Two dudes: Elaine May's lasting genius
The director's skills shine brightest in "Mikey and Nicky" and yes, "Ishtar"
At 92 years old, director Elaine May has plans to craft her first feature film in 40 years, with Dakota Johnson starring and producing. If the pending Crackpot never ends up on screens, it will be far from the first and only movie we’ve missed out on from May. Her truncated career as a director and writer in the misogynistic Hollywood machine means we missed out on a lot of work from May, and the eradicated possibilities still leave a decades-sized hole in movie history today.
Playwright and director Kenneth Lonergan summed up May’s treatment quite nicely in 2019 after working with her on his stage play, The Waverly Gallery:
“I’m not sure how well known it is that Elaine was the only woman film director working in the studio system in the 1970s,” he wrote for Variety. “And as a woman director notoriously pilloried for not working that system with the crafty skill of, say, a Mike Nichols or a Francis Ford Coppola, it’s impossible to say what other creative avenues she would have opened up had she been afforded the second, third and fourth chances afforded to innovative and difficult male directors when they disrupt the arbitrary norms of the moviemaking machine.”
It’s the firm belief of this writer that women filmmakers should be as demanding, stubborn, artistically driven, and money reckless as their male contemporaries, whose directorial idiosyncrasies are more often used to draw support for their work. They should also be able to fail in the same way. May refused to be pushed around by studio executives, and they hated her for it. There hadn’t been a woman director so sure of themselves and their vision with the tenacity to make it a reality since Ida Lupino. There also hadn’t been another production deal with a woman director in Hollywood till May. She was the third woman director inducted into the Directors Guild of America, behind Lupino and Dorothy Arzner. As a headstrong, unorthodox creator, her films were unfairly maligned upon release and like most genius, far ahead of its time, laying the path for thematic and aesthetic choices that would eventually become mainstays of film and television.
Two of her best films revolve around two loser dudes getting into all sorts of trouble: Mikey and Nicky and Ishtar. Her debut film, A New Leaf (1971), remains a singular entry in the romantic-comedy genre, but it is far from her best. Most of the blame for this could easily fall on the Paramount Pictures for stealing the film reels from her, and editing her original 180 minute run-time to a mere 102 minutes. The effort tried to fit a complicated, yet funny romance into the rigid framework of a Hollywood rom-com, and the final result muddles the messages about misogyny May apparently tried to make clear in the original project.
May reunited with Paramount after making the moderately successful black comedy The Heartbreak Kid, starring Cybill Shepard and Charles Grodin. After her return to the studio, Elaine released 1976’s Mickey and Nicky, which would tackle an entirely different genre: the gangster film. Her third feature is unbelievable brash and dread-ridden, pairing longtime friends and collaborators Peter Falk and John Cassavetes as two low-level gangsters on the run after one gets a contract put out on him by their boss. Its approach to the mafia story—which excludes the presence of any big bosses and focuses on two “yes” men—upends the hierarchal and luxurious world presented in the recently released The Godfather Part I and II. No one would watch Mikey and Nicky and fantasize about joining the underground grimy crime world presented, with its worry and sweat and stomach ulcers. It’s radically unglamorous, pulling gritty and uncaged performances from its lead actors as they push their on-screen friendship to its limits.
After her production bumbles with A New Leaf, May felt much more protective of Mikey and Nicky and of her filmmaking process. She loved improvisation on film, and sometimes Mikey and Nicky can feel like a long practice in the emotionally draining art of dramatic improv. But it all makes sense for May, who got her start in Hollywood after working with Mike Nichols as the improvisational comedy duo Nichols and May. They recorded four comedy albums together, winning Grammys and bringing their beloved act to Broadway and television screens. It seems absurd to deride May for using the performance style that made her a success, which was supposedly what got her the projects in the first place, but it remained a looming problem on set.
That’s not to say May acted as a budget-friendly, easygoing director on set, but most male directors hardly ever are. Under-budget films rarely make history. May famously left the cameras rolling for indeterminable lengths in the hopes of capturing an inspired impromptu moment between Falk and Cassavetes, reportedly scolding a camera operator for turning off a camera after the two actors left the set. The film’s budget eventually ballooned to $4.3 million under May’s perfectionist supervision, and used 1.4 million feet of film, an unheard of amount for even the lengthiest epics (Gone With The Wind was shot on 449,512 feet of film).
The end result provides a thrilling, original take on the genre, and offers a captivating examination of male friendship. Nicky (Cassavetes) commits interpersonal violence against the steady and seemingly supportive Mikey (Falk). He emasculates him in front of women, breaks his heirloom watch in a fit of impulsivity, and generally puts Mikey in charge of handling his immature tantrums. However, Nicky also remembers Mikey’s dead younger brother, tethering him to his childhood and family while calling back to boyish sense of time. On screen, they intuitively understand each other in a way that feels singular within their adult lives. They know exactly what makes each other tick, but also what consoles the other as they seemingly outrun Nicky’s death sentence. Falk and Cassavetes’ preexisting friendship makes the pair all the more touching and realistic, a dynamic brought up by May’s approach to filmmaking and acting.
Mikey and Nicky remains an obvious and much talked about influence for the Safdie brothers, with tense tone and extremely claustrophobic filming style, one utilized by Cassavetes in his own directorial projects. Cassavetes’ Nicky is a great predecessor for Adam Sandler’s Howie in Uncut Gems: Both impulsive, reckless, selfish, and doomed.
Paramount once again seized control of May’s final product after filming, releasing a reportedly hacked version of the film in theaters just long enough to fulfill contractual obligations, and for critics to run it through the ringer. May would not direct again until Ishtar (in the meantime, she worked as a co-writer on Reds, Tootsie, and Labyrinth). The version of the film audiences see today is the May-approved edit originally screened at the Museum of Modern Art in 1986, and was released by the Criterion Collection in 2019.
May did not sit in the director’s chair again until 1987. It was then she made the notorious Ishtar, starring Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty as two wannabe lounge songwriters who inadvertently becomes pawns for the CIA while traveling to a gig in Morocco. At the time of its release, Ishtar was smacked with the label, “the worst film ever made,” and failed at the box office due to the dire criticism, a problem made worse by the film’s very large budget.
The first 25 minutes of Ishtar are pure gold, with Hoffman and Beatty giving it their all as two born losers who support each other’s delusional music dreams. They sincerely believe in their mutual “talent” and destiny as songwriters, giving up romantic relationships and menial jobs to focus on becoming the new Simon & Garfunkel. No, the duo’s song are not worthy of a lavish record deal and worldwide acclaim, but they are undoubtably clever, and hilarious in delivery.
Its an early prototype of cringe comedy: a self aware representation of goofy, talentless dudes. Beatty and Hoffman—both Oscar nominees thanks to May’s work—stumble over metaphor-ridden lyrics, building songs about “hot fudge love.” The accomplished composer Paul Williams (The Muppet Movie, Phantom of the Paradise) wrote these songs, knowingly making cheesy ditties so bad they’re good. Its humor lies in buddies Lyle Rogers and Chuck Clarke earnestly committing to achieving their midlife crisis dreams, and maybe ‘80s audiences just weren’t ready for it. Audiences also weren’t ready for Beatty to play someone so dopey—an insecure character so against his typical type—which he does with excellent grace and pitch-perfect comedic timing.
Beatty and Hoffman both played characters unlike any others in their filmography, making Ishtar a standalone in their body of work. Similar to Mikey and Nicky, the lead characters of Ishtar have an unspoken love for one another, even though the one seen between Lyle and Chuck is filled with much more warmth, admiration, and support. It became a perfect springboard for buddy comedies to come, all the while targeting America’s nonsensical involvement in the Middle East.
While the film does lose steam in the last act, time has given Ishtar a long list of redeeming qualities, and it is far from the “worst film ever made”—a difficult label to quantify in the first place. May tried to make the big, action-driven blockbuster—on her own terms—with her vision trampled at nearly every turn, from the script’s inception to the editing room (once again). Similar to Paramount’s treatment of Mikey and Nicky, Columbia refused to properly promote the film, tossing it to already soured critics who had been fed information (possibly by sources at Columbia) about its production month’s ahead of its release. May’s innate talent became once again subsumed by on-set chatter and budgetary watchdogs, obfuscating the work at hand.
As with most misunderstood art, time has been very kind to May and her films, offering a new level of respect not previously paid to the vanguard director. The tangible success of her influence has now been seen over the decades, garnering new prestige for May. Genius is hard to understand in the moment sometimes, but its hindsight cannot undo the loss of May’s Hollywood shutout. Unfortunately, there’s no way to recover unmade work, which leaves us to just be grateful for the visionary films she managed to make in such a misguided system and conscious of those trying to do the same now.