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

A New Leaf is uneven but wonderful.

HENRY: From now on, Henrietta, I'll cook.

HENRIETTA: What will I do, Henry?

HENRY: You'll eat.

or

Henry: Madam, I have seen many examples of perversion in my time, but your erotic obsession with your carpet is probably the most grotesque and certainly the most boring I have ever encountered. You're more to be scorned than pitied. Good day, Mrs. Cunliffe.

another appreciation:

http://fourthreefilm.com/2016/08/mainstream-obscurity-the-films-of-elaine-may/

for that special someone who reminds you of Mikey and Nicky

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1398326469/written-and-directed-by-elaine-may-t-shirts

Joe McElhaney on that good Elaine May detail spotting: pic.twitter.com/rMIdepYDFm

— Peter Labuza (@labuzamovies) June 14, 2017

new New Leaf Blu

https://www.slantmagazine.com/dvd/review/a-new-leaf-2017

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.

Her role as Henrietta in A New Leaf was a rare delight, an article of perfection.

Mike Nichols on Elaine May and his decision to not direct THE EXORCIST https://t.co/7PQEWlBcZm pic.twitter.com/WdDtDb0DxC

— Alexandra Heller-Nicholas (@suspirialex) March 9, 2018

will trod the stage again at 86

NEW LONERGAN ALERT. And wow, this CAST! pic.twitter.com/8Vkt240dRD

— Louis Peitzman (@LouisPeitzman) April 11, 2018

Watched The Heartbreak Kid tonight for the first time in at least a decade. (Instead of playing my old home-taped VHS, I lifted it off YouTube.) One of those things where you watch it, smile at all the stuff you used to love, feel a bit sad because you know you'll never love it that way again. Not that I was never aware (or at least not since I left 20 behind) that it was far-fetched and gimmicky fluff and rather cruel to Jeannie Berlin (maternal director notwithstanding...). But there were things in there that were part of me, going back to first seeing it as a teenager. They're still there--but tonight, less so.

I really don't think Walter Matthau has been funnier than in ANL.

he's terrific. the miscasting, such as it is, is hilarious. somehow that gap heightens the sense of a man totally, defiantly oblivious to his own situation. all those early scenes with him refusing to accept the facts in dealing with his accountant, his butler... terrific. the last act is a mess and a flop (no matter whose fault that was) and yet it's still delightful to watch this guy carry on with all his pretensions and selfishness, plus you get may's big costume gag scene.

also even though in the current version it's really abruptly set up, watching matthau tell off the crooked household staff was oddly satisfying.

"Henrietta, where's your left arm?"

e's terrific. the miscasting, such as it is, is hilarious. somehow that gap heightens the sense of a man totally, defiantly oblivious to his own situation. all those early scenes with him refusing to accept the facts in dealing with his accountant, his butler... terrific

Albert Brooks obv looked at these protracted studies in embarrassment when writing and filming Lost in America.

happy birthday to the Information Supervisor

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CidZon6Ga98

retro in Toronto coming up soon

def seeing Mikey and Nicky, mulling the others

i wish m&n was better

how could it be??

The Heartbreak Kid on Friday! Don't miss it, Simon (my seen-it-too-many-times misgivings above aside).

I have a conflict that night, alas

Obviously would not have watched The Heartbreak Kid at home a couple of months ago had I known it would turn up on the Lightbox schedule. Anyway, full house, some appreciative applause at the end. How hard it is to see? Their print had Swedish subtitles.

well, the print they showed in NY 3-4 years ago did not (she was in the audience, so maybe it was hers).

btw tix are on sale for her return to Broadway in the Lonergan play.

Mikey and Nicky tonight!

One of the best rabbit holes I've gone down, on discovering Elaine May through A New Leaf, was finding out that: she was still alive and married to Stanley Donen, and that her daughter Jeannie Berlin was the one in Kenneth Lonergan's Margaret who had been a big wow in a film of wows. How great that May's now appearing in a Longeran play.

did not know she and Donen have been a couple for close to 20 years. however, she seems to have refused to marry him.

Oh yes: whoops.

Coming to Criterion in January:

https://www.criterion.com/films/27895-mikey-and-nicky

Also, I'll be seeing her on Broadway in 3 weeks. Stay healthy, Elaine!

she's getting great reviews (the NYT liked the play more than Vulture)

http://www.vulture.com/2018/10/theater-review-elaine-may-in-the-waverly-gallery.html

https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/6015-raves-for-elaine-may-on-broadway

She is heartbreaking in this; it's a good play. (Michael Cera plays a clueless Masshole aspiring artist.) She has the funniest line of the night, in response to her son-in-law's "It's hard getting old."

Elaine is almost off in her own project in Enter Laughing (1967), the first film Carl Reiner directed (about a Jewish kid in the '30s -- him -- deciding to be an actor). She's the actress daughter of a pretentious ham (Jose Ferrer) way off Broadway, but she'll settle for encouraging him to cast younger men she can make out with onstage. She gets 80% of the laughs in the picture.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2FFyA8Qpkc

(yes, that's Rob Reiner as a schlub)

Mikey and Nicky was personal for May. She grew up in a mob-connected family, and the film’s characters are based on low-echelon gangsters she knew from that time. In fact, this was a project that she had been thinking about since the 1950s, when she was living in Chicago and working with the improvisational group the Compass Players. Friends such as Alan Arkin and Mike Nichols remembered scraps of paper strewn around her apartment with references to the title characters. It was her first totally original screenplay.

https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/6160-10-things-i-learned-mikey-and-nicky

Watched it last night and was a little (or a lot) dubious that Nicky had been that much of a loathsome fuckup and made it into his 40s alive; I was certainly glad when he finally got it.

damn, cold

saw it on tuesday having forgotten i'd heard it wasn't a comedy; took me a while to find its groove but it's a good movie with some really interesting things on its mind re: jealousy and unaddressed resentments in male-male friendships etc. very "actory" movie in that so much has to be unsaid. last scene really landed hard.

^^Probably one of the darkest '70s movie endings.

The film's original .8 million budget had grown to nearly $4.3 million (6.6 million in contemporary dollars[1]) by the time May turned the film over to Paramount. She shot 1.4 million feet of film, almost three times as much as was shot for Gone with the Wind. By using three cameras that she sometimes left running for hours, May captured spontaneous interaction between Falk and Cassavetes. At one point, Cassavetes and Falk had both left the set and the cameras remained rolling for several minutes. A new camera operator said "Cut!" only to be immediately rebuked by May for usurping what is traditionally a director's command. He protested that the two actors had left the set. "Yes", replied May, "but they might come back".[2]

I mean, come the fuck on.

Michael Cimino: "Hold my beer..."

legendary anecdote, plus the reels in her garage

i wanna know how her numbers stack up to kubrick's wastage....

the screening the other night was introduced by producer john hausman, and he told the "they might come back" anecdote, but then drifted into musing about how with digital, young filmmakers are just shooting constantly, creating editing hells for themselves but just not even having to worry about these issues. made me think, all may was really doing was arguably wasting other people's money, right? can't say it strikes me as crazier than, like, warner brothers spending tens or maybe hundreds of millions of dollars on post-wrap *reshoots* for "justice league" because they didn't know what they wanted, and were retooling their whole lineup's vibe on the fly, strikes me as far more absurd and stupid. tho obviously in may's case the relevant thing is that it was self-defeating since it severely curtailed her opportunities to make more films. feel like a man in the same position would get more chances to redeem, idk.

Kind of. Much of it depends on the film being made. In Steven Bach's Final Cut (the book about the Heaven's Gate debacle), he makes sure to illustrate the Heaven's Gate wasn't even United Artists' most expensive and trouble/overbudget production of 1979--Moonraker was. But Moonraker was a franchise film that they felt would ultimately payoff whatever money was sunk into it (and did, becoming the biggest Bond film up to that point at the box office), and Heaven's Gate was a fast-tracked prestige film that went wayward in directions not yet imagined by the industry.

The digital thing seems like sort of a false equivalency--sure, theoretically you can shoot more stuff, but at the same time you're still running up against other same old same old budgetary restraints (paying crew, renting gear, union requirements, insurance etc.), plus there are only so many hours in the day.

But yeah, the film did May no favors re:her directing career. Ishtar only happened because Beatty went to bat for her.

Yeah, I wasn't sure but I got the sense he was maybe talking about students or w/e, where there's much less of a crew and so on, and he's just startled to see people leaving the camera rolling between takes or while everyone's moving lights around. Versus a lifetime of feet of film === $$$.

Saw it yesterday (thanks Criterion Channel)...hmm a bit. It seems like half a remarkable film; I don't want to take away from May's clearly intentional development of the characters over the years, and the relatively circular dialogue at points and other lacunae similarly are part of the whole point, but my attention kept drifting at points. I suspect I'll like it better on a second watch, though. Absolutely a great in medias res start to the whole thing, and I loved Ned Beatty just being sick of this shit.

I think most complaints i'm seeing about it are ones I reserve for Cassavetes-directed films.

Mikey and Nicky is such an odd duck: Mean Streets filtered through Husbands by the woman who made The Heartbreak Kid. It makes more sense than it should; The Heartbreak Kid already showed that May understands toxic masculinity as well as Scorsese or Cassavetes. A few too many of the scenes between Cassavetes and Falk are allowed to ramble on too long, a Cassavetes tactic that doesn't always play as well here (a recent rewatch of Husbands confirmed for me that Cassavetes exerted more control over the shape of his films than appears). I can see it growing on me with later viewings, but for now I file it as more of a curio (albeit a successful one) than a legit 70s Classic.

That ending, though.

seeing Ishtar on the big screen tonight, woohoo!

a dangerous business...

Watched the Criterion of M&N last night, which I'd last seen only four years ago. A 5-star film.

The alleged "loose" woman who bites Falk is played by Walter Matthau's wife Carol Grace. She'd also been married to William Saroyan... twice. Hadn't had a film credit since '59, never had another.

Very brief but amusing roles for M Emmett Walsh and Bill Hickey.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/tv/awards/tony-awards-2019-elaine-may-wins-first-major-acting-award-at-age-87/ar-AACDbSD?li=BBnb2gh

!!!

https://thefilmstage.com/news/elaine-may-to-direct-first-narrative-feature-in-30-years-with-dakota-johnson-led-crackpot/

!!!!!!

I rewatched Heaven Can Wait (1978) last night, script credited to Elaine and Warren Beatty. Her touch is most apparent with the Charles Grodin-Dyan Cannon murderous couple ("Don't cover my mouth!" "You used to like it") and in cop Vincent Gardenia's pre-climactic grilling about hats, cocoa and cookies.

88! I wonder if she plays piano.

took me a while to find its groove but it's a good movie with some really interesting things on its mind re: jealousy and unaddressed resentments in male-male friendships etc. Yes to all, gotta say some of it seemed familiar too. Will say no more.

If you're leaning in the direction of "She ripped off Mean Streets," it was shot in '73 and the script existed long before that.

No, I didn't mean Yes that part in particular. Hadn't thought of Mean Streets: some similarities, but whatever the chronology, provenance etc. of scripts, seemed and seems like such relationships could exist in and between many lives...

i've now watched all four of these and i don't really get her. the new york part of ishtar is very funny but the rest of her filmography leaves me cold. i watch a lot of old movies but her movies feel so of another time that they feel completely foreign to me (harold & maude is another movie like that to me). also i'm turned off by how little interest she seems to have in the visual aspect of moviemaking - ishtar looks alright but mikey & nicky looks like crap, is often out of focus and/or murky and dark. what am i missing

I think the grimy run & gun look of Mikey & Nicky works for the material. (My only complaint with the look of it would be the couple of scenes where you can plainly see the wireless mics on Falk & Cassavetes, which takes me out of the movie if I notice them.)

But I know what you mean. Mikey & Nicky is the only one of her movies that 100% works for me, I rate New Leaf and Heartbreak Kid as 'good but could have been great', and part of what holds them back imo is the bland approach to shooting & staging. I always chalked it up to her coming out of theater. But I dont think youre missing anything per se if it doesnt work for you, I think with these films you either find a way to look past the flaws and enjoy the writing & performances or you dont.

The Heartbreak Kid is an ordinary looking film, although it's been so long since I watched anything but a deteriorated print (VHS, YouTube, Swedish print), it's hard to say. For that particular film, it never bothered me.

The way she shoots Cybill Shepherd--the female gaze--means more to me.

Doc otm re Matthau's casting as a rich wastrel scion:

he's terrific. the miscasting, such as it is, is hilarious. somehow that gap heightens the sense of a man totally, defiantly oblivious to his own situation.

and Zack Snyder's Gardner Fox's Justice League: The Whedon Cut:

all may was really doing was arguably wasting other people's money, right? can't say it strikes me as crazier than, like, warner brothers spending tens or maybe hundreds of millions of dollars on post-wrap *reshoots* for "justice league" because they didn't know what they wanted, and were retooling their whole lineup's vibe on the fly, strikes me as far more absurd and stupid. tho obviously in may's case the relevant thing is that it was self-defeating since it severely curtailed her opportunities to make more films. feel like a man in the same position would get more chances to redeem, idk.

omg that DN

and i think this might be the week i finally accept the Youtube quality and watch Heartbreak Kid. ~april is May~

Here's a wayback link for the Movieline report on May's appearance at the Ishtar screening upthread

No doubt hero of the arts Brian Calle is rushing to restore the archives of the Village Voice, but just in case this doesn't happen for no apparent reason, here's that piece on revisiting A New Leaf.

And new to the thread: MAD Magazine's take on The Heartbreak Kid, by Drucker and Siegel. (nb that you'll have to scroll up and down to read the opening double-truck.)

https://vitatrain4life.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/giphy-49.gif

the Heartbreak upload is very poor quality, but it's not like May's main concern was the look of the film, soo... Just pretend you're watching broadcast TV on a CRT.

Don't watch it on fucking Youtube, you'll miss the unctuous texture of the egg salad on Jeannie Berlin's face, and the intensely rich redness of her sunburn.

Somewhere in storage I have a copy of the widescreen DVD of the O.G. Heartbreak Kid from Anchor Bay. Probably some decent rips up on back channels. Apparently Bristol-Myers Squibb (who through some litany of business deals own the Palomar Pictures library) are holding it and other films hostage because they made King's Ransoms on remake rights*, and are trying (and failing) to make lightning strike twice on physical media/streaming licensing.

*In addition to THK, they've got The Stepford Wives and Sleuth.

Torrenting is really the only accessible other option - it's a three-hour round trip walk to the one video store that has it here, and they require a $200 deposit for their sole copy. Discussion upthread notes how scarce prints are, even if repertory cinemas had not been closed for a while, for some inexplicable reason.

I assume BMS (who owned Palomar in time to actually make most of the library, including THK) just don't care enough to bother licensing, and are setting their rates high enough to turn away suitors on purpose. Pelham 123 is their other notably-remade title.

Paramount was able to get a temporary DVD license as part of their deal for the Stepford remake, and a bunch of non-remade Palomar titles were put out on DVD by MGM back in the day, some of which Kino has more recently put out on Blu.

Carrie Courogen
@carriecourogen
·
Apr 4
Replying to
@carriecourogen
A podcast as big as Blank Check, with a large fanbase talking about how they are being introduced to this filmmaker via the podcast, has a responsibility to do more than the bare minimum to get this right. This many errors, tired exaggerations, and assumptions is unacceptable.
Her fact check of the Elaine May episode:

I fact checked the Blank Check episode on Elaine May’s A New Leaf pic.twitter.com/3Zslz39MJz

— Carrie Courogen (@carriecourogen) April 4, 2021

For those not listening, her corrections do not correspond to errors made on the podcast.

i think they kinda do? the hosts' hearts are in the right place, but they are not really research and facts oriented - the comment about skimming wikipedia is really not too far off of the way griffin will typically characterize his own pre-show reading.

a couple do but - her first point outright repeats, rather than corrects, the same thing that Newman and Sims said on the podcast
- Elaine and Marvin May separated after three years but did not divorce
- improv point might be accurate but I don't recall them saying she went to Chicago with the intention of getting into a pre-existing scene, rather than improv in Chicago being the next phase of her career
- her fourth point m/l contradicts itself? performers going to NYC to work as performers and pursuing an audition with a major talent agent while there is not an argument AGAINST them wishing to make a living by performing?
- Penn point might be accurate, idrc, might be crosstalk?
- Tony point mbaidrcmbc
- theatre one is a good and valid correction
- if she thinks Griffin mispronouncing words or names is laugh-out-loud hilarious then it's bemusing how she made it through his approx. seven pismronunications per episode for the last five years without concluding it is a comedy show, not an educational one
- studios point is valid but also was clearly the speakers riffing in speculative metaphor, not presented as reportage
- citing your sources in order to specifically call out their bias or slightness is not a journalistic failure
- the shooting coverage thing is valid if that's what they said
- I think the comedian and UCB-trained improviser Griffin Newman, whose persona is built on exaggeration and amplification, was improvisng a comedic exaggeration by saying that May slept with a loaded gun under her pillow to protect the Mikey & Nicky reels from the studio

and her saying that David should kill himself out of embarrassment for joking about movies on a podcast, when he has a day job as a film critic, does not suggest that her criticisms are entirely measured and in good faith imo

Somewhere in storage I have a copy of the widescreen DVD of the O.G. Heartbreak Kid from Anchor Bay

I have a copy of this too. The AB disc is pretty average, visually, but definitely superior to the YouTube stream.

i'm not seeing the "kill yourself" part?? but the way twitter behaves and stuff loads or doesn't load still baffles me so i guess i could be missing it. that would certainly change my reaction.

i think there is an interesting issue here, which is how much *are* you obligated to do your homework/research? in my own archi-blogging i often write about topics in a looser, glibber way than i ever would in my academic writing: discussing buildings without first reading all the published work on them, repeating fun anecdotes or gossip without necessarily doing the legwork to confirm the original truth vs the telephone-game version etc. i also lean way more into formal analysis and whether i think the building is bad/good/great/masterpiece in a way that would be at best irrelevant in the kind of historical writing i'm trying to do for a living, which is much more about social/political/economic context and not so much art appreciation. it's fun to have the space to write more lightly, to be more of an opinionated amateur critic/tourist/connoisseur than a professional historian. but if my blog had thousands of followers it might not actually be so fun - i do think i'd feel more of an obligation to get things "right" and be more discreet, circumspect, precise, careful. or at least have big disclaimers on every post.

so i get where, if someone were concerned about the ongoing misunderstanding of elaine may or the systemic marginalization of female filmmakers, you might really be bothered by a podcast with a HUGE following, that demonstrates a certain sloppiness with stuff. like whether or not every fact check is completely on-point, she's accurately clocked that this is not a carefully researched karina longworth podcast, it's a looser comedy/discussion/fan podcast, maybe serving as a fun creative outlet for a critic like Sims. and, i'd buy an argument that that's less of a problem when they're riffing on James Cameron than it is with May. the intense defensiveness of the BC fans on their subreddit is kinda disappointing. lotta "jokes" that are just warmed over "cancel culture" stuff and/or saying that fact checks are good but daring to post them publicly is just outrageously rude and unfair...

Courogen apparently is working on a May biography, so she's done the work and would know the facts, and should rightfully be irked with something widely out there that's lesser.

I am a new Blank Check fan -- started listening about a month ago by dipping into the archive -- and Courogen's tweets depressed me because they seemed like valid points and so this new favorite thing of mine felt tainted.

However, with some distance -- and now having listened to both the New Leaf and Heartbreak Kid episodes -- I am less bothered by them. I think Courogen raises some worthwhile points about the ways in which the podcast may unwittingly perpetuate some broad narratives about May -- which I assume her biography will attempt to correct. But the list of errors, which seemed egregious to me at first, now looks nitpicky. (For what it's worth, in the episode about A New Leaf, Griffin also says that Mark Harris's Pictures at a Revolution is about the movies of 1969, but it's actually 1967. Whatever.)

I agree with Doctor Casino that the defensiveness of Blank Check fans on Twitter and Reddit is disappointing, though. It reminds me of the Reply All scandal from earlier this year. I think the question of who gets to tell these stories and what kind of responsibility they have is enormously complicated, and I understand why this caused the consternation it did.

I am curious if anything will come of this:

I haven’t listened to them yet! But am happy to work with her to add further context and clarity on the socials as the eps get released

— Blank Check Podcast (@blankcheckpod) April 4, 2021

I mean, I assume that is a bit of crisis management on Marie's part, but it would be nice to see the show explicitly address the critique. It's really too bad that the episodes were all pre-recorded.

yeah. to me i take the fact checks as less "these are very important facts and they are wrong," and more "getting this many minor things wrong is a giveaway that they haven't done more than a half hour's prep for this miniseries." and i think that would be the more objectionable thing, in a "you have a listener base and that means you have a responsibility" sense.

i did see where Griffin agreed that the "pasta dinner" bit is bad, whether misunderstood or not, and that it would henceforth be dropped without fanfare. ostensibly, the original joke was that he really, sincerely and chastely, only wanted to have pasta with Daisy Ridley, and also that he was "offering" an extremely cheap and unimpressive date experience to a movie star. but the pitfalls there are pretty obvious and dropping it is the right move.

Yeah, as a new listener, I had no idea that "pasta dinner" was a bit, and I cringed when I heard it in the first 5 minutes of the episode.

the shooting coverage thing is valid if that's what they said

i would even argue that this one is kind of a ridiculous splitting of hairs: "she went over schedule shooting too much coverage" vs "she went over schedule bc she had to go back and and reshoot many weeks of scenes to get coverage, which was the exact right amount of coverage but shooting it caused her to go over schedule". like technically correct i guess but not really a 'how dare you sir' gotcha.

i get why ppl like blank check but its definitely in a class of lite infotainment podcasts i dont have much use for, where i always wish i was just reading a long article or book about whatever the subject is.

but most of those fact checks are v corny imho, 20 not 30 years with stanley donen, 3rd not 4th woman in DGA, come on now, and sic otm about many of them being contradictory or redundant. but hearing that she is writing a may bio makes a lot of sense bc its very much that LRB letters page vibe of the Very Very Invested biographer aggrieved about someone else stepping on their subject

The differences between her blowing the schedule on A New Leaf (having to go back and pick up coverage bcz she didn’t get editing and just did her shotlist) and the others (shooting endlessly and having everyone improv, even in battle scenes in the Moroccan desert, then building the film in the edit) are fascinating and worthy of comparison. But Blank Check’s approach is about the viewers’ reaction to the work, not about a Longworthian research and scripted presentation of facts. It started as a review podcast that did the Phantom Menace every week, pretending as though no other Star War film had ever been made. Their analysis of Demme’s deep, empathetic interest in humanity came from their watching all his films, and didn’t address Tak Fujimoto’s choice of lights and lenses, as interesting as that would also be.

i'm not seeing the "kill yourself" part??

Courogen deleted some of her tweets, but it was something like “if I were a salaried film critic for the Atlantic, I would simply choose to die of embarrassment rather than publish inaccurate material about a filmmaker.”

i mean if we're gonna extend BC some benefit of the doubt and allowance for what they're trying to say and do, then can we also say that there is in terms of intent and colloquial meaning a difference between "i would rather die of embarrassment " and "you should kill yourself" ?

Like there’s a difference in serious intent between “May fought with the studio to protect her intent with the film” and between “May was sleeping with a loaded gun under her pillow to protect the film reels under her bed, lest the studio burst through her window in the dead of night,” you mean?

Whew i had no idea podcasts were judged so seriously over there. Not saying they shouldn't be but.. some of the ones i've heard could be fact checked out of existence within about 15 minutes by the same logic.

Is Blank Check any good usually? Do the ILX film bods like the hosts/ the show?

i'm a fan of the show! really good casual film dork listening most of the time. a key factor is that david's voice/mannerisms go down smoothly for me and often just tickle me. it's not a serious history show but they do genuinely love the movies and hollywood and are leeeeeagues ahead of most "here's a couple of guys with movie opinions" shows one could imagine.

so i get their vibe. I also could imagine someone legitimately misreading an exaggeration like the gun/pillow story as someone retelling a wild anecdote that they believe to be true. (for all i know that's some widely circulated myth and not a griff-ism, but i myself know too little about May to say.)

more generally... there's a middle ground between "knows nothing, just riffing and goofing" and "did Longworth-level research." i've been frustrated before on seasons where i did know more about the filmmaker/context, and where they landed in that middle ground didn't work for me... Miyazaki was one of those. i know their "connoisseurs of context" thing is partly kidding themselves about NOT being true experts, but combined with the amount of time they DO devote to context/backstory (versus a show that's like "the premise of the show is we watch movies knowing nothing about them"), it does make you want them to know what they're talking about. and getting lots of individually minor things wrong does kinda work against that, and when you're an expert on something, it's frustrating to hear someone with a huge audience getting shit wrong. this really doesn't seem outrageous to me.

i like blank check a lot, i binged a ton of it over the winter. i like learning about the movies but mostly i enjoy the enthusiasm (for most movies) and the banter.

and yes must acknowledge: their start was with a long run of episodes based on the conceit that they did NOT know what they were talking about (discussing the star wars prequels as if they were the first and only star wars films). but it's changed a lot since then. i definitely learn stuff from the show, mostly the way you learn something from someone explaining it casually at a bar. but there is sort of a trust that when they're relaying fun and memorable trivia that it's also correct trivia that you could repeat without contributing to general ignorance and confusion. i think david cares about that more than griffin.... just reflects their different personalities, training, relationship to the industry etc.

yeah, I like it lots too. though I mostly listen when I'm interested in the film or director, it's to hear the speakers' reactions, not to learn more.

it does make you want them to know what they're talking about. and getting lots of individually minor things wrong does kinda work against that, and when you're an expert on something, it's frustrating to hear someone with a huge audience getting shit wrong.

agreed - as I said, many of her corrections are valid (but mostly v. minor), and I'd rather they get their research right than half-remembered. but many of hers were inaccurate and the overall tone (inc eyerolling weeks before the miniseries about how she was going to hate listening) was not a productive way of adjusting against their rhetorical excesses.

the conceit that they did NOT know what they were talking about

I really enjoyed Avery Edison's disappointment this week, as a long-time listener and first-time guest, that America's Finest Film Critic was not present in the third chair.

as someone who has seen all the elaine may movies and didn't love any of them, their enthusiasm is making me reassess the movies and feel like i wasn't viewing them through the proper lens or something

I watched The Heartbreak Kid earlier this year and genuinely liked it. I felt less enthusiastic about A New Leaf, which I watched a couple of weeks ago, but thought it was at least trying to do something interesting. The Blank Check episode made me appreciate it more, even if I still don't find it quite as funny as they do.

As NA knows because we watched it together, I don't really like Ishtar apart from the opening scenes in New York. I'm going to watch Mikey and Nicky sometime this week.

yeah the first 10 minutes or so of Ishtar are my favorite part of her filmography

imo most criticisms of the 3 comedies are generally hard to argue with, but if you can bargain with yourself to overlook the flaws the movies have interesting & funny pleasures to offer. pretty far from masterpieces though.

my main problem with mikey & nicky is that it looks like crap. i know she's more of a script/character director than a visual stylist, but i don't understand how she shot thousands of hours of footage and there are still scenes in the movie that are blatantly out of focus.

but yeah even though i didn't love any of her movies, there was definitely stuff i liked and/or thought was interesting in each. i just couldn't completely connect to any of them. not saying she's not worthy of discussion or reappraisal.

I think the grimy run & gun look of Mikey & Nicky works for the material.

The grainy, low-light effect really helps you feel that you're caught up in this gross night with these two seedy creeps.

yeah, i definitely appreciate the scuzzy lo-fi-ness of Mikey and Nicky but i get the complaint.

agreed 100% about the opening chunk of Ishtar. when i saw it in a full theater it was KILLING up until they actually get on the plane. there were a few solid laughs afterwards, iirc largely thanks to Grodin, but a lot more failure.

i'm really glad i saw A New Leaf in a similar packed-house environment. i'm sure i would have a lot less affection for it if i'd watched it at home in quarantine... comedy can survive the small screen, but compromised/flawed comedy is obviously gonna have a tough time...

Ishtar is probably the one that suffers most from May's lack of interest in framing or visual storytelling, as well as leaning into improv. Hoffman just isn't interesting enough as a creator (or actor imo) to craft anything revelatory in the moment - the film would probably have been better sticking to May's script and letting the cinematographer do the pretty set-ups she argued against.

(Hoffman also thought in advance that the script should never have left New York, and that the first half-hour of the final movie is still great.)

the first acts of movies are a hell of a lot easier to script and pace successfully than the second and third acts are.

Co-sign on the first half hour of Ishtar. The rest is unwatchable, barely above Spies Like Us.

Curious to read the new Nichols blog though, just to read the Elaine May stuff

the first acts of movies are a hell of a lot easier to script and pace successfully than the second and third acts are.

Not usually an issue with May - we can't tell anything about the act structure of A New Leaf with a 90-minute middle act thrown out by the studio and a judge, but as great as the "I'm pooooooor" sequence is, the later parts all work onscreen. The first act in Heartbreak is perfunctory, with chaos ramping up in the 2nd-through-fifth. The structure and pacing of M&N has nothing to do with scripting. And The Birdcage may have stuck to the pace of La Cage (idk), but is very close to the escalating-farce family-conflict structure of Heartbreak Kid.

agreed that the second half (or whatever) of A New Leaf works onscreen, but for me it works more like a collection of incredible sketches, than as pieces of a larger comedy... but of course it's impossible to know how it was all supposed to work. Birdcage is definitely great evidence that she knew her way around scripting and pacing a comedy, for sure.

the Ishtar problem is just that the North African material isn't funny, while watching Beatty and Hoffman try to write songs together is hilarious. the rare movie that arguably peaks (into true all-time brilliance imho) while the opening credits are still being doled out. the pause and delivery of the word "Why?" in that songwriting session cracks me up just thinking about it.

There are funny elements and bits in the African material, but structure-wise, a big problem is that it loses the thread of the leads' own aims for far too long. It's a bathetic triumph when they get up and perform a whipped-into-shape version of that terrible opening-sequence number. But the thing would hang together better if the story had enabled their getting caught up in CIA missions to also sustain a stronger throughline, sneaking off to find places to perform along the way & such.

(If she'd been allowed to shoot the desert stuff in the US, perhaps they could have thrown more of it out and focused on the New York narrative? But having been forced to go to Morocco to use up Coca-Cola's trapped-in-the-country money, the impetus to use as much as possible would have been strong...)

In general it seems she might have been better served as part of a directing team, to riff ideas on set and vibe with the actors, but with a more practically-minded partner to balance that and run comms with the crew. (Apparently she wrote lots of Reds in the edit with Beatty, too?) But her never giving a fuck about film directing in the first place was probably the biggest strike against her finding a more productive way of doing it, within the system or otherwise.

In general it seems she might have been better served as part of a directing team,

From the full post-Ishtar-screening discussion with Nichols:

Now tell us a little about the people who you made your movies with. People like our friend Anthea Sylbert, who was a great costume designer and an inspiring and remarkable person—how important is a person like that?

There’s about five of them. And when you meet them, they’re sort of like friends, you want to keep them. On Heartbreak Kid, I had no idea what these people would wear. Anthea said: “Well, cotton underwear is what the girl would wear, that’s what those blondes wear.” She was just perfect. She was just a true artist. And in A New Leaf, she said: “Have you thought about what’s in your purse?” Man, I hadn’t thought about my part. I had no idea. And every once in a while you get a fantastic art director, and Sylbert was wonderful. I do miss that. Those wonderful people who work with you on a movie, and who tell the story with you. That’s the best part of making movies, I think. It’s the only thing where you can work in a group where five or six people all tell the same story in their own specific voice. The music person has a voice. The makeup person makes you up to tell the story… And they all tell the same story. And I miss that because you can’t really do it on the stage.

On first directing:

I know nothing. I actually remember calling you and I said, “Well, how should I say action? Firmly or…?” I began sort of on one foot and just continued that way.

I think the real secret of movies is putting a crew together. And it takes about 25 years to get it right. That’s not an exaggeration. And you have to do it steadily because you can’t ask anyone. Everybody will say about everyone you ask, “He’s a very good man.” Nobody will ever tell; you have to find out. And when you have that many people that can you depend on, everything changes.

You’ve never seen a movie with that many mistakes in it. My editor was a really nice man who had a drug problem. And the first cut he did, he did flash forwards, so that I would watch the scene and there would be a piece of the next scene in it. He’d never edited. It was his first movie. And I said, “There’s a piece of the next scene in this,” and he said it’s a flash forward. I didn’t know what to do. And fortunately, well he didn’t OD, but he took too many drugs and left, and the apprentices and I sort of took out the flash forwards.

And I managed to learn on that movie, while shooting it I made so many mistakes that I actually learned a little bit about how to make a movie. I didn’t learn—I had such a good focus puller I didn’t know there was such a thing as focus until the next movie.

July: https://www.powerhousefilms.co.uk/collections/frontpage/products/ishtar-le

89.

Happy Birthday to Elaine May - Directing A NEW LEAF in 1971 pic.twitter.com/u5wyndoTbc

— Hill Illustration (@charliehillart6) April 21, 2021

Honorary Oscar!

Mikey and Nicky is annoying the fuck out of me. I'm just sad Mikey is going to end up getting killed for this doofus

Ok, not so keen on Mikey now either

Yah that’s a difficult one to get through

I like movies with shitty people in them but Nicky is such a pain in the ass, dumbfuck. It's innervating.

I've now seen all of these movies bar a new leaf and I don't really like any of them. Heartbreak kid is my favourite

The copy on Amazon Prime seems to be stretched horizontally. I agree with comments above that it also looks like crap. Not just the darkness but also e.g. starting with a freeze-frame of a door because they didn't shoot enough coverage.

not shooting enough was famously the biggest problem with Mikey And Nicky

Mikey and Nicky is perfect

I think Morbs said Mikey and Nicky was his favorite gangster film.

Also his favorite gay romance.

thought this thread was bumped because of her guest role in the Good Fight, where she played RBG in a dream sequence where she basically says "fuck Black people, get yours" to Christine Baranski's character

If you’re giving out spoilers, how about a timestamp

don't have a timestamp for you but there's video here: https://ew.com/tv/the-good-fight-diane-rbg-clip-interview/

I had already acquired the episode due to hearing that May was in it, intending to watch the story it told; now that I know she's only in one scene and what she does in it, I shan't bother watching the story, but I still would have checked out the whole minute or five or w/e of her performance. Being directed to an Entertainment Weekly video of the writers of the story breaking down their intention in telling a story that I haven't seen has entirely drained my ability to invest into May's involvement in the story.

tbf, it's the Elaine May thread; it's reasonable that people might pop in with comments on a recent tv appearance. i get the desire for a spoiler tag or something, but if you are saving watching something i do recommend leaving such threads lie until you've gotten around to it. for example i usually unbookmark film-anticipation threads in between when the film comes out and when i watch it, but that's just me.

without being mad at Murgatroid or anything, I do think there's a difference between "btw y'all May took her first non-Woody screen acting role in 31 years this week in case anyone wants to check it out!" and "here is a complete summary of May's first acting role in 31 years, including the punchline, which aired a day and a half ago"

(her first notable screen acting role in 21 years if we assume fewer people here regularly watched Woody's Bezos miniseries, which he promoted by saying "It was a catastrophic mistake. I don't know what I'm doing. I'm floundering. I expect this to be a cosmic embarrassment," than The Good Fight)

I didn't think it was a spoiler because it's a dream sequence that does not impact the actual plot whatsoever

Why the Indicator Ishtar got canceled:

-Ishtar had gotten to a point where the studio was asking for significant cuts to every single feature on the disc and to leave off things already licensed for it altogether, and they just decided to cancel the release instead of dropping it all, the studio did not want anything that discussed the film's past reputation at all, too many sensitivities, they could have done a vanilla edition and decided it wasn't in the spirit of the label

Powerful studio people who interfered in 1986-1987 still alive? Never underestimate the sustaining powers of hate.

The speculation is that it's actually Warren Beatty who stepped in here. But really, how powerful even is he these days?

Annette Bening could not be reached for comment.

Beatty's meddling is supposedly why the Criterion edition of Shampoo was less than stacked.

Whaddya want, guy always had a lot of energy to carry out his various activities.

the studio did not want anything that discussed the film's past reputation at all

Forgot that Sony did a still in-print "Director's Cut" Blu of Ishtar.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0037QGRVK/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_glt_i_H8AD6ZAX5TV39ENHDH3T?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1

Mikey and Nicky was really hard going. It was an Elaine May version of a toxic John Cassavetes film, starring Cassavetes himself

mikey and nicky is amazing

Yeah it's an experience, if nothing else.

Came here to post that I had recently rewatched Enter Laughing, a film I had fond memories of seeing on a TV matinee movie as a kid, and had forgotten Elaine May is in it. Turns out Morbs beat me to it four years ago.

CRACKPOT LIVES https://t.co/UiDmcaMYL6

— Ben Mekler (@benmekler) February 8, 2024

what are the best films directed by nonagenarians?

Aside from Manoel de Oliveira's?