BEFORE: This is still the week for the old and dead celebrities - jeez, at this point it's almost easier to count how many of the celebrities from the 1960's are still alive, there don't seem to be too many. Mel Brooks is still alive (at last reporting) and so is Elaine May - but Mike Nichols died in 2014. This special's been airing on HBO Max for some time now, I couldn't work it in last year but thankfully it's still available, and I can cross it off the list.
Anne Bancroft carries over from "Mel Brooks: Unwrapped".
THE PLOT: Filmmaker Mike Nichols sits down with theater director Jack O'Brien to discuss his personal life and professional work.
AFTER: Wow, you talk about lives LIVED, you have to talk about Mike Nichols, who started as an improv comic and ended up one of the top Hollywood directors of all time. It's like learning that the Beatles started out as a skiffle cover band who only played garden parties before becoming the biggest band in the Free World - but everybody gots to start somehere, I guess.
The early routines Nichols did with Elaine May were a hit, they were on every comedy show and they had a best-selling album and they even played Broadway - they may have had a basic framework for the premises but each night they never knew exactly where they were going to go with it. Apparently they tried to rehearse once, and it did not go well - nothing beat that feeling of being out on stage and letting the comedy develop, without a net, and I guess some things only come to you when you're in the moment.
But Nichols was also a fan of theater, and his life was changed by watching Brando in "A Streetcar Named Desire", so when the run of the improv act was over, he got into directing plays, starting with "Barefoot in the Park", his first gig directing a Neil Simon play, which was followed by another, "The Odd Couple". Other people directed these stories as movies later, but Nichols directed them as plays. (Robert Redford was in both stage and screen versions of "Barefoot" and Walter Matthau in both versions of "The Odd Couple".). And Nichols got Tony Awards for both productions.
Then Warner Brothers offered him the chance to direct another play, "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf", written by Edward Albee, as a movie. Nichols leapt at the opportunity, because he already knew the whole stage-play, in and out. He knew the timing, the story arcs, how long everything needed to be, he just had to learn to apply all that to a movie, with the film and the lenses and the editing and such. A lot of movies have been plays first, a lot of film directors have been stage directors, it doesn't seem that uncommon. No actors carried over from the stage play, but Warner wanted Elizabeth Taylor to play Martha, despite being too young, and Nichols then felt it made sense for her husband, Richard Burton, to play George. Those actors WERE the characters in real life, in many ways, and their marriage probably had just as many problems and issues that they could fight over, so it all seemed to make some kind of sense.
This documentary was recorded in two parts - one intimate discussion of Nichols' early films with theater director Jack O'Brien, and another discussion of the same films in front of an audience. The doc toggles between the two conversations, which is a bit jarring - the audience is not there, then they're there, then they're gone again - but this was apparently necessary to keep the best takes and the best anecdotes and present them in chronological order by film.
The conversation(s) with Nichols then turn to "The Graduate", a classic film if ever there was one. Dustin Hoffman had no prior acting experience, but that worked for a depressed California character who didn't know what to do with his life, and thus settled into an affair with his girlfriend's mother. It was satirical, but also deadpan and realistic, and all the Simon & Garfunkel music didn't hurt. We learn that it was just happenstance that Nichols was listening to their first album while starting the filming of "The Graduate", and he put two and two together and realized their songs were perfect for the soundtrack. But he hated the first song that they proposed for "Mrs. Robinson", so the duo took another song they were working on, called "Mrs. Roosevelt" and just changed the title and a few other lyrics.
The real shame here is that this special is only an hour long, and thus only covers his anecdotes about his first couple of films, made in the 1960's. I wish there could be another hour focusing on his films of the 1970's ("Catch-22" and "Carnal Knowledge"), an hour for his films of the 80's ("Silkwood", "Heartburn" and "Working Girl") and an hour for the 1990's ("Postcards from the Edge", "Regarding Henry", "The Birdcage" and "Primary Colors"). Yes, I realize that would be four hours long, but I think his body of work merits that - the "Spielberg" movie was two and a half hours, and the recent George Carlin documentary was THREE and a half. But Nichols died a few weeks after these two conversations were filmed, so we'll always be denied that.
What do Mel Brooks and Mike Nichols have in common? They're both on the list of EGOT (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony) winners, and there are only 17 if you don't count honorary awards. I've got one more documentary about another EGOT winner coming up in 10 days...
Also starring Mike Nichols (last seen in "George Carlin's American Dream"), Jack O'Brien
with archive footage of Julie Andrews (last seen in "Walt: The Man Behind the Myth"), Elizabeth Ashley, Carol Burnett (last seen in "Betty White: First Lady of Television"), Marlon Brando (last seen in "Spielberg"), Omar Sharif (ditto), Richard Burton (last seen in "The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart"), Art Carney (last seen in "The Late Show"), Leslie Caron (last seen in "The Last of the Blonde Bombshells"), Montgomery Clift (last seen in "Zeroville"), Sandy Dennis, Art Garfunkel (last seen in "Gordon Lightfoot: If You Could Read My Mind"), Paul Simon (ditto), Buck Henry (last seen in "Eating Raoul"), Dustin Hoffman (last seen in "Can We Take a Joke?"), Rock Hudson (last seen in "Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me"), Ann-Margret (last seen in "Magic"), Lee Marvin, Walter Matthau (last seen in "I.Q."), Elaine May (also last seen in "George Carlin's American Dream"), Robert Mitchum (last seen in "Promising Young Woman"), Mildred Natwick, Anthony Perkins (last seen in "They'll Love Me When I'm Dead"), Sidney Poitier, Robert Redford (last seen in "Havana"), Vanessa Redgrave (last seen in "The Gathering Storm"), Katharine Ross (last seen in "The Hero"), George Segal (last seen in "The Sparks Brothers"), Paul Sills, Neil Simon, Meryl Streep (last seen in "The Prom"), Jessica Tandy (last seen in "Best Friends"), Elizabeth Taylor (last seen in "The Automat"), Jack Warner
RATING: 5 out of 10 Broadway revivals
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