At Metrograph theater on Friday, a crowd of around 175 people was treated to the cinephile’s equivalent of a Bigfoot sighting on the Lower East Side: A rare public appearance by the 92-year-old writer, director and actress Elaine May.
May chooses her creative projects sparingly — she won a Tony in 2019 for her last major acting role, in “The Waverly Gallery” — and almost never sits for interviews. But her friend and longtime collaborator Phillip Schopper convinced her that it was a worthwhile occasion: A screening, hosted by the American Cinema Editors society, of the director’s cut of her storied 1976 gangster flick, “Mikey and Nicky,” followed by a craft-oriented discussion with Schopper and an assistant editor on the film, Jeffrey Wolf. “Ask me anything,” May said to them at the start of a lively 40-minute discussion — a tantalizing prospect coming from such an elusive figure.
May’s directorial career started out with a hit: Her riotous 1971 comedy “A New Leaf,” which was released a decade after the dissolution of her era-defining professional partnership with Mike Nichols.
But in 1973, as she began shooting “Mikey and Nicky” — a bleakly funny tale of wounded masculinity and betrayal, starring John Cassavetes and Peter Falk — she and the executives at Paramount started butting heads. In part because she needed to work around Falk’s busy “Columbo” schedule, production went late and over budget. When May did not deliver a cut of the film by the contractual deadline, and several reels of the film mysteriously disappeared, Paramount sued her. Litigation stretched on for nearly year, until, in May’s telling on Friday, studio executives “got really nervous that I would be jailed.” She heard one of the higher-ups reason, “Do we really want to be the only studio that has ever jailed a director for going over budget?”
In the end, as May recalled, they reached a compromise: “They actually gave me the movie back because they didn’t want to promote it, because they thought it would be such a flop.” Paramount buried it with an extremely limited release over Christmas 1976. Critics largely spurned it — in The Times, Vincent Canby wrote of May that “it took guts for her to attempt a film like this, but she failed” — and audiences who associated May’s name with zany comedy were put off by the film’s dark tone.
In recent years, though, “Mikey and Nicky” has been the subject of a reappraisal and has finally found an audience, thanks in part to a 4K restoration of the director’s cut that was supervised by Schopper and released by Criterion in 2019. May’s directorial reputation, too, has been on the rise over the past decade. To a younger generation of cinephiles that does not remember the press’s frenzied fascination with the Paramount lawsuit or the production travails of her fourth and final film, “Ishtar,” May is now appreciated as a maverick filmmaker who challenged the studio’s whims and worked on her own terms. The audience that had sold out the Metrograph screening in mere minutes was noticeably reverent and intergenerational.
Though “Mikey and Nicky” seemed like a left turn for May when it was released, she emphasized in the post-screening discussion that it was, for her, a personal tale, informed by the stories she heard from mob-connected family members and neighbors while growing up in Chicago. The particular codes of honor among thieves fascinated her. “If you stole, you didn’t go to trial or anything — they killed you,” she said. “So nobody really stole much.” When there was a hit out on someone, she said, the target would almost never leave town. “It was as though it was their fate. It’s sort of like a Greek play,” she said. And, as in the movie, “The best friend always turned them in. Always! How they didn’t remember that from the last time, I don’t know, but that’s what happened.”
Cassavetes and Falk embodied these hapless characters and deliver their rat-a-tat dialogue so convincingly that the first thing May is always asked about “Mikey and Nicky” is if it was improvised. It wasn’t. Cassavetes, she said, was actually “the most Method actor ever. He had to know everything, every word.”
May has a reputation for having a keen sense of an actor’s performance, and she recalled that Cassavetes often sought her approval. “When I would say ‘Cut!,’ John would say to Peter, ‘She hated it.’” Falk would be perplexed: All she said was “Cut!” But May mused, “He was always right, John. Years later, I figured out why. It’s because he hated it. And he knew if he didn’t like it, I wouldn’t like it.”
Even at 92, May has retained her dry, daffy wit and her immaculate timing with one-liners. Audience members leaned forward to catch every word, every anecdote — and every zinger. Jeffrey Wolf suggested that after May’s battle with Paramount, “The affirmation is tonight, people coming to see the film.”
May shrugged and said to the crowd, in her wryly self-deprecating way, “I made it as interesting as I could.”
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