POLL: Elaine May

Oh, the humanity!

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Telling the truth is a bitter herb.

Telling the truth can be dangerous business.

Honest and popular don't go hand-in-hand.

Mikey and Nickey is now on my Netflix queue. What else should I know about it?

nothing til u see it, of course. shot in Philly. went spectacularly over budget, EM wound up hiding reels from the studio in her shrink's garage.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

wow, at least 5 ppl have seen A New Leaf! (I voted for M&N)

I really don't think Walter Matthau has been funnier than in ANL. And Elaine nearly matched her club/LP work w/ Nichols.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lFQ0RSP3Gs

The lady herself to discuss Ishtar after a 92nd St Y screening:

http://www.92y.org/shop/event_detail.asp?productid=T%2DLC5AE33

Also imminent on BluRay.

i watched a new leaf for the first time recently and was fairly underwhelmed. it really was not funny and matthaus character is just too mean to ever be sympathetic imo. actually, i think the same thing abt grodin in heartbreak kid so hm

Being played by Matthau is enough to get sympathy from me. "NO, don't take them OUT!!!"

I saw "A new leaf" a couple of weeks ago for the nth time and I still found it immensely enjoyable. I didn't remember the line about the Boston Hitlers - it made us laugh hard.

I've never seen A New Leaf, but I definitely want to. I recently listed The Heartbreak Kid #50 on a Facebook countdown of my favourite films.

Tix still available for her Ishtar event tonight

Elaine May is really good at making me squirm in terror of society. I haven't seen Ishtar, though. I semi-recently got a comedy record of hers and Nichols', the one where the pianist improvises and the duo improvises characters to go along with the piano, and the first bit about the boss taking his young employee to dinner, trying to get in her pants and later trying to conceal his bitterness when she makes her rejection clear, made my friend go through a few sympathetic saucer eyeballs and oh-no-he-di-ents. It's a really subtly played bit; they have these extraordinary psychic undercurrents working together.

The Heartbreak Kid made me so disgusted sometimes I couldn't laugh. Mikey & Nickey reminded me of a Cassavetes movie, a less sloppy one, but that's probably just the cast. The extras on the dvd are actually pretty interesting. The blues and blacks and oranges of the nighttime street scenes were really pretty. Haven't seen A New Leaf since I was a teenager going through a brief late-60s/early-70s comedy phase. I remember the movie being ambivalent and cruel. Is there a biography of May? What makes her so cruel?

i have ishtar on my dvr now, not sure when ill get round 2 it

What makes her so cruel?

Telling the truth can be dangerous business.

― kingkongvsgodzilla, Saturday, July 7, 2007 8:23 PM

“At that time, Reagan was president, and I met him,” May said. “And he’s an amazingly naïve, innocent, charming guy who really, really cared about show business! In the nicest way, really. He knew Mike’s and my albums. He could quote them — he memorized them! He did our ‘Telephone’ routine. So he was the president. And nobody really knew what was going on, actually. I thought, ‘Really, there’s something very endearing, if terrifying, about this kind of innocence, this kind of naïvete.”

http://www.movieline.com/2011/05/ishtar-revelations-from-director-elaine-may.php

ishtar kinda reminded me of dumb & dumber, w/o nearly enough jokes. i can def understand it being a flop.

i actually liked the setup & them in ny more than the meat of the plot in ishtar/morroco -- their agent saying most ppl would kill for a booking in northern africa was pretty good; also the bitter herb line lol

She sat in the row behind me tonight at a Lincoln Center screening of The Heartbreak Kid!

I managed to avoid asking her for the Information supervisor.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LjmG4qtkO0&feature=related

Are you seeing her Broadway one-act, Morbs?

dunno, I saw the last one. Also I know one of the cast members, need to see if I can get a comp.

Charles Grodin and Jeannie Berlin did the Q&A last night, but Elaine stayed in her seat. When some questioner said it was a crime that THK was no longer on DVD, she piped up "Well then, everyone hear tonight should--" and she turned to a companion to ask, "Who owns it?" He said, "Bristol-Myers." She repeated, "Bristol-Myers."

http://www.hometheaterforum.com/t/315469/who-now-has-control-of-the-palomar-library

Grodin said that Neil Simon was a controlling schmuck (nicely) who left rehearsals after a few days because the actors were doing improv. "Where does it say they sing?"

What did you think of it? One of my favourite movies ever. "I'm not dying...I want out of the goddamned marriage!"

I'd seen it once before, maybe 20 years ago. Eddie Albert is pretty scary in it, a great role for him right after finishing Green Acres.

I love J Berlin's honeymoon stuff: "Lenny, that's us, 50 years from now."

"there's no deceit in this cauliflower"

The cauliflower line's great. To cross over to another thread, I think it exemplifies a kind of early-'70s gossamer that Kael was much more attuned to than Simon, Kauffmann, and Sarris (Made for Each Other, [/i]The Sterile Cuckoo[/i], etc.). I love Grodin giving his spiel to the group of kids right at the end.

The one scene that doesn't come off is Lenny scaring off Kelly's bf at U.Minn by playing a narc, cuz Grodin really doesn't have the authority to do it.

xp Grodin's insistence that much of the film was improved without Simon's approval sorta confirms Kael's review, which if i recall correctly is half about how good elaine may's direction is and half about how bad simon's writing usually is

think i will order myself up a full-on lovefilm may-fest when i get back to london, i always liked the sound of her but i never heard or saw a lick of her work

Grodin also said Eddie Albert asked him during the reception finale scene "Why are they shooting this? It isn't going to be in the film," bcz everything was so casually non-choreographed.

Anyone ever see this comedy she acted in w/ Lemmon and Falk?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6tzxo_BaVQ

80 today

HBD to you both.

A New Leaf is coming to DVD & BluRay from Olive Films on 9/4/12.

Edmund Wilson was infatuated w/ Elaine:

http://www.vanityfair.com/online/wolcott/2012/12/May-in-December

on A New Leaf

http://www.villagevoice.com/2013-07-24/film/a-new-leaf-elaine-may/

Ishtar blu-ray:

http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2013/08/06/ishtar_blu_ray_dvd_is_available_and_the_warren_beatty_dustin_hoffman_flop.html

I'll finally get to see A New Leaf this Sunday. Strange feeling: it's going to be introduced by someone who had film classes with me almost 35 years ago. I know her brother a bit, so I knew she ended up teaching in Colorado where Stan Brakhage taught. She made an impression back then, I'll say that.

ohhhhh man you're in for a treat, such a great movie.

(also, Mikey & Nickey pretty underrated itt!)

I liked A New Leaf okay, but I much prefer The Heartbreak Kid. I thought it got better once May appeared. My biggest problem was probably the very thing people love most about the film: Matthau seemed wrong to me. I think he's great as a disheveled grump, great as a wry intellectual (A Face in the Crowd, Fail Safe), and great in The Fortune Cookie; I couldn't connect with him as a spoiled scion, though. The nightgown scene was great ("Where are you right now?" "Same place I was as before..."), and May is fetching. And I liked spotting all the '70s character actors. Not just the well known ones like David Doyle and Doris Roberts, but also Graham Jarvis (he plays a con artist in The Out of Towners--turns out he was from Toronto) and a guy, possibly uncredited (he's got like one line), who I'm sure played the FBI guy in All the President's Men who has a hallway conversation with Redford. "Close your eyes and let go" makes a for a good metaphor for what it's supposed to be a metaphor for. I think a three-hour cut of this would be a tough slog.

I think Matthau's miscasting is brilliant. Like Groucho as the president of a country.

Melinda Barlow, the woman I mentioned in the previous post, said beforehand that the three-hour version involved an excised subplot with Matthau also plotting the murder of Jack Weston, and that it was intended by May to be even more of a black comedy than it is now.

There were some clear affinities between May's character and Jeannie Berlin in The Heartbreak Kid, with May's being the much gentler version.

Nichols and May discuss Ishtar and moviemaking in general circa 2006:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShLPGHoXJFY#t=1639

You could read the transcript, but they cut some of the jokes and the video is funnier.

http://www.filmcomment.com/article/elaine-may-in-conversation-with-mike-nichols

The "This is shit" film Nichols talks about pulling the plug on after 5 days of shooting was Bogart Slept Here, an early version of The Goodbye Girl that starred de Niro.

I've a Netflix disc of A New Leaf on top of the pile at home.

^^Which after finishing an intense period of work and a comedown period of watching music stuff on dvd (ie: stuff I can just soak in and not have to think about too much), I got on with A New Leaf. I have an odd criticism: It feels like it should have been a British film, with, I dunno, Peter Cook and Eleanor Bron or somebody in the leads. Much of the class stuff would--to me anyway--work better with genuine British voices. But the film we have is very interesting. I can see why it wasn't successful. The humor is very dry--particularly in the context of other "Zany" films of the period-- and as a director May really makes the audience look and listen for the gags. Take the "Boston Hitlers" line, which is just thrown out there in a wide shot. A lot of the funniest things May's character does are little detail things, usually tied to her clumsiness. She gives a wonderful, endearing performance, and I think my biggest takeaway form this screening is that the tragedy of Elaine May was not that she didn't get to direct enough, or even that she didn't get to write enough--it's that she didn't get to act enough.

Apparently she played that role as a last resort, cuz the studio was truculent about all her choices for it.

A New Leaf, unavailable on DVD in the UK, has now turned up on British Netflix

they will clear the rights for individual venues

The manager of the London rep nearby is a big '70s guy, will mention this to him next time I'm in.

I like the idea of a Heartbreak Kid director's cut, with the agonizing (and great) pecan-pie scene going on for 30 minutes.

Anyone attend the Mikey and Nicky screening tonight at Metrograph in NYC? Elaine May took part in a post-screening discussion with the film’s editors.

Would have loved to; sadly it was completely sold out in between the first promo email hitting my inbox, and me having time to open a browser and look at tickets.

Elaine May: ERAS

In 2004, the film was released on DVD on every continent but North America and Antarctica.[59]

(FWIW, I would've voted for Mikey and Nicky had I been here for the poll.)

I know at least one person who got in. We're huge Elaine May fans and have seen her make public appearances in NYC before. The last time was actually a Broadway performance, The Waverly Gallery, I think in 2018, and deservingly she later won a Tony for it.

They did record the discussion on camera, but I have no idea if they'll post it. I was told she comes off as much older now - to be fair, six years can be an especially long time when it's taking you into your 90s - but she was charming and told a couple of funny stories regarding the only line that was improvised in the film and how the physical reels for the film were "misplaced" and relocated during Paramount's attempts to take it away from her.

xp always heard those were tough markets to break into.

Sad to hear this, but I was thinking of the film May was hoping to make with Sebastian Stan (which Stan talked about earlier this year), and re: her appearance last night I was told "I hope she makes it soon because it looks like the window is closing."

On a more positive note, it was nice to hear so many people coming out to see her. Critics like Richard Brody (who tweeted about it), Nick Pinkerton and possibly Gary Giddins (or someone who looked exactly like him), and even actor John Turturro. When we saw her at The Waverly Gallery, Bill Murray was there and I just noticed that he was the one who presented her with an honorary Oscar four years later.

New bio is pretty good.

First of All: ELAINE MAY IS STILL ALIVE

Secondly: this is as good a place as any to ask about this '70s Jeanie Berlin vehicle I've never heard of: https://www.austinfilm.org/screening/sheila-levine-is-dead-and-living-in-new-york/

519 Letterboxd logged viewers!

Prior to going into general release, this film was booked for an exclusive engagement at the Fox Village theatre in Westwood, near the campus of UCLA. Throughout it's brief run there, it played to empty houses and more customer complaints and refund requests than usual.

Apparently available to rent on Amazon.

I PVR'd Sheila Levine from Hollywood Suite a couple of months ago. Got ~40 minutes into it, haven't gone back; wasn't connecting at all.

She was Roxy Cinema this weekend along with her daughter Jeannie Berlin and Marlo Thomas to talk about In the Spirit (which they screened), a 1990 comedy starring all three of them (and co-written by Berlin). Appeared on Saturday and Sunday.

Oh wow, I really want to see that film, it sounds a hoot.

It's supposed to be pretty good. Here's a newspaper review from Dave Kehr who usually championed Elaine May's film work (which sadly doesn't amount to many films if you exclude her script-doctoring):

In the occasionally incoherent, entirely unaccountable and often very funny "In the Spirit," Elaine May and Marlo Thomas play a pair of incompatible New Yorkers-the former a middle-age, middle-class housewife whose executive husband (Peter Falk) has just lost his job, the latter the recently widowed owner of a New Age boutique-who are thrown together when they become convinced that a mob killer is after them.

Though the direction is credited to Sandra Seacat and the script is the work of Jeannie Berlin (May's daughter) and Laurie Jones, May's personality pervades the film, from the extremely dry wit of the dialogue to the deliberate avoidance of conventional dramatic structure. Like May's own work as a director ("A New Leaf," "The Heartbreak Kid"), "In the Spirit" is devoid of slick narrative and conventional climaxes; it seems to wander on its own eccentric way until it just ends, an effect that can be both refreshing and frustrating, subversive and madly self-destructive.

The picture is clearly a family affair, with buddies such as Falk (the star of May's masterpiece, "Mikey and Nicky"), Olympia Dukakis and Melanie Griffith dropping by for cameo appearances, and not much money has been spent on the cinematography or set decoration. The blotchy skin on display in "In the Spirit" seems less a consequence of bad diets, as the Marlo Thomas character insists, than bad lighting.

Yet somehow the general shoddiness suits May's humor more than the overproduction of "Ishtar" (her most recent, and unfortunately, most notorious film). The most original aspect of her work is its lack of emphasis and rhetorical effect, the way in which she presents dramatic events almost wholly without drama. What remains is a sense of life as it is lived, inevitably accompanied by a mingled sense of confusion and disappointment.

"In the Spirit" is, however, considerably more chaotic than May's own work: Seacat never seems to come up with the appropriate lens or camera angle, and it starts to be a surprise when her shots actually match. Still, it's enough for Seacat to point her camera in the general direction of her actors, as long as it's a question of Falk and May discussing the three weeks they've spent as guests in an 8-year-old boy's bedroom, or Berlin, in a bit part as the hooker whose murder sets the plot in motion, dyspeptically describing her experience as a porno movie star ("I can't believe a professional prostitute can be so boring," Falk observes).

With the gruffly sarcastic May bound to the bubbly, optimistic Thomas, the film suggests the claustrophobic same-sex friendships of "Mikey and Nicky" and "Ishtar." (A May buddy film contains more turmoil and passion than the average hetero romance.)

The two characters are led through a succession of painfully cramped spaces-ranging from a bombed-out New York apartment to the front seat of booby-trapped compact car and finally, the attic of an upstate farmhouse where the two women await the killer-which come to represent the unwanted, uncomfortable closeness of their relationship.

Thomas, rail-thin and girlish, partners the dark, skulking May with surprising assurance; she, like Falk in "Mikey and Nicky" and the Warren Beatty character in "Ishtar," is the maddening innocent whose mere existence is a rebuke to the May's character's calculation and self-consciousness. She is a protected species, as this strange, tiny film deserves to be as well. (3 out of 4 stars)

i caught one of those roxy screenings and they’re all still super funny, gently zinging each other and the moderator throughout. they also screened a funny promo where, as a bit, the cast and crew mostly talks about how they hated the shoot and various people involved.

Did May, Berlin or Thomas hang around afterwards to talk to attendees? Pretty amazing all three were there.

May directing a new Renee Taylor play in Massachusetts in August:

https://www.theatermania.com/news/elaine-may-to-direct-new-renee-taylor-play-dying-is-no-excuse_1784499/

May’s first time directing a play in decades

I'm glad she's getting all this work in, that's for sure.

FWIW, re: Berlin, if anyone hasn't seen it, I highly recommend Kenneth Lonergan's Margaret. It was kind of a cause célèbre when it got a belated release in 2011 due to Lonergan's unfortunate troubles with one of its financiers, Gary Gilbert, but it's one of my very favorite American films of the past 15 years (even though it was technically filmed in 2005). To my surprise Berlin appears in a supporting role and she's hilarious, delivering my favorite line which I won't spoil. She's also appeared in Inherent Vice and The Fabelmans, but I feel like she should be in more films.

Did May, Berlin or Thomas hang around afterwards to talk to attendees? Pretty amazing all three were there.

yep! but since I had nothing interesting to say or sign, I just kept moving.

julian schlossberg was also there and also still very funny!

I found the fake promo and it is indeed hilarious:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5GGOaWFZx4

new 4K restoration of A New Leaf: https://vinegarsyndrome.com/products/a-new-leaf?variant=42894660239402

First of all, Elaine May is still alive.

Museum of Moving Image is showing Heartbreak Kid in 35mm this weekend from a print courtesy of the Academy Film Archive: https://movingimage.org/event/the-heartbreak-kid-2/2025-09-27/

Ugh, I'm always on the lookout for screenings of that one but am probably gonna need to work most of the weekend.

That's a beautiful looking print. Metrograph screened it last year and IIRC Music Box in Chicago screened it later on in the year as well. It's still a goddamn shame this movie has been buried by a fucking drug company.

I woke up on the first day of the New Millenium, Jan 1st 2000... having crashed on a sofa at a wild Y2K party in San Francisco

not only was the world still intact, but Ishtar was on the televion.. kinda anticlimactic

It's uneven but there's a lot about Ishtar that's brilliant in a very unfortunate way given the U.S.'s disastrous policies in the Middle East over the past 25 years. There's no better metaphor than two incompetent Americans lost and guided by a blind camel in the middle of the desert. The movie also walks a very fine line that plays up the Americans' cultural isolation without coming off as racist itself. ("Kareem Abdul-Jabbar???")

saw THE HEARTBREAK KID tonight. kind of at a loss to even describe how I feel afterward. I really liked the first 45 minutes or so, as difficult as it was to watch as someone who is also recently married. grodin is so good at playing these unlikeable sleazeballs. but once the setting changes from miami to minnesota, I found almost every scene to be so implausible as to sort of tarnish the first half of the film. the ending was good though, in a sort of getting-everything-you-ever-wanted-isn’t-all-that-grand sense that reminded me of the ending to CALIFORNIA SPLIT. but I have to be honest, the cinematography seemed pretty pedestrian apart from a couple of nice shots, and I’m kind of flabbergasted that three different actors were nominated for oscars

Even when her scenes are slack or have a poor rhythm they're her own; you can't mistake her for another filmmaker.

(This isn't a defense, necessarily)

I love the ending, both the final scene and the penultimate sequence where Lenny has dinner with Kelly and her parents ("this is honest food!") and the father's unsuccessful attempt to bribe him, the way the dad correctly understands that Lenny if full of shit but still loses because he doesn't understand that Lenny has fooled himself with his sales pitches as well as fooling his wife and daughter. Lenny's quiet defeat in the wedding reception scene is more powerful because it follows his improbable victory in the preceding scene imo

there was an old The Onion headline that was something like 'man arrested after acting like male lead in romantic comedy', and I remember that being a commonplace observation back in the 2000s, about how the way men act in romantic comedies are actually toxic and would be awful in real life, but I can't think of another film that dramatizes it as well as this, and sort of before the conventions of those 90s/00s romcoms had really been established?

I loved the back half too, especially in stark contrast to The Graduate (and though I don't think May has ever said anything negative about The Graduate, The Heartbreak Kid plays like a hilarious response). It manages to seem both absurd and brutally honest at the same time. And yet just as The Graduate's ending tipped Nichols belief that his romantics would end up like their parents, May's film suggests a similar future where wild and reckless abandon ultimately leads to a life devoted to quite the opposite.

Might go to MoMI tomorrow afternoon to finally see THK. Or THBK.

I definitely should see THbK. I've long loved M&N and this thread revival prompted me to finally stream A New Leaf this weekend, so thanks: it's frequently hilarious. And I totally get the suggestions upthread that the trappings of class often feel somehow 'British'.

A dimly-remembered TV viewing of Ishtar as a child barely counts as a viewing at all now, so I really should revisit that too.

That's a beautiful looking print. Metrograph screened it last year and IIRC Music Box in Chicago screened it later on in the year as well. It's still a goddamn shame this movie has been buried by a fucking drug company.

Wait, there is a remake with Ben Stiller?

Directed by The Farrelly Bros.!

Had no recollection of its existence.

Supposedly the reason why certain Palomar Pictures titles (Heartbreak Kid, Stepford Wives, Sleuth) are MIA on Blu is that Bristol-Myers got serious $$$$ for the remakes and expected the same for the disc rights to the originals.

Lolz, my first post itt is a link to the IMDb page for the then-impending remake!

I saw the remake long before the original and loved it.

It's literally near impossible for me to imagine The Heartbreak Kid without the acting trio of Charles Grodin, Jeannie Berlin, and Eddie Albert. They totally make the film! Haven't seen the remake, but also can't see how it would work.

When I finally watched the original, Lenny's character really struck me as a proto-George Constanza.

I'm looking forward to seeing Kelly Reichardt's new 70s-set film The Mastermind, which features a delusional antihero with a plan to rob a gallery. I feel like it would also be a good hook for a season of films in this lineage of pathetic but obnoxious losers with big ideas, from The Heartbreak Kid to The King of Comedy to Two Lovers.

Throw a couple of Dustin Hoffman films in there too.

Oh, and Dog Day Afternoon.

...and Wanda.

It's literally near impossible for me to imagine The Heartbreak Kid without the acting trio of Charles Grodin, Jeannie Berlin, and Eddie Albert. They totally make the film! Haven't seen the remake, but also can't see how it would work.

I could have included her too! Sorry, Cybill.