Vital Viewing (People Will Talk Edition)

 

Filmmaker Robert Altman was born on this day in 1925. He died in 2006, but not before first receiving an Honorary Oscar for lifetime achievement. Lily Tomlin and Meryl Streep offer a rather lengthy introduction (which I'll explain in a bit), and then the great director himself: 

Robert Altman's revelation that he once had a heart transplant took just about anyone who recognized the name Robert Altman completely by surprise. Finding out you need a heart transplant, preparing beforehand for a heart transplant, recuperating from a heart transplant--doesn't all that take a while? No one could remember Altman being absent for any length of time. Now, he was a movie director and not a movie star, and so unlike the latter, Altman wasn't followed around by paparazzi the moment he walked off his property. Yet neither was he totally ignored by the portion of the media that covers the entertainment industry. For one thing he was a very prolific director, averaging a film a year since 1968. Some years there were two films. And there were projects for television (in the 1950s and '60s he been a prolific TV director) such as a new version of The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial (with Brad Davis in the Humphrey Bogart role) and his election year collaboration with Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau, Tanner 88, starring a favorite actor of his, Michael Murphy. Altman also had an air of motion picture historicity about him, ever since his 1970 landmark film MASH introduced, or at least emphasized as no film had before, a whole grab bag of cinematic tricks that made the "New Hollywood" landmark of a few years earlier, The Graduate, look like The Great Train Robbery. By the 1990s, moviegoers had moved on to other things, and the box office misses exceeded the box office hits. Yet no matter how commercially (though not necessarily artistically) irrelevant he became, there always was enough of a buzz about a new Robert Altman film to guarantee him a fresh round of interviews with the leading entertainment journalists. So how in the world could a heart transplant be so overlooked?

Turns out one prominent entertainment journalist WAS paying attention. On December 3, 1995, Army Archerd in his long-running Variety column reported “Good wishes are out to director Robert Altman who underwent heart transplant surgery Sunday. Altman had known the surgery was necessary since last March, friends say.” Altman's wife Kathryn promptly got in touch with USA Today, and that venerable newsmagazine a few days later supposedly set the record straight: “If you heard Robert Altman had a heart transplant, we happily report it’s untrue. He has heart problems, he’s fine. He’ll be fishing next week.” We now know that Mrs. Altman was less than honest with the venerable newsmagazine, as she admitted later on, "We denied it like hell." Why? According to Altman himself "There was such a stigma associated with a heart transplant at that time" He was afraid no one would ever let him direct another film, thinking he might drop dead on the set. Well, it's understandable. Who among us hasn't fudged the truth on a job application or résumé? There's still the question of the prolific filmmaker's busy schedule. I looked up Altman's filmography, and there is in fact quite a gap between Prêt-à-Porter, which came out in December of 1994, and Kansas City, which was released in August of 1996. Had Altman been a movie star such a long absence from the public eye wouldn't have gone unnoticed, but he was a movie director, so it did. Altman lived another 11 years after his transplant, about four years short of average. However, it was not heart disease but another insidious malady that felled him: leukemia.

 We now move from the heart to another internal organ, the larynx, informally referred to as the voice box. If you're not familiar with Robert Altman's work, you may have been puzzled by Lily Tomlin's and Meryl Streep's introduction. Why were they stepping on each other's sentences? Was there static on the teleprompter? Lily and Meryl were in fact trying to evoke one of the defining features of an Altman film: overlapping dialogue. Now, Altman didn't come up with the idea. Howard Hawks used it in His Girl Friday (1940), and Orson Welles (along with every other cinematic trick) in Citizen Kane (1941). Altman, working thirty years after Hawks and Welles, had a technological advantage they lacked: multitrack recording, basically wiring each actor with a mike, taping each actor's dialogue with separate tape recorders, and later playing it all back in a sound studio, turning up the volume on the bit of dialogue most meaningful to the film. At least, I think that's how he did it. After all, I'm not a sound engineer (comment section mainstay Shady Seaweed worked in television--maybe he can elaborate.) However it was done, Altman's reasons for doing so differed from Hawks and Welles, who simply wanted to cram as much exposition as they could in a scene. Exposition never concerned Altman much. It's impossible in practice but were a 30-something Ernest Hemingway to write a one-page synopsis of MASH or McCabe & Mrs. Miller or Nashville or A Wedding and turn it in to a community college teaching assistant for grading, he would get an F for having too many meandering sentences and not coming to the point. Even if some of his movies like The Long Goodbye, The Player, or Gosford Park had something resembling a plot, it was not narrative that Altman was after but a more immersive experience for the viewer. And a voyeuristic one as well. Not in the sense of looking through a peephole, but the voyeurism that we can't but participate in when we're amongst a crowd of people, and overhear little snatches of conversation, even inconsequential snatches of conversation that would otherwise bore us if we were being addressed to directly, but paradoxically intrigue us when absorbed secondhand. However, if you just as soon be by yourself and don't want anyone else around you, avoid this potentially absorbing collection of Robert Altman's signature conversation set pieces: 

Shhhhh! I'm trying to listen.

Quips and Quotations (Working Conditions Edition)

 

 

I'd rather leave directing to the directors. I'd find it distracting to be directed by a Paul Newman. Costarring with him is fine. But I like my directors to be father figures. If Paul directed me, I'd be committing mental incest.

--Ava Gardner

 

Vital Viewing (Golden Age of Hollywood Multitasker Edition)

Ida Lupino was born on this day in 1918. Raised in a London acting family, she took up the profession herself and eventually landed in Hollywood. Keeping whatever British accent she may have had well-hidden in her most best-known roles, she became, in her own words, "the poor man's Bette Davis", due to the off-kilter characters she played. However, her films (a few of which were turned down by Davis) tended to be much more gritty, and she was soon a mainstay of a genre now known as film noir (French for "dark film".)

Though she first appeared on film in 1931, it wasn't until 1940's They Drive By Night that she finally became a star, thanks largely to the above nervous breakdown (which I don't believe originally was done with subtitles.)

The next year she appeared opposite another actor who took a decade to find his niche in movies, Humphrey Bogart. High Sierra was one of the earliest doomed-lovers-on-the-run films. Screenplay by John Huston.

From a story by Irwin Shaw, The Hard Way (1943) was based on the relationship between Ginger Rogers and her mother, though Lupino wasn't a mom here but Joan Leslie-as-Ginger's older sister (I imagine because the actresses were only seven years apart in age.)

In Road House (1948) Lupino got to sing the Harold Arlen-Johnny Mercer standard "One For My Baby (and One More for the Road)" You might recall that Bette Midler won an Emmy for singing this same song on the last regular The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. I'll admit the Divine Miss M is technically a much better songstress than Lupino, but her version never led to betrayal and murder as it does in this film (though it is my understanding Carson stopped returning Ed McMahon's phone calls after a while.)

Though she more often than not played femme fatale types, Lupino got a chance to portray a more sympathetic character in On Dangerous Ground (1951). I mean, what could be more sympathetic than a blind woman? Especially when opposite another mainstay of film noir, the underrated Robert Ryan?

Ryan was not at all sympathetic in his next movie with Lupino, 1952's Beware My Lovely.

Now on to her other career. I have to jump back in time a few years.

That's an actress by the name of Sally Forrest and not a pregnant Lupino in the above ad, yet the latter was very much involved in Not Wanted (1949) behind the scenes. Not content with merely acting, Lupino also liked to write screenplays, which she then produced herself. The director, Elmer Clifton, had a mild heart attack and had to leave the picture. So Lupino stepped in and finished the job, though, out of respect for Clifton, she kept his name in the credits.

Lupino calimed she never thought about directing before, but now it was all she wanted to do.

The first few movies she directed were "women pictures", though they often had provocative and controversial themes, such as the one above about rape.

In 1953, one of the queens of film noir got a chance to direct a noir herself, the extraordinarily suspenseful The Hitch-Hiker. That's Lupino on the left in the sunglasses.

Now regarded as a noir classic, in 1998 The Hitch-Hiker was considered "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant" enough to be selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry.

A montage of moments from The Hitch-Hiker, featuring Edmond O'Brien, Frank Lovejoy and William Talman. Perry Mason fans may remember Talman, here playing the title character, as assistant D.A Hamilton Burger. Playing a homicidal maniac in this film, he probably could have used Perry's help.

Lupino sometimes appeared in her own films. Here she plays one of the wives of the aforementioned Edmond O'Brien (a great character actor) in The Bigamist. 

IdaLupino still appeared in other director's pictures as well. In Women's Prison (1955) she plays a prison superintendent who herself should have been under lock and key. 

Here's Lupino in an episode of The Twilight Zone.

However, it was another episode she directed, but did not appear in, that's more memorable. Titled "The Mask" don't watch it if you're planning on going to a masquerade ball.

As she moved from movies to television, Lupino didn't just direct dramas, but also sitcoms...

...such as this episode of Gilligan's Island, featuring Tina Loise as Ginger, and guest star Hans Conried as Wrongway Feldman. Amusing enough on its own terms, I guess, but a long way from The Hitch-Hiker

Lupino continued to act, but as is often the case with female stars, the parts got smaller as she aged and her looks faded a bit.

Still, she got to meet Columbo.

All in all, a remarkable career. Ida Lupino died in 1995 at age 77.

In Memoriam: Mike Nichols (1931-2014)

Director (both stage and screen), actor, improvisational comedian. Oscar, Emmy, Grammy, and Tony award winner.
  

 "The reason you do this stuff--comedy, plays, movies--is to be seized by something, to disappear in the service of an idea."


"I never understood when people say, 'Do you do comedy or tragedy?' I don't think they're very much different. They both have to be true, and there isn't a great play in the world that doesn't have funny parts to it--as [Death of a] Salesman does, as King Lear does. The whole idea is to reflect life in some way, which means you surely have to have both."

"I asked a shrink: 'Everything is so great. Why am I still so angry?' He said, 'Anger doesn't go away.' I always thought it was kind of a good engine."

Though he had no trace of an accent as an adult, Nichols spent the first seven years of his life in Germany.

  
This is the Old Town Hall in Munich. I have no evidence that Nichols lived in that particular German city, but the fellow who made this painting--it recently sold for 130,000 euros at an auction in, of all places, Nuremberg--did spend some time there...

...and he soon would have a profound effect on the future improv comic/director, whose family was Jewish.

"The things that you saw earlier in your life generally have more power than the things you saw last week."

Fortunately, Nichols family got out in time.

“American society to me and my brother was thrilling because, first of all, the food made noise. We were so excited about Rice Krispies and Coca-Cola. We had only silent food in our country, and we loved listening to our lunch and breakfast."

Though it doesn't compare to what would have happened had he stayed in Germany, the rest of Nichol's childhood was far from idyllic. For one thing he was, and would remain, bald, the result of a rare negative reaction to a whooping cough vaccine at the age of four. He eventually took to wearing hairpieces and fake eyebrows. For another, he didn't know the language of his adopted country very well, at first only able to utter, "I do not speak English" and "Please don't kiss me." He later got the hang of the lingo, as his future success as an actor proved.

Before he took up acting, however, Nichols enrolled in the University of Chicago as a pre-med student--his father had been a doctor--but became more interested in theater. He soon dropped out and moved back to New York where he enrolled in the newly-opened Actors Studio, studying under Lee Strasberg. Meanwhile, some friends of his back in Chicago had formed The Compass Players, one of the first improvisational acting troupes (which in a few years would spin off the more famous Second City group) and asked Nichols to join. That's him in the above picture with the cigarette. That's Shelly Berman on his immediate left, and a seemingly napping Barbara Harris on the right. However, it's the woman to the left of Berman that I'm most interested in, the one looking at Nichols, or at least in his direction. She's none other than...

...Elaine May! 

Nichols and May spun themselves off from the rest of the troupe... 

...becoming one of the most successful comedy teams of the late 1950s and early '60s.

In case you were wondering about that Grammy I mentioned earlier.

Honor thy mother.

Teeth Encounter.

The 1950s quiz show scandal was the talk of the water cooler. The Van Doren mentioned here is Charles Van Doren, a college professor who became a celebrity while a contestant on the highly rated quiz show Twenty-One. Doren, a witty, telegenic intellectual, was the main reason for those high ratings, a reason not lost on the show's producers, who fed him all the right answers. Ralph Fiennes played Van Doren in the 1994 movie Quiz Show.

Death be not proud.

The two also did commercials.

I was born in 1961, the same year the duo broke up, so all of the above clips are really before my time. I first came across a mention of the comedy team in a 1977 or '78 newspaper article about Mike Nichols, who by then was well-known for something else. Though I caught Elaine May in the 1978 Neil Simon movie California Suite and a few other things over the years, I never saw her and Nichols perform together until about 15 years ago when a PBS documentary played a lot of their old bits in full. I immediately became a fan of the duo, when I later became comfortable enough on the Internet, sought out their routines on YouTube. That's a good 45 years after the fact. I envy those of you who saw them in the beginning.

"They set the standard and then they had to move on.

--Arthur Penn, who directed them on Broadway.

Nichols and May are perhaps the most ardently missed of all the satirical comedians of their era. When Nichols and May split up, they left no imitators, no descendants, no blueprints or footprints to follow. No one could touch them.

--Comedy historian Gerald Nachman (nice to know there are historians for that kind of thing.)

At loose ends after the breakup, Nichols thought he'd give directing a try. First up was a revival of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Ernest in Vancouver B.C. Must have done well because Neil Simon picked him to direct his 1963 Broadway play Barefoot in the Park, which ran for 1530 performances and won Nichols a Tony Award. Above are original cast members Robert Redford and Elizabeth Ashley.

“On the first day of rehearsal, I thought, ‘Well, look at this. Here is what I was meant to do.’ I knew instantly that I was home”.

Another big hit was Luv by Murray Schisgal, and starring Alan Arkin, Anne Jackson, and Eli Wallach.

Nichols reunited with Neil Simon again for another monster Broadway hit, as well as another Tony winner, this one about two divorced men living together, one of whom seems to be on the verge of a nervous breakdown: The Odd Couple.  Above are the original Oscar and Felix, Walter Matthau and Art Carney. Matthau also appeared in the film version. Carney didn't, so if you haven't seen him on stage, as I haven't, his take on Felix Ungar seems to be lost forever. How did the man who gave us Ed Norton stack up against Jack Lemmon or Tony Randell? We'll never know, though we have a clue. In his review, New York Times theater critic Walter Kerr described Carney as "immensely funny quivering his lip like an agitated duck, clearing his ears by emitting foghorn hoots, and clawing his hands through what is left of his hair to indicate pride, despair and all of the other seven deadly virtues. His problem is tension (“It’s tension. I get it from tension. I must be tense,” he says) and ours is to keep from laughing through the next good line." Carney may have resembled his character a bit too much. Not to long after he left the production, HIS marriage ended, leading to a nervous breakdown.

By 1966, Mike Nichols was the most successful director on Broadway.

This guy was doing all right, too. Edward Albee had written several well-received plays, one of which did so well Hollywood purchased the film rights. 

Now, Nichols had never directed a movie before...

But then, there had never been a movie like this before. 

Liz and Dick, here playing George and Martha, a middle-aged married couple with issues. Though tame by today's standards, this film's colorful use of language ("son of a bitch" "up yours" "great nipples" "goddamn" "hump the hostess") was largely responsible to bringing about an end to the old Hays production code (the same one that resulted in a $5000 fine for Gone With the Wind producer David O Selznick, not that he gave a damn) to be replace by G, PG, R, and X (and later PG13 and NC-17) But, really, the real worth of this film is the two stars amazing performances, be they potty mouthed or spouting literary allusions (sometimes both at the same time!) I've seen this film numerous times and never tire of it. If this was all Mike Nichols was known for, I've still would have done an obit on him.

George and Martha do their thing in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. George Segal and Sandy Dennis are their captive audience.

Man, oh, man, had that OTHER George and Martha behaved that way, we'd still be a British colony!

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf was considered such a cinematic breakthrough upon release, one wondered if Nichols could ever top it.

He did. The Graduate, Oscar's Best Picture of 1967. I never tire of this one either. It's a simple story, really. Boy meets girl...Well, OK, boy meets WOMAN. Boy also meets girl, who happens to be woman's daughter. Boy loses both woman and girl. 

Boy gets girl back.

Boy and girl not so sure movie has happy ending.

Sorry if I gave something away, but you really should have seen this by now.

One of the explanations I've read for the long faces at the film's conclusion is that Dustin Hoffman and Katherine Ross thought the camera had stopped rolling and thus went out of character. Director Nichols decided to use the shot anyway, as it lent a touch of ambiguity to the ending.

Anne Bancroft as Mrs. Robinson. Self-loathing has never been sexier.

"And here's to you, Mrs. Robinson,
Jesus loves you more than you will know.
God bless you, please Mrs. Robinson.
Heaven holds a place for those who pray,
Hey, hey, hey
Hey, hey, hey...

"...Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio,
Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you.
What's that you say, Mrs. Robinson.
Jolting Joe has left and gone away,
Hey, hey, hey
Hey, hey, hey"

Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel. "Mrs Robinson" won them a Record of the Year Grammy. No Oscar, though,  the song appeared on an album of theirs as well as in the movie.

Buck Henry, on the right, co-wrote the screenplay with Calder Willingham.

Elaine May makes a brief, uncredited appearance.

Here's a bit of trivia for all you Bewitched fans out there. The woman on the very left is Alice Ghostly, and that's Marian Lorne right next to her. Lorne played bumbling Aunt Clara, a semi-regular on the supernatural sitcom, and when she died in 1968, was replaced by Ghostly, who played the similarly bumbling Esmeralda. Yet The Graduate is the only time these two very funny actresses appeared on film together. A coincidence (or magic!)

Trailer for The Graduate.

A comedy that doesn't always play like a comedy. The naturalistic acting, Robert Surtees impressionistic cinematography, and Simon's and Garfunkel's poetic music belies the fact that so much of what you're watching is flat-out funny (Hoffman's and Bancroft's scenes in the hotel room in particular.) The incongruity works brilliantly. Plus The Graduate made money, and for a while Hollywood filmmakers were given the free rein to be as enigmatic as they please.

Until something came along that WASN'T enigmatic, but made money anyway.

As for Mike Nichols, well, you can only be revolutionary so many times. After the twin sucessess of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf and The Graduate, he backed off on making cinama history and concentrated on merely making good cinema. He largely succeeded.

As he did on Broadway, to which he kept returning to no matter how well his movies did. In 1968, he teamed up again with Neil Simon...

...and won himself another Tony for Plaza Suite. George C. Scott and Maureen Stapleton played three different characters in three different acts.

Cinematic history aside, Nichols also, perhaps inadvertently, made constitutional history as well. Jack Nicholson and Art Gunfunkel spend the postwar years trying to figure out the opposite sex in 1971's Carnal Knowledge. This now-but-not-then tame film actually led to the Supreme Court ruling that a city, town, or village can ban a movie if it violates "community standards" (trying mightily to define obscenity Justice Potter Stewart wrote "I know it when I see it." Fortunately for Nichols, he didn't see it just then.)

Carnal Knowledge trailer. See if it piques your prurient interest.

1971. Yet another Tony for yet another Neil Simon play, The Prisoner of Seventh Avenue with Peter Falk and Lee Grant. Curiously, Nichols never directed any movies based on Simon's stage successes. Maybe there was a feeling of been there, done that.

As odd as it is mentioning Mike Nichols and Aaron Spelling (Charlie's Angels, Melrose Place) in the same sentence, they co-produced the well-regarded 1970s TV drama Family. Clockwise from bottom: Michael or David Schackleford, Meredith Baxter-Birney, Gary Frank, Sada Thompson, James Broderick, and, lest we forget, Kristy McNichol.

Actually, for a few years there in the late 1970s, it was IMPOSSIBLE to forget Krisy McNichol. Such was her fame that her brother became famous simply for being her brother! (And you thought that kind of thing only happened on 21st century reality shows.) 

  
In 1977, Nichols directed Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy in the Broadway production of The Gin Game.

 After a few Broadway and Hollywood flops, Nichols came back strong with Silkwood (1983). That's Meryl Streep on the left as doomed real-life nuclear industry whistleblower Karen Silkwood. Kurt Russel and a deglamourized Cher play her co-workers.

Silkwood trailer. Make sure to put on your Hazmat suit before watching this.

I keep going back and forth between Hollywood and Broadway. Well, in 1984, Nichols directed the Broadway production of David Rabe's Hurlyburly, which took place in Hollywood. 

Working Girl (1988) Secretary Melanie Griffith arranges a merger behind ailing boss Sigourney Weaver's back and merges with Harrison Ford to boot. Don't feel too sorry for Weaver. She brought it all on herself by stealing one of Griffith's ideas. Rather misleading promo shot here. By the time Ford feels comfortable enough to put his arm around Griffith's shoulder, he's completely on the outs with Weaver, his fiancee, who doesn't much like Griffith at that point. Can't they be at least have them hissing at each other?

Working Girl trailer. 

Mike Nichols smooching TV journalist Diane Sawyer, whom he married in 1988. They were still married at the time of his death. 

Debbie Reynolds and--oops, I mean Shirley MacLaine and Meryl Streep as mother and daughter in 1990's Postcards From the Edge, based on the novel by Carrie Fisher.

Nichol's former comedy partner Elaine May scripted 1996's The Birdcage, an American version of the 1978 French comedy  La Cage aux Folles. Starring Robin Williams and Nathan Lane.

Oh, and Gene Hackman was in it, too.

Trailer for The Birdcage.

John Travolta and Emma Thompson as an ambition southern politician and his equally ambitious wife looking to get to the White House in Primary Colors (1998) based on the novel by Joe "Anonymous" Klein, screenplay also by May. Maybe they could make a sequel, except this time the ambitious wife, now a former senator and secretary of state, wants back in that White House. Whadya think?

In 2003, Nichols directed the highly-rated HBO mini-series Angels in America, based on a play, or rather two plays (Millennium Approaches, which won a Pulitzer, and Perestroika) by Tony Kushner, a mixture of the real and unreal dealing with the 1980s AIDS crises. Above is Al Pacino as Joe McCarthy sidekick  Roy Cohn, who was, in fact, a real person, though I'm sure some wish he would have been purely fictional.

Angels in America trailer.

In 2005, Nichols directed the musical Spamalot, based on the 1975 comedy movie, Monty Python and the Holy Grail. From left to right: Hank Azaria, David Hyde-Pierce, Nichols, and Tim Curry.

In 2010, Mike Nichols won the American Film Institute Lifetime Achievemant Award...

...And Elaine May was on hand to pay tribute.

If you watched the above clip--I know it's long but it's pretty funny--Elaine May made an amazing claim about Nichols.

I looked it up. IT'S TRUE!!! They were related! Third cousins, twice removed!

Let's end it there. Talent, genius, whatever you want to call it, obviously ran in that family.