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David Poland

By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

BYOB: MIke Nichols

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I don’t want to play “write the best obit.” It’s exhausting already. But…

To paraphrase Cameron Crowe, Mike Nichols work completed me in a way that I didn’t know I needed completing. His films offered me truths that rang in my head as undeniably true, even when I was too young and inexperienced to know why. He never explained… he always showed, whether visually or with a brilliant turn of words crafted with one of the many great writers with whom he worked. And with his death, a feeling of loss, that like the experience of his work, is deeper than I can really understand.

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6 Responses to “BYOB: MIke Nichols”

  1. Who plays “write the best obit?”

  2. movieman says:

    Most of the obits I’ve read (or heard on NBC Nightly News) got huge chunks of info wrong.
    One claimed that “Carnal Knowledge” and “Catch 22” flopped with auds and crix at the time of their original release.
    Not quite.
    Both got generally excellent reviews (particularly “CK”) and were major water cooler hits in the summers of 1970 and ’71. And both played (first run) in theaters for months (and months) back in the pre-home video era.
    The only way “22” could have been considered a “disappointment” was (a) its considerable expense; and (b) that it opened a mere 6 months after cultural touchstone/b.o. behemoth “M*A*S*H” which it was erroneously compared to.
    The same idiot remarked that 1975’s “The Fortune” was a “comeback” for Nichols after the combined “failure” of those two films (and “DOTD,” which was a critical and commercial stiff although I love it dearly). It was “The Fortune” that stiffed; particularly shocking at the time considering the fact that Nichols’ Nicholson/Beatty pairing arrived on the heels of “Chinatown” and “Shampoo.”
    NBC wrongly credited Nichols as director of the film version of “Barefoot in the
    “Park” and said that “Primary Colors” was made for television.
    That kind of shit “journalism” really pisses me off.

  3. KrazyEyes says:

    Considering that most of your obits are the equivalent of throwing up a photo and leaving a BYOB I don’t think you’re in any danger of winning the “write the best obit” contest.

  4. The Pope says:

    @ Tapley & KrazyEyes
    There are two types of obits. The first is the one written by friends and then there are the ones written by critics. While the friends are always filled with sadness counterbalanced by a wish to share the happiness of their memories, the critics are in the business of revision, all too often with one eye on delivering the definitive piece. And those obits aren’t really about the deceased but the writer’s desire to nail the life.
    Read Anthony Lane’s piece in The New Yorker. It’s good until the last section when suddenly Lane tries to adopt Nichols’s humour. Of course he misses and thus so does the obit because suddenly it was no longer about Nichols but about Lane.

  5. Sam says:

    First, that obit in the NYT was exhaustive! It just kept going on and on but in a good way. I forgot how frequently he kept returning to Broadway. It seems that he just went in, did his job somewhat on the qt.

    His film body of work was astonishing and like Allen, Speilberg, etc. should serve as a reminder that everyone has their highs and lows, but to keep going. Who would think that someone who did Day of the Dolphon and The Fortune back to back would end up having a big fucking hit like The Birdcage 15 years later?

    And still followed with successes in various media including the underated Primary Colors and the epic Angels In America.

    I’ll always enjoy The Graduate and never tire of Liz and Dick going at it in Virginia Woolf, but my own personal favorite is his indictment of male male sexuality Carnal Knowledge. (Ann Margret so sexy, yet so broken.

  6. PcChongor says:

    “The Fortune” has always been one of the most underrated comedies of all-time. Without it, there’d be no Coen Brothers as we know them today.

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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon