'American Masters: Mike Nichols': A Genius For Comedy
American Masters kicks off its 30th season on Friday night with a profile of Mike Nichols, best known now, I suppose, as the director of The Graduate and the HBO movie of Tony Kushner’s play Angels in America. Those with longer memories know and love Nichols’ work with Elaine May: As a comic duo in the 1960s, they improvised some of the funniest comedy routines anyone has ever created, leaving behind a series of classic comedy recordings that are still exceedingly funny today.
May has directed this American Masters, which relies heavily on Julian Schlossberg’s interviews with Nichols, who died in 2014. The result is a fairly vivid portrait of Nichols, who, after the break-up of the Nichols and May act, became one of the most successful theater and film directors in America. All I need to do is list a few more of his directing credits: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, the original production of The Odd Couple, Barefoot in the Park, Silkwood, Working Girl.
Nichols was an effortlessly entertaining raconteur, poker-faced and full of good show-biz anecdotes laced with wicked interpretations and sarcasm. In this PBS hour, he seems at ease with Schlossberg, sometimes too much at ease — as though he knows Schlossberg won’t push him into areas Nichols may not want to go, such as his movie flops in the 1970s including The Day of the Dolphin (1973) and The Fortune (1975). Beyond a brief comment about how his unsuccessful adaptation of Catch-22 (1970) didn’t “feel right,” there’s little about the difficulties and botched projects any artist inevitably endures, and which, I would bet, Nichols might have been equally insightful.
Anyone who’s read John Lahr’s extensive 2000 New Yorker profile of Nichols won’t learn much new, and, oddly enough, American Masters has already produced a superior piece on Nichols, the completely captivating Nichols and May: Take Two, in 1996. Interest in Nichols will only increase. There is a major Nichols biography being written by my former colleague Mark Harris that is eagerly anticipated. Until then, Friday’s American Masters is a fine introduction to the man.
American Masters: Mike Nichols airs Friday on PBS. Check your local listings.
