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“Don’t Expect to Like ‘Em:” The Making of Elaine May’s Mikey and Nicky
Mikey and Nickey Entering to a standing ovation at a Friday-night screening of Mikey and Nicky at New York’s Metrograph on December 6, Elaine May looked out at the full house. “I was told this entire audience is made up of editors,” she said. And then, mock-anticipating their first question, she declared “Steenbeck,” name-checking the flatbed editing table on which her 1976 film was cut. The event was organized by the American Cinema Editors as part of their ongoing Filmcraft series at the Lower East Side Theater, and May was accompanied onstage by two editors; series moderator Phillip Schopper, and Jeffrey Wolf, who was an apprentice in the Mikey and Nicky cutting room.
There were plenty of non-editors in the theater as well, enjoying a film that was barely seen when it opened and is now widely considered one of the essential works of the New Hollywood era, a darkly comic, ultimately tragic drama of friendship and betrayal among a pair of small-time mobsters. John Cassavetes is Nicky, who has stolen money from his boss and suspects–rightly–that he is the target of a hit job. Peter Falk is his friend Mikey, who spends the entire night with the hopeless task of trying to settle Nicky’s shattered nerves. It’s something like a hyped-up Abbott and Costello by way of Mean Streets that takes us on a nocturnal journey that is equally exhilarating and despairing.
Taking more than three years to make, the behind-the-scenes saga may be better known than the movie itself. (The tsuris is outlined in vivid detail in Carrie Courogen’s lively new biography Miss May Does Not Exist). The monumentally long shoot, which required 110 days of night-for-night filming in Philadelphia and Los Angeles, yielded nearly 1.5 million feet of film–more than three times the amount for Gone with the Wind. This was followed by nearly two years of editing, in Los Angeles and New York, interrupted by duelling lawsuits between May and Paramount. By the time the film was ready for release in late 1976, the studio was under new leadership. Focused on the blockbuster release of King Kong, Paramount dumped Mikey and Nicky in just a handful of theaters, supported by small newspaper ads with the memorably off-putting message “Mikey and Nicky. Don’t expect to like ‘em.”
While this tagline may have been playing into the vogue for cinematic antiheroes (after all, this was the year of Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle), it was also meant to manage expectations. The ad made no mention of May, whose successful first two films, A New Leaf and The Heartbreak Kid, were much lighter in tone–at least on the surface. I talked this week to Julian Schlossberg, a Paramount executive at the time of the release, who left the studio in 1977 to start a distribution company that would acquire the rights to Mikey and Nicky. About the infamous tag line, he said “If you were trying to do The Producers and lose money, that’s the way to do it.”
Asked at the Metrograph about the genesis of Mikey and Nicky, May first joked, “I was thinking, for what movie can I get so sued by a studio…What is a movie that has no laughs? Well, it has laughs, just not the cheery kind.” She then explained that the film’s origins go back to a short play she wrote in Chicago in the early 1950s based on memories of the petty crooks in her neighborhood, including some of her mother’s friends, who worked for gangsters like Bugsy Siegel and Mickey Cohen. The incongruity of these criminals’ double lives was striking. “Bugsy Siegel, he bought a tree for Israel every year, went to temple every Saturday, was wonderful to his mother,” said May. And the low-level mobsters in her Chicago suburb were good neighbors. “Peter [Falk] was a method actor,” said May. “When he wanted to know about how gangsters lived, I sent him to my mother.”
In addition to its roots in her personal memories, Mikey and Nicky also happens to fit in perfectly with a throughline that goes through all of May’s work, from her caustically brilliant comedy sketches with Mike Nichols to her films as writer-director. The theme, as J. Hoberman succinctly put it, is “the abjectness of women and the idiocy of men.” Some of the most emotionally devastating moments in Mikey and Nicky involve the mistreatment by the men of the women in their lives. In a particularly harrowing scene, Nicky molests his girlfriend at her apartment while Mikey waits in the kitchen, and then, in an appalling act, pimps her out to Mikey.
Acutely capturing the constantly shifting scales of trust and paranoia, vulnerability and bravado between its characters, the film is a series of set pieces, messy encounters pitting Nicky’s volcanic childish behavior against Mikey’s desperation to hold things together, a turbulent dynamic that is exploded when it becomes clear that the bonds of friendship will not be strong enough to prevent a shocking betrayal. This turn of events reflects one of the realities of gangster life that first inspired May to write this story. When a gangster stole money from within, the punishment was death. “It was like a Greek story,” said May, “If you stole they killed you. Nobody who had a hit on them ever left town. And they always called on the guy’s best friend to do the hit.”
Defiantly unconventional, the film opened to sharply mixed reviews. Vincent Canby in The New York TImes warned that “it’s a melodrama about male friendship told in such insistently claustrophobic detail that to watch it is to risk an artificially induced anxiety attack,” and concluded “Miss May is a witty, gifted, very intelligent director. It took guts for her to attempt a film like this, but she failed.” When it was rereleased by Schlossberg in 1985 at the Cinema 1, in the slightly trimmed director’s cut, Canby recommended the film, admitting that despite his reservations at the time, “it has many articulate supporters who may now prove the rest of us wrong.” (The original release version was 118 minutes long; the current version–preferred by May–is 106 minutes.)
Among the film’s strong supporters at the time was New Republic critic Stanley Kauffman, who chose it as one of the decade’s top ten films. Revisiting the film a few years after its initial release, he wrote: “Seen after The Deer Hunter, which tried to deal with male mystique and only fitfully succeeded, May’s film treats the subject with greater and more scathing precision, by taking the male companionship below the hearty and respectable rituals of hunting, even of war, to the stripped extremity of the criminal world, where the theme of latent homosexual love-and-fear burns through.”
The press didn’t always treat May so well. Marred by clear misogyny, much of the coverage about the making of Mikey and Nicky, and later Ishtar, suggested May lost control of both projects, resulting in going way over schedule. But something May said at the Metrograph Q&A made it clear that she was never really out of control. Instead, she took great pleasure in immersing herself deeply in each of the film’s three creative phases–writing, shooting, and editing–and used each as an opportunity to explore and deepen the material. After commenting, “I was in the editing room, and there was a lot of footage,” panelist Jeffrey Wolf, an apprentice editor on Mikey and Nicky, asked, “How did you keep it all in your head?” May responded drily, “Movies, although edited, are also written…you’re not a schmuck after you’ve written it. You know what it’s about. When you write a movie you always remember what you had in mind originally.”
In an episode of his Video Archives podcast praising Mikey and Nicky, Quentin Tarantino called May “One of the greatest screenwriters of all time.” Because of her improv comedy background, and the film’s resemblance to a John Cassavetes film, May is frequently asked if Mikey and Nicky was improvised. “No,” she told the audience. “It’s impossible to improvise a movie that’s so plotted, where you have to set up the ending.” Comparing their working methods, Wolf quoted Tarantino, who said that “Elaine May movies are shot, John Cassavetes movies are captured.” Unlike Cassavetes, May is first and foremost a writer, who starts with a story in mind, where Cassavetes, as a director, was always hoping to find a story during the filming. Improvisation was part of his method, and Cassavetes agreed to first perform May’s script as written, for the first takes, and then he and Falk were allowed to do variations with ad libs. May often filmed with three cameras running simultaneously, usually running the camera for the full ten minutes that the magazine held.
While the second draft of the film was created during filming, the final draft was written during the editing. “All performances are made in the editing room,” said Wolf, who said that May truly loved the editing process, where she could sculpt the film’s final draft. “She’s a very joyous individual. She’d sit in the cutting room and smoke cigars. We’d make splices with mylar tape, and she’d often burn a match under the mylar to make sure it wasn’t easy to change the cut.” Wolf allowed that May did sometimes have the problem of “feeling there’s always one more thing you can do. And she was worried that the type of humor in the film wouldn’t be accepted. It was great at the Metrograph to see how well the film played as comedy.”
