Mark Harris on Mike Nichols’ Incomparable Life

Published Jun 22, 2021, 4:00 AM

Alec’s guest Mark Harris has written a compelling new biography about one of the most celebrated directors of all time, Mike Nichols. Drawn from more than 250 interviews, Mike Nichols: A Life tracks Nichol’s difficult childhood as a German Jewish immigrant growing up in New York City to his college years at the University of Chicago where Nichols found a community of performers, including his life-long collaborator Elaine May. In 1963, Mike Nichols and Elaine May performed more than 300 sold-out comedy shows on Broadway. Nichols then spent decades moving fluidly between directing on Broadway and in Hollywood. His movies include The Graduate, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Silkwood, and Working Girl, and his plays include Neil Simon’s Barefoot in the Park, Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing, and Monty Python’s Spamalot. Over the course of his lifetime, Mike Nichols’ won every major award in his field and, as Mark Harris movingly chronicles, it took a lifetime for Mike Nichols to learn to be happy. 

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I'm Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing from My Heart Radio. Mike Nichols was one of the most celebrated directors of the last century, and he is the subject of a compelling new biography written by My guest Today, Mark Harris, drawn from more than two hundred and fifty interviews. Mike Nichols. A Life traces nichols lonely and difficult childhood onto the highs and lows of his astonishingly productive fifty year career. Nichols was the rare director who moved fluidly between Broadway and Hollywood. His films include The Graduate, Who's Afraid of Virginia, Wolf, Silkwood, and Working Girl, Where I had My chance to experience firsthand his ability to connect with actors on the stage. Nichols was prolific in shepherding the casts of everything from Neil Simon's Barefoot in the Park and Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing to Monty Python's Smam a Lot. And before all of that, Mike Nichols was a performer, one half of the influential sketch comedy team Nichols in May, which he developed with the incomparable Elaine May. One thing Mark Harris knew when he started working on this book was there would be plenty of material. I don't know how you wake up every day and go to bed every night with the same person in your head while you're working on something. And I just thought that with Nichols, whatever I found out good or bad, there probably would not be boring parts. I mean, he had such a long, interesting career and it was always on two tracks, movie directing and theater directing, and before that there was all of his work with Elaine May. So I thought, I'm not going to hit a whole decade where nothing interesting happens or I can't find out anything good. And I just felt like I would never be bored. And and I also I felt truly that there was that what I didn't know was a much much longer list than what I thought. I knew now. Diane and his children were not interviewed for the book. No, they weren't. I went to them before I really sat down with Penguin to try to make a deal, because I had no interest in doing the book if they were opposed to it. But they gave their consent. They never asked to see anything advanced. They never asked for me to leave anything out, So I felt like what I really needed from them was they're okay, and they're okay to make their okay public. When they don't agree to sit down, why don't they do it? I felt like, in different ways, it was a very big ask. Mike's three kids are pretty private people, and Mike made no secret of the fact that when they were growing up he wasn't always as present a father as he felt he should have been. And I really understand the idea of not wanting to play out a whole parent child drama in the pages of a book. Diane was in a uniquely complicated position because if she had sat down and done an interview with me, I think everyone would have taken that as tacit approval of everything that was in the book, which she could not give, of course, because she didn't know what was in the book. So they put a lot of trust in me letting me do this. Everybody that worked with Mike, he's such a fizzy character. I would imagine your work was made easier by how much people remember their time with Mike completely. That was a really particular thing, Even if he said something to them forty years ago. They held onto it. Whether it was a great funny piece of advice or a brutal insult, it stayed inside them when it went in. That's interesting. I didn't know Mike well. I worked with them that one time in the eighties, and but I would always see him. He was very kind and he loved actors. And it was at a time in my life when I was being tortured by a girlfriend I had like she was so resentful of my starting to work and being more successful. This is the beginning of me making films. This is the beginning of me throwing my clothes in a suitcase and leaving the moment after I hung up the phone, Hollywood was calling me to make movies and I was going to go no matter what. And you were gonna start missing everything, birthdays, anniversary as you didn't care. And I'm sitting lamenting this with Mike in his trailer when we were doing Working Girl, and he said to me, well, you know the relationship is dead. He said. There's two metrics. One is he says, there's just not enough other people in the room when you're with your girlfriend. They just aren't enough other people in the room. The other one is he says, how quickly do you get back into your ship after you come the thing to say, I mean, he really really like beguiled me. He was beguiling. Everything that came out of his mouth was smart and funny and rich. Well, I think you got him at a really interesting point in his life, not just because it was Working Girl, which of course is one of the movies that people still talk about and watch, but because he was on his way to marrying Diane. And I think at that point, you know, he had recovered from a big breakdown that he had had a couple of years earlier. He got addicted to halcyon and all of that, and he recovered, and Working Girl came along, and he said, it's too elaborate and location driven a production. I'm gonna make Biloxi Blues first, which is a movie that I can do in my sleep, and then I'll get my muscles back, and then I want to do Working Girl. But it was a point when he was trying to fix himself in some ways. You know, you go into your fourth marriage and obviously why the first three didn't work, and what your part was in that must be very front of mine. So I think you got him an unusually kind of vulnerable and tense and excited time in his life. There's up moment you have in the book which is just so thrilling about Fiffer. When Fifer leaves the room and comes back, he says, my god, he's dazzled by what Nichols does and he says, it's all in there. And that was the thing about Mike. If there's ten things you want, the average director has four, maybe five of the ten things you want, and Nichols, of course had all ten of those things. And because his mind was on everything. If he was talking to you about the scene. I remember vividly he was talking about the scene we were going to do, and I'm sitting on a bed and he's sitting on the bed, and as he's talking to me, he's looking over my shoulder. He says, what is this painting doing on the wall. He says, take this down, He says, I hate this painting. And they're like the set design is in his mind. It's all of one. I was really surprised when I was doing the research and interviews how many stories I heard in different contexts about Mike freaking out about some physical location or surroundings based thing. This really bothered him. There was one point when he had an entire Broadway set re built because a hallway that was on the stage in the center he decided was eight inches too narrow and that he needed those extra eight inches. There's another point when he's doing Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf on stage with Elane May at the Long Wharf and they're in the living room set and he realizes that there are only three places to sit and there are four characters, and it he just completely blows a gasket. He completely freaks out. He can't let it go for days and days, and it was a really interesting kind of glimpse for me in what he needed in order to work now. You wrote a book about a battery of directors who were very influential in the seventies, as well as your other book about a battery of directors during the wartime. Nichols is someone who you really when you say his name, your heart pressed to think of anybody who was as adept at directing actors. There are directors who cast well, and they cast the prison and there's everything that just wind upup and let him go. You've come to do this thing I know you can do when I just let you go, do that and it puts a costume on you and we go. Whereas Mike really this idea, the vanity of certain directors who believe they quote unquote get a performance out of you is completely nonsense. But with Mike, it really was true. Mike got a performance out of you. Do you think that made him completely unique in the business. I do think it made him pretty unique. And I also think it's the reason that a lot of people have kind of had trouble pinning down what makes him special as a director. Because Mike didn't write his own movies. I mean that already sets him apart from a lot of the directors. Like when we talk about a Cohen Brothers movie or Paul Thomas Anderson movie or a Tarantino movie. We know where he's coming from as a writer as much as we do as a director. But if Mike's really special gift was connecting with each actor in a way that was going to bring the best performance out of them. If that works, that is sort of something that it's supposed to end up being invisible, Like You're not supposed to watch the movie and think, oh, that's a impeccably directed performance. You're supposed to watch the movie and think that's a great performance. And so I think the thing that made him special is something that isn't always evident to people who watch his movies. But what's interesting is that he did do a lot of writing. I mean, he was right in there with Piffer and Simon and other writers giving them his ideas about cuts. I mean, decorating the house is one thing, Building the house is another. And Mike didn't build the house. He didn't write the pieces, but he contributed. Why do you think he never wrote his own stuff for motion pictures. Well, some people say that it was because he was uncomfortable from the beginning of his life with literal writing, Like he hated his handwriting. He didn't like putting things down on paper. And of course there's the interesting thing about his work with Elaine May, which is that all of the most famous sketches that they did together, some of which they did hundreds of times, were never actually written down. They were just things that were work doubt between the two of them until every word was locked. But it was never locked on paper. It was just locked in their performance. They were too childish. That quote you have where she says they talked about they don't want to break up anymore on the show, and she says it's so childish, and she says, she said it was the most responsible conversation we'd ever had. Yeah, I love that story so much that there there are these two people in there I guess late twenties by that point, saying we have to stop laughing on this Broadway stage. People are paying to see this, and they couldn't keep it together. They really didn't think of it as a grown up job that they had. Author Mark Harris. If you love behind the scenes stories of Hollywood legends, check out my conversation with Sam Wasson, author of The Big Goodbye Chinatown and The Last Years of Hollywood. Wasson spent a lot of time with producer Robert Evans, who was credited with turning Paramount Studio Is around in the early nineties seventies. He loved it, he loved it, he loved show business, he loved movies, he loved people, he loved talent. It's actually that simple. I asked him this question. I said, Evans. Is it as simple as you bet on talent? Do you have an easy job? And he said, you goddamn right, that was and it's true. Here more of my conversation with author Sam wasson that Here's the Thing dot Org. After the break, Mark Harris talks about a fundamental truth of Hollywood. Success has a way of limiting your choices. I'm Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing. Mike Nichols was known for bringing out remarkable performances from his actors, but not always. Two stories of when Nichols struggled stood out to me and Mark Harris's biography, nichols frustration with Gary Shandling as the lead in What Planet Are You From? And his decision to fire Mandy Patakon just a week into rehearsals for Heartburn, a role that went to Jack Nicholson instead. It's so interesting to me. I mean, Mike did know how important casting was, and yet the list of actors that he fired over the decades is really pretty impressive. It's like Gene Hackman, Robert de Niro and in that case, Mandy Pottakin. I know that Mike was very impressed by his work on stage, and that was a moment when he was really coming up. He was a big deal on Broadway, and Mike often felt that could carry over. I mean, he would fill out the supporting cast of his movies a lot of the time with people he had seen on Broadway or off Broadway because he knew they could deliver. Yeah, he even flew them to Texas when he was doing Silkwood. But that's different, obviously than casting a romantic leading man opposite Meryl Streep. I mean, so it could have been the jewishness, it could have been that he just felt a good connection with that character. But whatever it was, clearly it was something that he Nichols decided pretty early on was a wrong call. I mean, they shot for a week before he fired Mandy Patinkin, but it sounded to me like even before that, in the read throughs, in the rehearsals, Nichols had a really strong sense that it was not going well on a character level and maybe not going so well on a personal level. Meryl said that Mandy was very rabbinical in his questioning and then his character development. Right, I loved that word. That's exactly what she said. She said he was rabbinical, that he had to kind of interrogate everything about the character, maybe even to the point of torturing people a little. But one thing that seemed to come up a lot, and I can understand how this would be a sticking point was he kept saying, I don't understand this. Why would a man ever cheat on his wife? Why would a man ever cheat on his pregnant wife? And heartburn was obviously like the facts of the case, we're not in dispute. It's based on this real thing that happened between carlburn Steen and or Evran. So I think there was a feeling that at some point we got to get off the y and just move on to it happened. So you have to figure out why this like this guy did this, and that's what you have to play. I love how you write. When Nicholson comes on the project, he says, Mike, if you need me, I'm there, and then later on they interpreted Mike, if you need me, what he meant was if you need me, which is means an eight million dollar price ticket, I'm there. Well, I was just gonna say that decision just completely changed the budget of the movie. Heartburn was not an expensive movie, and it turned into a much more expensive movie the second Nicholson came on board, but he did it with very few days. Notice, well, you know, Mike decides that in order to have the Hollywood career he wants to have in the budgets and get paid what he wants to paid. The budgets inflate in direct proportion to Mike's salary inflating. If Mike's salary becomes six seven eight million dollars, the budget goes from fifty sixty five million dollars, and that the canoe tips over. In terms of casting, you have to have the star. We go, we're gonna get less creative maybe about who should play the part, and we're gonna start talking about who we need to play the part to sell tickets. And I wonder if you felt that he ever express any anxiety or regret about the fact that, in order to make big ticket movies he couldn't cast who he wanted in the film. Well, I don't know if it turned into a casting thing, but probably the worst example of a movie where his ask his fee changed the whole nature of the movie was what planeted Are You from? The comedy he made with Gary Sandling, because everyone who wrote that movie, which seems like a pretty long list of people when you add everyone who took a crack at the script and and even people who were in it, like and At Benning, said this was this really should have been a small movie. There should have been an indie style, Charlie Kaufman, quirky little comedy, and instead I think it becomes maybe with the exception of Primary Colors, the biggest fee that Mike ever got for a movie. In the minute you're paying someone like Mike Nichols eight million dollars in the nineties to direct a movie, suddenly it becomes a completely different kind of movie. So what planet are you from? Turned into this movie with big sets and special effects and and sort of elaborate costumes and kind of heaviness of production value that crushed the comedy under its weight. And I think that was the only time where money actually did damage in a kind of material way to a movie that Mike was making. I mean, he did get a lot of money for Primary Colors, but Primary Colors was probably always going to be a movie where you wanted to see a couple of stars play those parts. When you're doing a movie about a potential president and first lady, you want to see big names, And in that case, to Mike's credit, he did resist. You know, there was a lot of pressure to turn the main character, the narrator of the novel Primary Colors, who was African American on the page, into a white character. People were openly saying, like, why don't you give this to Michael J. Fox. This is a perfect part for him, And Mike resisted that and actually cast an unknown actor, Adrian Lester in the part. So I don't think there are too many cases where money got in the way of him casting a movie the right way. I mean, I know that on Working Girl there was a lot of back and forth with the studio right about whether they could afford two stars in the leading part or they wanted Melanie and I to play the two leads, right, And then he said, and he said to me point there was one of my favorite conversation with Mike. He said, if I put you in Melanie in the leads, where they're gonna give me twenty million dollars to make my movie, and if I cast these other people, they're gonna give me fifty million dollars to make my movie. She said, I hope you don't mind, but I'm gonna have to go with them in order to make my That was one of my first indoctrinations into that. And meaning there's a metric, there's an arithmetic to this, which is there's just nothing I can do about it. I can't make my movie for twenty million dollars. And he said, would you play this other part? Would you play this smaller? I said, you got. I mean I just wanted to be around him and work with him. I once said to someone, Travolta is the last movie star in the timeline, mean that old movie stars after that are all about effects and guns and cars and computer generating, and that the star of themselves is the hood ornament on a vehicle. Travolta is a very old school movie star in terms of you build the movie around what he can do you and if you don't make the movie built around what he can do as primary colors, you suffer because he's not really right for that role. And in my mind, well, and he was the second choice. I mean, Mike really wanted Tom Hanks for that part, and it sounded to me like he came actually quite close to getting Tom Hanks, and then Hanks backed away. Some people said because he didn't want to offend the Clinton's I read that when Hanks said to me, was I thought of myself as an old young man but still not quite old enough to play a president. Well, someone said that to me. Was They said, oh, if you do that part in that movie, they go, you'll be middle aged for the rest of your life. And then you also write about how the timing of the Clinton scandal and the film collide. Yeah. I had kind of forgotten that. I knew that they were intermingled, but I didn't remember that we're talking about two separate scandals. That the Primary Colors was really springing off the Jennifer Flowers story, and then in the middle of it, the Monica Lewinsky story breaks. Yeah, I mean a story that makes Primary Colors suddenly looks quite a children's book, right exactly. And um, Emma Thompson, this speaks to Travolta's stardom. Emma Thompson tells a really funny story about the moment they all found out, which is they were sitting around and Emma Thompson said, Mike and I were reading, you know, rice and beans out of all the starring containers, and John Travolta had like a seventy five course chef's meal. He had his own chef on the set, And I thought that was like, of all the star indulgences, that struck me as one that like Mike, would be the most forgiving of because he loved food so much. What's rehearsal without donuts? Right from Barefoot in the Park. So it happened a couple of times in Mike's life that this thing just from out of left field kind of derailed a movie at the last minute. Once was Catch twenny two when they saw Mash just a couple of months before Catch twenny two was supposed to open and realized that Match was going to take the entire audience that they were hoping to get and Catch twenty two. And the other was Primary Colors, where they all said, I don't really know what's going to happen to the movie, but they knew what was going to happen to the movie. They knew that it was totally eclipsed by the scandal, right, And when you read the reviews of it at the time, some of them even say explicitly, like we see this on the news every night, and this movie feels like it's about something that happened two years ago, and nobody's mind is on that anymore. I got a little choked up reading this book because it's like you get to those forks in the road of career versus personal life, and you have to say to yourself, am I willing to do what it takes for some people? The answer to that question is very easy. I mean, it's just reflective that they when you're offered that opportunity. I remember when I would be working in films early on and things were getting a little shinier. People looked at me with there was an unmistakable look. At least I thought it was unmistakable where they looked at me, like, you realize, we don't ask just anybody to do this, don't you? You realize that they are at bus loads of people coming here who want to be sitting exactly where you are right now discussing with us. I mean, they really put a pressure on me to want to spend the big wheel of the movie star game, whether it was gratifying creatively or not. And I had grown up tortured by wanting to be a better actor. And I thought it, well, that's not going to get me there, and they were like, you need to go get a vaccine for that. We need to get you disabused of that, because who gives a shit about that? Where we're gonna, I'll be offering you your own seat up here on Mount Olympus. And I always struggled with that, and I see that with Mike, and that that leads me to the question, do you think he was happy? I think it depends on when you're asking about for a long time, I think the answer is no, and he would have said no. I mean, I was shocked. This was when I was working on my first book. But I was shocked when I asked him about coming to the Oscars and winning for the Graduate and for Best Director his second film, and he basically said, and his face almost fell when he said that. He said, I really have no memory of that experience, but misery and wanting to get back to the hotel and feeling like being alone at the hotel at midnight was the entire experience of winning that Oscar. He described himself as Mr. And Hedonia, And I think that lasted well past nine eight I think there were long stretches. Even when Mike was being fairly productive, like in the early eighties when he was not directing movies but directing a lot on stage. He described himself as sleepwalking through entire productions that he did, just feeling totally disconnected from it. I mean, I think depression was something that he really wrestled with for a very long time. I do think later in life, Mike was more happy, more settled, more comfortable with the kind of work he did and the way he made his choices and what he was doing. And I think his marriage to Diane had a lot to do with that. And also I feel like he always wanted to work, but he didn't necessarily feel that he had that much to prove anymore, and so that made him happy. But now there were long stretches when I think what was externally going on in his world in terms of the creative work he was doing, did not match his mood, his happiness at all. It seems like there's a fracture was an impact of Mike's personal life and his personal psyche from when things end with Elaine until he meets Diane. Mike isn't healed until he finds Diane. When he finds Diane, he finds a woman that is really the woman who makes him feel better and is the right fit for him in terms of a companion and a wife. Do you think that's true. I think that's true. Yeah, I really think that's true. I love the thing that he said to Doug Wick, the producer of Working Girl, which you know, it was a movie he made while he was sort of preparing to marry Diane, which was he said, if I don't find a woman who will kick my ass when I'm rude to a cab driver, I'm doomed. I mean, he was immensely proud of Diane and what she did, and he he loved her celebrity. He genuinely did. But I think he also felt that he needed someone to tether him to humanity and to say behave yourself and to say treat other people well. But yeah, I do think there's this long stretch after his big rift with Elane. May happens in ninety two, sixty three, and by sixty five or sixty six, they're friends again, and they're they're doing occasional performances for benefits and she the love of his life. The book to screams that not from you, but you lay out the fact. You go, my God, Was this just the love of his love? Was he so deeply in love with this woman? I think he was deeply in love with her. I don't know enough, honestly, about Mike's third marriage, which lasted a really long time and was a serious relationship with someone who really cared about him and who he really cared about. I feel like it's not my place to rank loves, but I absolutely know that Elaine was his first love, and he, I mean, his first wife, looks exactly like her, so it's hard not to draw conclusions from that. Mark Harris, author of Mike Nichols Alive. If you're enjoying this conversation, be sure to follow Here's the Thing on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. When we come back. Mark Harris talks about Mike nichols later years and how, at long last he started to become Mark tent. I'm Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing. Mike Nichols was married four times. His last two journalists, Diane Sawyer. They were together twenty six years until Mike's death in two thousand fourteen. She was someone who had to get on a plane and go a lot of the times, I mean at a moment's notice, because she worked in news, and um, I just remember a few times from the years when I knew Mike he would really miss her when she was gone, but he would also be so proud of the fact that she was doing it. And the combination of two super high achievers in completely different fields is really interesting because there's no real competition there. Mike did not aspire to be in television news and Diane didn't aspire to be in the movie business. And that's a good combination. Yeah, to get back to Gary Shandling, only because you handle that beautifully. You write in Shandling, a congenitally nervous comedian insecure about his attractiveness, two women, terrified that people were smirking at his hair. He had seen a nightmare version of his own reflection. For his entire life, he had worked to compose a surface self and impeccably polished Mike Nichols, capable of concealing any insecurity with an epigram A decisive piece of direction where brilliantly inscrutable, wide eyed grin whose infinite variations could meet anything from how true to what a terrible idea? To only you and I know we're on the Titanic. I just love that. I love that. He told George Siegel. So this was as early as you know, the mid sixties. It takes me three hours to become Mike Nichols every day. And and I held onto that line so tightly because it tells you so much like what it costs you to compose a self, like to feel that you can't go into the world without creating this external self that is someone you can carry off. But also what are you afraid that people are going to see if you don't do that? I think that's what Gary Schandling triggered. That Gary Shandling was somehow to Mike the person that Mike was afraid other people saw when they looked at him. And which which tragic is that Mike in the casting realm, when you talk about that collision of the budget, the star, the nature of the person. That was a fifteen million dollar movie, right and then suddenly it's a what fifty nine million dollar movie? I mean all wrong, and there's no way he can I think Mike's worst fear was to be painted into a corner and there was nothing he could do. He was so resourceful. You present him with a problem and it was fun, It was a game. He was always with clever people. Sondheim, who's more clever than son Teim, you know what I mean, Bernstein, all the friends of his in Connecticut and up in a Cape cod in Martha's vineyard or wherever he was, and everything seemed to be people who had built these towering careers out of problem solving and loving the challenge. But when you put him in a situation where there was no way out, you were trapped and no wonder he decided to just decimate Shandling. Right. I don't get the impression that Mike minded if an actor was momentarily stuck on a scene or a line or something that neither to be talked through, because that was an interesting puzzle to try to figure out, and if he believed in the actor, Mike even had pleasure in that. But with Shandling, he later said that he was sort of fooled that he thought from watching the Larry Sanders show which was of course so brilliant that Gary Shandling was just a completely facile, natural actor, and when that turned out not to be the case, and that was probably Mike's fault in many ways for not having spent some real time with Shandling to get to know him beforehand, it was I mean, it reminded me of something that someone said in an another context about him, which was when he couldn't get something from an actor, he was like a musician whose instrument suddenly refused to play, that he just got stuck. He did not know how to move forward. And what's unfortunate with what planet are you from, is that in that case, it really sent him into this just terrible temper where he really did, by all accounts, take it out on Gary Chandling in a pretty terrible way. But when you said it about Diane tethering him when he's abusive towards cab drivers, you can almost hear people like that in his life saying you're not so all fault anymore, so a little less tarib if you don't mind, you know, I mean, he's so he that grown man who loses control of himself. Believe it, I've been there and that's not great. Now. I was at Mike and some people I don't really remember. It's kind of weird. Was thrown together so hastily, or at least it wasn't my mind. We did this benefit one of those highly improvhasatory, wonderful evening. It was one of the funny evenings I've ever had. We did, I think at Carnegie Hall called Short Talks on the Universe, and any Lane wrote up vignette, but I did a scene with Ellen Barkin and Ellen Ellen and I play two people that are flirting with each other, or think they're going to flirt with each other and think that's what's happening, and they wind up just tearing each other to pieces, saying with such horrible things to each other. And it was very funny. I mean normally that kind of Albi esque thing wears a little thin on me after a while. Virginia Wolf and that kind of thing that there's the shouting and the venom and everything, I'm like, oh God, I get exhausted. But we did it. It was very funny, and in that way that he loved to improvise, he loved to get people to just fling it against the wall and play with it, which is probably his greatest gift. Because other other directors are astute with a camera and cutting and so forth, and other people know how to manufacture a movie, even a hit movie, But getting actors, shepherding them toward the breakthroughs and they're acting, is the thing that I think he's the most memorable for and come from all of his improphessitory work. In fact, Eline was sitting behind me. Wow, I went on stage and did my thing that I took my seat in the audience. They held a seat and Eline was behind me with Donnin and I turned her and I said, what a Stanley Donnin have that I don't have? I think, he said an Oscar. I said, that's true, that's true, But I mean everybody who knew Elaine was just madly in love with Ela, and Emiline couldn't give a ship me. Lane was like, she's kind of thrived from the fact that does she really care what you thought? She talked to you? Correct, she said, the only things I can remember are the things I'm not going to tell you. It was difficult to get her to commit to do it. It always seemed to be postpond and prest bond. Once we sat down and talked. Other than that very scary first thing that she said to me, she was great. There's so little that she has done in terms of real, sit down, non joky interviews over the last fifty years that I really didn't know what it was going to be. And I couldn't believe how not only forthcoming she was, but how specific she was about the dynamic between her and Mike professionally and personally, the work that they had done together, the pain of that breakup, the way their relationship was different after the breakup and after their reconciliation, the way they stayed together for fifty five years after that. I mean, I feel like an enormous amount of what I came to learn and understand about Mike grew out of that interview, which fortunately was an interview that happened quite early in my interviewing process, so I was able to I mean, she was the first person I went after, and really the only person in the book who if she had said no, it would be a different book. I really don't know how I would have done it. It would have been hamstrung there. Yeah, Kushner, of course, Angels is done by Mike for HBO. Did you get to know him at all during the shoot? Did you become friendly with Mike at all? Yeah, that was the first time I met him was probably when he was in Central Park one night directing this cruising scene and I remember Tony and I he called Lake because he was having trouble with the scene or something, and he said, get out of your apartment, come down here because I need you. And so Tony and I walked down there, which was just a fifteen minute walk, and we were saying, I wonder if we're gonna be able to find the shoot, and then we rounded the corner onto Central Park South and like the whole Central Park South is floodless circus is there? That was our first understanding that this was going to be a big production. But yeah, the first time I ever met Mike was watching him direct a scene that he was having trouble with and that was an amazing introduction just getting to see him sort of figure out is this an actor problem? Is this a visual problem? Do I not have enough fog? Is this a staging problem? Is this the way guys would walk toward each other, away from each other? It was really interesting to watch him kind of struggle, but also almost mathematically or forensically work out like what am I not getting here that I need to get? And it wasn't a case where he was taking it out on anyone. And I was always interested that he called Tony that night and and said like, come help me, which was not Mike's away necessarily, but he didn't mind asking for guidance. Was the book in your mind then, no, not at all. I never thought of doing a book about Mike until after he passed away. I urged Mike to write his autobiography, and he wouldn't do it. No, interesting no, And he used to say, not only do I not want to do it, but I'm very proud that I have made any future biographer's job impossible by burning all my papers. Towards the very end of his life, he did for the first time expressed some interest and maybe doing a book where he would sit with the writer and they would just go project by project and he would talk about directing. So his papers are not donated somewhere. Nothing was left to any academic institution. No, I I don't think they're not then he like library or university or anything like that, and maybe that will happen down the road. Luckily for me, everybody who might ever wrote a note to or an email too, seems to have saved it. So I was able to get his own voice into the book, which was really important to me. Well, whenever I saw him, he was very sweet to me. He would hug me and he was so nice. I think I saw him the Lincoln Center maybe a year before he died. He was with Diane, but he asked me to do postcards from the edge. I remember we were under the cloak of the holidays one year, it was like January, and he said, I want you to come to do this movie with me. I want you to play this part. I said, I really don't know. I said, uh, we're not shooting until May. I said, well, I've been having this problem with my same girlfriend. I said, been having this problem that I keep trying to end this relationship and it's so painful, it's just so miserable of and I thought of old people. He wouldn't understand lingering, nagging problems. But he had this great line. He goes, what kind of problems could you possibly have that couldn't be solved by May? He said, and I thought, well, you really made me feel like ship. Now you have a point there, But I didn't do the movie, and I that when you did, when he invited you and you didn't come, it was not good. Matthew Broderick told me an interesting thing, which as he said that he felt that actors men came in and out of Mike's scope, that for a while the bright light really shone upon you, and you were the guy, and it could only be you, and then it would move on. But actresses he tended to hold onto forever, like he didn't really let go of an actress once he loved her. On the Richard Burton documentary that was on PBS, there's a wonderful line that Mike himself had and he said something along the lines of he said, Richard had completely lost the distinction between being and seeming until his life had become only about seeming. And I thought, was that true of Mike as well, where where a large part of his life was he was obsessed with people's perception of him as opposed to how he really lived his life. I'm sort of pay shuring that question as a diagram, and I'm thinking that like maybe as the years and the decades go on, the being and seeming lines get closer and closer, until Mike finally was what he seemed to be or seemed to be what he was. I guess depending on what angle you look at it from. But I think who Mike was and who Mike wanted to be finally did come together despite of this childhood. I would say, so. Yeah. He talked about how directing put him in the place where he was the father to the room full of people. Right. That's such a striking thing to me in that he felt it when he was thirty one or thirty two years old and he walks into a rehearsal room for the first time for Barefoot in the Park and says, oh, I get it. This is what I want to be. I want to be a director because the directors the dad. I think of myself at thirty one and not aware enough being the dad was not like high on my list year, but my paternal nature exactly. So it's an interesting instinct at that young age to decide that, oh, this is who I am. I'm the father. But it's like to me, I mean, I only have a silly analysis of it, but it's like Mike was like the somalia of human emotion and feeling. He had this hyper developed sense of what people were feeling and why and how it was expressed. So when he was directing actors, he'd be listening and he'd be sitting there going, you know, no, no, no, no, not that, do it again, and and we're going to get closer to the thing that he knew was the perfect take, or the right take, the truest take, the funniest take. He had to such an ear and an eye for that kind of thing. And so maybe that guy that has that hyper developed sense is the kind of guy that could say I'm the father in the room and I'm thirty one years old. He was so developed emotionally. Maybe so because by that time he had spent his whole childhood and adolescence watching other kids, like kids who looked to him like quote unquote normal kids and who sounded like normal kids. I mean, he spent so much of his childhood sta to get apart from the crowd, thinking what does it look like? What does exactly it looked like when someone is popular or when someone's unpopular, or when someone's awkward. I think that went into him really early, that you figured out human nature by watching other people. Yes, Oh God, that that resonated for me so incredibly. I want to just say, this book, Mike Nickles of Life. I went into this and I thought I knew everything about Nichols. You made me see Nichols in a different light. And because the order of the book and the way you put it together, in the whole arc of the book, you made me see this guy in a light that that much of it I knew, but I didn't really know. And this book really so definitive. It's just just a beautifully written book. To congratulations, Thank you so much. And I have to say I don't think I've done an interview for this with someone who has read the book as carefully as you have. No, I loved it. I loved it. I couldn't put it down. I really mean that, I couldn't put it down. So anyway, thank you, thank you for Mark Harris on legendary director Mike Nichols. The book is Mike Nichols Alive. We're produced by Kathleen Russo, Karry Donohue, and Zach McNeice. Our engineer is Frank Imperial. I'm Alec Baldwin, here's the thing. Is brought to you by iHeart Radio

Here's The Thing with Alec Baldwin

Award-winning actor Alec Baldwin takes listeners into the lives of artists, policy makers and perfor 
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