The Game is Present: The Implacable Elaine May
Elaine May shooting coverage for A New Leaf, making a process up as she went.
The process-oriented filmmaking method of Elaine May that angered the studios into justifying hampering the production, post-production or releasing of the four features she directed is easier to understand once we adopt the mental habits of producers. Many of the critics reviewing May’s four features did exactly this.
Bill Krohn’s cautionary words in Cahiers du Cinema’s Orson Welles issue in 1986 could easily apply to May: “This is no comfort to those of us eager to understand, and eager as critics always are to have the last word, which are not about to have with this filmmaker.......It is the last challenge, and the biggest joke, of an oeuvre that has always had more designs on us than we could ever have on it.” Welles once remarked that Hollywood studios form an impression of new talents early on and as with himself or Preston Sturges or Frank Sinatra, once they decide they don’t like someone, there is nothing that person can do to change their minds.
Add to this assessment the predicament of being a woman in a patriarchal studio system, defying the uniformly male perspective of the artform and it becomes a bit easier to see what the criminally undervalued director, writer and actor was up against. May’s process - from her time as one of the promethean developers of modern Chicago Theater and its improvisational approach to scenework, to the films she directed and the scripts she’d written, to the many more she’d worked on as a script doctor, to her work on screen in other people’s projects - suggested an ongoing and open method of discovery and transformation that necessarily rules out completion and closure. She purposely resisted categorization on set and off, admitting in private that she went as far as to purposely give contradictory answers and accounts in different interviews for her own amusement, confounding academic appraisals of her incredible and tragically hamstrung body of work even further.
Nichols and May in the early 60’s, whose act helped revolutionize standup comedy
In doing this, she treated being a public figure as one more game, one more Viola Spolin foundational theater exercise that privileged the act of being alive in the moment when exploring character and leading into story. You find the truth of a scene by taking cues and opportunities from those around you, and using strong instinctive responses to carry out a scene. Spolin, more or less the founder of the modern improvisational approach to acting, used games to foster a sense of focus and acuity in actors on stage. The process democratizes the performance of scene and improv by promoting the spirit of generosity and equality while cutting off anything too show-offy or self-serving.
This method, which places emphasis on awareness of space and the other actors, became the basis for the movement which began in Chicago with the opening of The Playwright’s Theater Club by director Paul Sills and producer-director David Shepard in 1953. Players included May and her future artistic partner Mike Nichols along with Barbara Harris, Fritz Weaver, Byrne and Joyce Piven, Ed Asner and Sheldon Patankin. In 1955, May was a member of Shepard’s Compass Players, whose immense impact would beget Second City and its renowned school of improv and writing.
These are the founding figures and organizations of the unique and internationally influential style of theater originating in Chicago in the middle of the 20th century and as a longtime student of the Piven Theatre Workshop where I myself train as an actor, I can tell you they are deservedly lionized artists in this town. May’s strict adherence to the principles of this improvisational form would carry through in her groundbreaking performances and recordings with Mike Nichols, the films she directed and appeared in, the many more she wrote and this prickly presentation of herself in the public eye - a kind of elusive performance of its own.
Mike Nichols was the dufus always a step behind Elaine May in these scenes. Character-wise, she held the power, but the joke was that she was clueless as to her capacity to wield it over him.
Of course, this adds an element to her films - in which Spolin’s games are always present in some form - as explorations of character and to her filmmaking as a process of theatrical exercise that resists categorization by genre. They’re dark comedies (or unexpectedly funny dramas) with roles written by the director from the standpoint of an actor. Their ignoble protagonists range from questionable to downright pathetic. They’re feminist features about men. They’re surprisingly transgressive for mainstream features, in which established actors are cast boldly against type.
May’s open-ended, explorative approach to shooting resulted in three hour long rough cuts assembled from over a million feet of footage, which brought a retaliatory effort by the studios to suppress and control production and final cut privileges that would only worsen with each new project. Her subsequent creative and legal battles with the studios over the years, in which we hear of stories of May smuggling canisters of her footage out of studio lots in the trunk of her car, are evidence of the vision that had to be carried out on her own terms, the procedures and rules of which she was improvising as she went along.
The studios would use her ballooned budgets, her failure to deliver a film on time, her erratic temperament on set and hostility toward their authority as justifications for their restriction of women from the director’s chair. May’s hiring by Paramount to direct her own script in 1971 could, judging by the reportedly low enthusiasm from studio heads at the time, be read as an attempt for the studio to appear supportive of female artists.
May’s rather extraordinary tightrope act of a performance in A New Leaf, which she wrote and directed, was a landmark form of debut for a rising female talent at that time. The DVD package from Olive Signature includes some highly informative special features.
Her brilliant characterization of Henrietta, the quirky and awkward botanist in A New Leaf (1971), gives us a sense of what studios found beguiling about her talent. For May’s debut feature, she wrote herself a part that capitalizes on her mastery of conveying emotional inexperience through gesture. A daughter of a wealthy family who’s marked for murder following marriage to Walter Matthau’s aloof, bankrupt playboy, she is simply so absorbed in her work as a botanist that she’s unable to see that she’s being taken advantage of by everyone around her. Totally unfamiliar with romance, Henrietta finds in Henry an unlikely partner in social ineptitude.
What’s amazing is that May's work on screen here never feels like a stunt. As quirky and nebbish as Henrietta is, she never comes across as anything but a real woman. The character should come off to us as pathetic and contrived but she never does. She’s someone we know because May’s script and rendering of her illustrate the space of the character with imagination and style. What May does with her hands alone on screen is ingenious. Never will you see an actor better use their hands to express a character’s state in the present moment.
The humor of the scene in which Henry the Aspiring Murderer kneels on broken glass to propose to her, in spite of his dark intentions, remains grounded in human comedy. He’s playing the part of a romantic, putting up with her glaring unworthiness - characterized by the wine stain on her mouth. Meanwhile, the sweetly clueless Henrietta is too insular and flattered to see through Henry’s transparent patronizing.
Watch Elaine May’s hands in this scene (or any scene) as a means of adding gravity to a characterization. Her hands are always in character. A New Leaf is a remarkable debut and not even May’s best work.
The added specificity of May’s identity as a Jewish woman must have complicated Hollywood's plan for selling audiences on her gifts even further. Jewishness had always been hidden in American movies. As more explicitly Jewish male performers like Dustin Hoffman, Elliot Gould, Mel Brooks and Woody Allen were just becoming visible in movies in the 60’s, Jewish women - who they were, their ambitions and values - remained almost totally invisible.
The identity of the male Jewish hero in movies (always explored curiously via dark satire) was something tangible: intelligent, neurotic, standing apart from white bread America. May, whose rise to fame with Mike Nichols in the 60’s happened almost instantly, was never as famous as someone like Barbara Streisand and yet her knowing satire of the American Jewish male characterizes her talent as an essential Jewish female artist in the purest sense. She was not just mocking and critiquing the system that left her out but the vanity and self-loathing egotism of the Jewish artists who got in, automatically characterizing Jewish femaleness as something else entirely.
For The Heartbreak Kid (1972), she essentially burrowed deeper into themes and ideas first explored in A New Leaf. In that film, the avuncular Matthau’s initial disgust with his socially unacceptable Jewish bride was a by-product of his calculated intention to murder her for her money before changing his mind and falling in love with her. In Heartbreak Kid, the plot by Lenny Cantrow to dump his Jewish bride, Lila, (May’s actual daughter Jeannie Berlin in one of movie casting’s great twists of the knife) for Kelly, the idealized “shiksa goddess” embodied by Cybill Shepherd is hastily improvised by its unreliable protagonist.
This was the only May-directed feature without a May script and despite Neil Simon’s strict provision that his script for The Heartbreak Kid not be changed, May’s unmistakable personal stamp on every scene is so strong that the script is often understandably mistakenly attributed to her. Freed from the added task of appearing on screen, May’s stripping of 1970’s manhood plays like a dark satire of her pal Nichols’ hit The Graduate (1967). It is, for me, May’s best film.
Just as in The Graduate, an aimless nouveau riche Jewish male is trying to leave a Jewish woman while courting another, supposedly more acceptable and “pure” Gentile one. In what I would say is far and away Charles Grodin’s best performance, Lenny’s tour de force in craven emotional cruelty is never evolved or reckoned with. By the end of the story, he has gained no insight into his “accomplishment,” which leaves him looking as bored and listless as Hoffman’s Benjamin seated on the bus. Only Lenny is without his bride seated next to him, presumably ready to start the cycle of passive-aggressive devastation and brown-nosed bargaining all over again.
Critic J. Hoberman in his essay on May’s male protagonists: “Self-hatred merged with self-absorption, narcissism seemed indistinguishable from personal liberation, and alienation was a function of identity. The desire for the unattainable, for otherness entangled with May’s ongoing theme of betrayal.”
Grodin was so effective in his role, he received hate mail from angry viewers. He's the last person to tell you May had used him as any kind of hero: “I always thought the character in The Heartbreak Kid was a despicable guy.”
Placing May as a feminist filmmaker presents still another challenge. If finding one’s identity within this contemporary morass as a Jewish American is hard enough, asserting oneself as a woman from May’s perspective seemed insurmountable. May’s rise to stardom preceded second-wave feminism and in keeping with her obfuscatory public persona when asked whether her gender had influenced her work in 1972, she said, “I don’t think it’s important whether you’re a man, a woman or a chair.” She resisted all labels, and though I think May’s directorial positions are clear across all her films and her Nichols-directed screenplays and that May’s work is deeply and undeniably feminist, it’s important to take note of critical context at the time. ONLY a woman could have directed a movie like The Heartbreak Kid, in which Lenny’s announcement at the restaurant to Lila (played endearingly by Berlin to appear innocently unbearable like Henrietta in A New Leaf) that he’s leaving her is met with looks of disgust and disappointment from every woman sitting in the vicinity, which the camera is apt to catch.
Sadly, critics like Barbera Koening Quart and Molly Haskell at the time complained that May had “softened the edges” or that May had only zeroed in on a certain type of exclusively Jewish male fantasy. In reading their assertions, it seems hard to shake their implication that to center on a male main character in a movie is to privilege a man’s viewpoint, disqualifying it as feminist work or at the very least, dangerously reducing it to an oversimplified state. Much harder in fact perhaps to see that May made feminist films that subvert The Male Gaze and challenge men; their fragile egos, cowardice, vanity, and ruinous obsessions with status.
If you see one film mentioned in this piece, it should be the ballet of awkwardness that is The Heartbreak Kid. Then Mikey and Nicky.
This particular feminist statement, much less overt than Barbara Loden’s neglected, rediscovered and now rightly championed masterpiece Wanda (1973), stung because it struck at commercial cinema’s fixation on the psychology, fantasies, hierarchies, pastimes, wallowings, obsessions and identity crises of men. Not just the Jewish male storytellers like William Wyler (Funny Girl), novelist Phillip Roth or even Mike Nichols, but on the entire pathetic male species, which in 1972 had its most ego-puffing year yet with the biggest box office draws that featured those fixations being The Godfather, Aguirre, The Wrath of God, The Harder They Come, Jeremiah Johnson, Junior Bonner, Last Tango In Paris, Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex, Fat City, Deliverence, Cisco Pike and The Candidate to name a few.
Apparently, it was harder still to recognize Mikey and Nikey (1976) as a feminist feature and yet it survives today as a corrosive masterpiece about the emptiness of 20th century maleness. In this passion project, she focuses on male friendship, executed with the actor-friendly influence of John Cassevetes, who stars alongside Peter Falk. Mikey and Nicky has the feel of a Cassevetes work in the way the dynamic between the actors and its subtextual implications are mutable and alive in the moment. It’s one long period spent with these two men, more or less a Long Dark Night Of The Soul where the vagaries of the journey mirror the messy and at times volatile nature of their relationship.
The first names of the main characters in May’s amazing third feature suggest her former stage partner, who named the younger love interest in The Graduate, “Elaine.”
It has many of the more familiar characteristics of Cassevetes feature; it exists in the here and now, with no cognizance of the past or future. The plot is propelled forward by the characters and their decisions from one minute to the next, imbuing the momentum of the story with a sense of immediacy. The dialogue seems improvised but was tightly scripted, and rehearsed so extensively as to appear like extensions of the existence of the characters on screen. The performances are naturalistic and Cassevetes’s and Falk’s recitations of the lines feels edgy and discomforted. Their actions feel impulsive and May, who’d been spending time with Cassevetes and had admired his work, gives them the space to be messy, unpredictable and real people, contributing to the feeling watching the film that anything is possible. This is what Cassevetes’ brand of drama demonstrates that May understood from her Compass days - the intrinsic fascination of people just being people.
In the scene attached below, the improv-based gameplay as a foundation for scenework that May absorbed in Chicago is never more present. It’s a battle for the upper hand in which the men trade tactics such as sabotage, insult, mockery, escape, tousling, yelling, condemnation, silence, apologizing and bargaining. The power in the scene keeps shifting between the two of them. Their relationship is fraternal at times, paternal at others, with Falk’s low-level gangster as both a nurturing figure and an antagonist to Cassevetes’ paranoid thug, on the run after ripping off the mob to pay a debt.
The vicissitudes of their rocky dynamic are relentlessly conveyed in realist terms and it’s a merciless venture in this casting of male friendships as inevitable vessels for betrayal and deception. What’s amazing is that behind that fear of these characters, May’s love for them is apparent. They come across as life size. Beautifully tragic. And despite their relegation to the background of this story, May’s female characters are not spared from this ambivalent tone.
It was at this point that the studios had had enough of Elaine May and her method. The free-wheeling collaborative process that had seen her turn in a rambling, disheveled film to match rambling, disheveled characters had resulted in even Cassevetes having to intervene on her behalf with respect to a production in which May shot over a million feet of footage, going as far as to leave the cameras rolling when the lead actors took a break “in case they came back.”
The production went almost 50 days over schedule, and had a budget that ballooned from $1.8 million to $4.3 million and this would cement May’s reputation in Hollywood as a liability. The studio enacted its own final cut privilege, with prints being snuck out of the studio lot by May in the trunk of her car. Such a production fits a story like Mikey and Nicky, which seems like it’s always about to jump off a cliff in a crazed and manic sadness that could at any minute turn into a fit of laughter.
For Mikey and Nicky, May followed Cassevetes’ example of exhaustive and explorative rehearsals for their scenes but went as far as to keep the cameras rolling in case the actors did anything she found useful.
The recent critical and cultural reversal on Ishtar (1987) seems like less and less of a surprise as the years pass. May’s final assignment was also the final failure of the studio system - having snuffed out what remained of May’s studio clout - to place her in a commercially viable, mainstream context. She made costly, bratty mistakes over the course of an unmoored, ego-choked production, but of course, no woman had been given the space and money to make them before. May’s inability to turn in a film on time and under budget was the product of a system that gave women no opportunity, no forum in which to practice learning how not to do so. She was effectively set up to fail.
Thus Ishtar, which lost the studios an obscene amount of money and which the trade press and pop culture gatekeepers took great pleasure in trashing at the time, has come around to be regarded as an overlooked item. This should come as no surprise given its characteristically savvy look at maleness, this time within the context of American cluelessness about the Middle East.
While I believe that Ishtar is the weakest of the four theatrical films May directed, I throw my hat in with the view that it has a number of merits and is by no means a failure. Again we get a male friendship, undone by the phoniness that makes it function, this time set against the backdrop of international intrigue and pitched in the style of a Bing Crosby/Bob Hope road comedy from the 1940’s.
May’s assignment to this far-flung project came at the behest of Warren Beatty, who plays Lyle, the awkward and seemingly virginal sidekick to Dustin Hoffman’s cocky lothario Chuck (and there’s a neat reversal in typecasting ever there was one). They’re hack songwriters who encounter an unearthed mythical map foretelling of the coming of two saviors (for whom they’re mistaken) as they become embroiled in a CIA plot to overthrow a murderous Middle Eastern dictator by removing a left-wing opposition.
I find much of Ishtar rather loveable. It’s love-to-hate-it reception in this county and its status as a film maudit boondoggle of the first order overshadows its success as a piece of anti-Reaganist satire with great bad songs written by Paul Williams.
Using a trusted Hollywood entertainment trope, along with a top star (Beatty, who also produced) to implicate the CIA’s diversion of funds towards the anti-Sandinista forces in Nicaragua, which would involve the decorated US general Oliver North violating the constitution and lying to congress, is nervy on a never-before-seen level in Hollywood filmmaking. With President Ronald Reagan implicated in the scandal, May’s story used two uniquely American male bimbos, their deluded ideas about their own importance, their indifference to anything outside of their own ambitions, to link Hollywood and the US government’s duplicitous actions.
The link between Hollywood and Washington (as represented by Reagan) is in their shared emphasis on appearances, their narcissism and solipsism, their self-serving justifications, oiled by the stubborn treachery of the male ego. It doesn’t always work, but almost every element of Ishtar feels like an upturned middle finger to the traditional notion of America and its anachronistic patriarchal system. It deserves to be seen, right down to its final revelations about performance, about what it is to be a loser and in whose eyes such a judgment really matters.
Despite not getting an opportunity to get behind the camera again until a PBS documentary about Mike Nichols two years after his death made for the station’s American Masters series in 2016, May continued to write and doctor scripts and her voice remained unmistakable. I would even go as far as to say I consider the three screenplays May penned in the 90’s, Heaven Can Wait (1991), The Birdcage (1996), and Primary Colors (1998) to be projects whose prime authorship belongs to May and not the directors Beatty and Buck Henry in the former or Nichols in the latter two. Each film, again turning a comically critical eye on headstrong, egotistical male subjects, displays a kind of color and nuance viewers were not likely to find elsewhere in much of commercial cinema from the period. May remained a thorn in the side of the studio system that had thrown her out. She repeatedly wrote the most difficult kind of movie to get made - the smart, edgy mainstream drama-dy.
Nathan Lane and Robin Williams in a May script that sharply mocks the idea of traditional “family values” America propped up by the new wave of culture war conservatives led by Pat Buchanan (played in The Birdcage by Gene Hackman) as a fallacy made possible only by drag queens.
If you see only one of these features, I’d recommend the Nichols-directed Primary Colors, which in its dissection of the Clinton phenomenon, hasn’t dated as badly as one might think, even in our radically different political atmosphere. Not that the intelligent humor of Heaven Can Wait, or May’s thesis in The Birdcage that only homosexual drag queens can fit into the Republican ideal of the traditional nuclear family are any less trenchant or that those films aren’t also worth seeing. But in Primary Colors, the Bill and Hillary figures, played respectively by John Travolta and Emma Thompson, are people we have mixed feelings about in the scandal-ridden atmosphere we came to know in the 90’s. The movie seems eerily prescient in trying to grasp at the slippery nature of the new era of mass media that seems to pervade every element of our lives today.
As Robert Altman’s Tanner 88 series for HBO was an insight into how presidential campaigns are run in the 80’s, Primary Colors updates this assessment for the 90’s, when focus-group rhetoric and political correctness have entered the fray. There’s a chasm between ideals and actions in modern politics that perhaps renders true authenticity (along our obsession with it) moot and impossible. May’s presentation, which is thoughtful, urgent, witty and entertaining all at once, has enough respect for the audience to leave the moral judgements up to the viewer. Critical reviews for these features were mixed, as May’s hard-to-pin-down style, though unmistakably bearing her authorship and intellectually prescient as always, refused to tell her audience what to think and how to feel about complex people and their situational, erratic behavior.
Travolta turns in such good work in Primary Colors as May’s Bill Clinton surrogate, it’s easy to overlook how smart the script is and how the rest of the supporting cast, which includes Emma Thompson, Kathy Bates, Larry Hagman, Adrian Lester and Billy Bob Thornton, have such a field day with it
I’d be ashamed to admit I’d only gotten my first look at May with her brilliant performance in Woody Allen’s Small Time Crooks (2000), stealing scenes without even appearing to be trying. But then I’d go on to learn how terribly underseen May is on screen in general, following her near industry-wide snubbing after Ishtar. May’s initial rise to fame just preceded the moment when female artists learned that the best way to operate independently of the male-run studio system was to fight, rather than ingratiate their way in.
So it’s important that we talk about May to the same degree we talk about Shirley Clarke, Joan Micklin Silver, Claudia Weill and other pioneering female filmmakers whose decidedly more independent approaches made them hotter subjects for critical analysis, even as May’s anti-auteurist career resisted tidy summations by her own design. Whether or not she consciously saw herself as a feminist artist, she was always critiquing and challenging the roles patriarchal society expected women to play, on and off screen. Before it was cool.
May in Small Time Crooks, again masterfully using her hands to convey inner thoughts in broad material that seemed not to allow for such nuance.
All the while, she was playing a very simple and organic kind of improv game. And she was playing strictly. Taking empty containers for story and character and just filling and filling and filling them. Even as she was branded as “difficult” or “a perfectionist,” and her career was dismantled by Hollywood, she never lost sight of the belief (first espoused publicly by Mike Nichols) that all scenes fit into three categories: seductions, negotiations and fights. She placed this mantra in the realm of provocative social satire and thrust it into the mainstream in a manner that should put her alongside a figure like Preston Sturges, tirelessly and relentlessly poking holes in inflated male egos and the powerful institutions they hid behind: high society, professional politics, corporate America, the mob. Her consistent categorical implacability has made her a cult figure when she undoubtedly deserves an American Masters special of her own.
In May’s world, we are all students of Viola Spolin’s classroom. She gives the audience just the hint of a scene. Nothing more than a suggestion. Then actors colonize the space with their exchanges, senses and imaginations and the scenes develop organically because she gets the audience working with her. Even in teasing out material that can be ticklish, anxious and discomforting, she knows that if you give the audience too much, they won’t contribute anything of their own. This is the power of theater and film can work the same way. When we arrive at that moment, that’s when the wheels of performative art leave the ground, because viewing the characters and their explorative journey and its discoveries has become a social act, one the artist has led us into participating in, while making us believe it was our idea.
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