take me over and change me and clean me off and get me a new flight suit and then I’d go lie down again. I think they had thirteen flight suits for me in all.”
“We worked on the front-projection stuff for four weeks,” said Nichols. “And my strange obsession with staying in one shot and not cutting, of course, made it even more of a nightmare.”
In late August, Catch-22 wrapped production. Nichols expected editing to take almost a year. In interviews, he started to sound like he was out of his mind. “Simplicity,” he announced to a UPI reporter as the seventh month of shooting ended. “One basic fact has come home to me. Simplicity. And that’s the direction you’re down to as you progress.” To another, he talked with aimless grandiosity of “how I want to live—I’m going to get rid of myself in stages . . . there are so many things that we must do for one another to make sure that we continue to live on this earth.” But privately, Nichols was crashing hard, telling colleagues, “I feel like I’m pregnant with a dead child.”
“The thing about directing a movie,” he said toward the end of his life, “is that every day you think, Oh no. This time I’m fucked. I cannot get out of this corner. This scene is awful. She’s awful, he’s awful, I’m awful, the writing is awful. There’s one small chance. Maybe if we put her over here and cut this and put this line first, well, that could almost work. And you talk your way out of the end of the world. You shoot one more scene and you’re saved again. That’s an ordinary day, and it’s every day in some way or another. And it’s very addicting. You can save yourself one more time. Not all the time.”