Mr. Nichols: a fan remembers

Yesterday morning I was roused by my internal alarm clock, with it’s faithfully indiscriminate timing, and saw my phone, cozily illuminated under my covers. In my half-conscious sleep I read a prompt from CNN stating the legendary director Mike Nichols passed away at 83. After I became lucid enough to comprehend that I was an hour behind schedule, I managed to the leave house in under 30 minutes–a personal best–go to work, and didn’t look back.

It wasn’t until late in the evening that I remembered the prompt I read in the morning. I was at my parents’ place, and mentioned the news to my mom, knowing she would fill me in. He apparently died of a sudden heart attack, she said, and we both acknowledged how sad it was. Being fans of his wife too, journalist Diane Sawyer (reportedly the love of his), my mom said: “You know the first thing I thought of? Diane Sawyer. Poor, Diane.”

I won’t pretend that I had Nichols’ entire catalogue of 22 films, spanning almost 50 years memorized. That would be a pretentious lie. In fact, before I read this I had to refresh my memory of his films, save for my personal favorites, The Graduate, Closer, and his controversial directorial debut, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which is perennially on my must-watch list. For such a prolific roster of films (I’m pretty positive The Graduate is on every “best of..” film list ever made), he’s mostly been a quiet legend. A director’s director. And an emotional-well to the actors who’ve had the honor of his impeccable direction.

“A movie is like a person. Either you trust it or you don’t.”

Mr. Nichols first popped up on my radar my Senior year of high school in 2004, with the release of Closer, a film about the emotional entanglements and infidelities of two couples, starring Julia Roberts, Jude Law, Clive Owen, and Natalie Portman–only the most beautiful/talented cast of ever. It was a big deal at the time, because it was kind of a comeback film of sorts. Not so much because he’d been out of the game for a while, his last credit was just a year prior, but it marked a revival of his roots: the powerfully fraught drama. The years before Closer, had been devoted to comedies/dramadies, like Working Girl (oddly enough, a very adult childhood favorite of mine), Postcards from the Edge and The Birdcage; his last dramatic film was Silkwood, in 1983. Closer wasn’t a huge hit with critics. It was only nominated for two Oscars, and neither one of them were for Nichols’ direction. But it was successful at one thing: introducing a new generation to the masterful work of Mike Nichols–one of them being me!

I was immediately attracted to Closer, albeit to the attractive, talented cast, but still, I was definitely intrigued. Although, it wasn’t until the following year, when it began running on HBO, that I finally got to see it. I watched that movie SEVERAL times (but c’mon it’s so easy to do with the amount of repeats that HBO feeds their viewers…I digress). I fell in love with its twisted, and mauled love story. Although really fucked up (sorry, mom), and cruel, it managed to depict the ugliness of love in a beautiful way. To me, it was flawed in all the right places, and it was more human for that reason, too. Soon, after becoming acquainted with Mr. Nichols’ (including giddily finding out that he directed The Graduate AND was married to Diane Sawyer) I came to find that the human condition is his M.O. His adept ability to showcase an unattractive angle of the human condition, and their fractures in relationships through an almost symbiotic connection to his actors, is brilliant. His direction ignited performances so raw, and powerful in his actors, they often went on to, either be nominated and/or win an Academy Award. For instance, the two Oscar nominations Closer received were for Best Actor (Clive Owen), and Best Actress (Natalie Portman).

“I love to take actors to a place where they open a vein. That’s the job. The key is that I make it safe for them to open the vein.”

Here are some interesting bits of impressive trivia about Mr. Nichols:

• He was born in Berlin, Germany as Michael Igor Peschkowsky. His family fled the Nazi regimefor the U.S. when he was 8.
• Diane is his fourth marriage, but it’s also his longest!
• Is one of the only 12 people who are an EGOT, which means that he won at least one of all of the four major entertainment awards: Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony.
• Only one Oscar for “Best Director,” The Graduate
• Lost much of his body hair in his teens due to a bad batch of whooping cough vaccines
• A life-long Democrat 🙂
• Directed 17 different actors in Oscar-nominated performances: Elizabeth Taylor, Sandy Dennis, Richard Burton, George Segal, Dustin Hoffman, Anne Bancroft, Katharine Ross, Ann-Margret, Meryl Streep, Cher, Melanie Griffith, Sigourney Weaver, Joan Cusack, Kathy Bates, Natalie Portman, Clive Owen, and Philip Seymour Hoffman. Taylor and Dennis won Oscars for their performances in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?.
• You can also thank him for being one of the first people to successfully challenge the Production Code Office with his film Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which contained language that wasn’t commonly heard on film at the time, like “God damn you,” “screw,” and “hump.” In addition to the compromise on language, WB studio head, Jack L. Warner, undercut the Code’s usefulness by arranging to have the film released with the “For Adults Only” and required theaters to prohibit selling tickets to unaccompanied minors, which in effect unofficially created the Restricted rating years before the Motion Picture Association of America abandoned the Production Code for a classification system (G-M-R-X) in 1968. This opened the door for more artistic freedom, and darker content.

Interestingly enough, I had an encounter with Nichols’ (obviously, not physically) on one of my many spontaneous trivia-binges on IMDB, less than two weeks ago. While I watched the Hunger Games: Catching Fire, I noticed the exceptional, and underrated actor Jeffrey Wright amongst the cast. I always immediately think of his role in the HBO miniseries, Angels In America–his first big claim-to-fame. In a flash decision (the only rate of my decision-making), I decided I needed to look over Mr. Wright’s filmography, and watch the Angels In America trailer, since I’d never seen the movie (And holy moly! I totally forgot how many stars were in that movie!). That’s when I discovered Mike Nichols directed it. You would have thought I had actually had an encounter with him by the delightful feeling of familiarity when I saw his name. It’s funny how sometimes those strange, yet comforting events happen before someone’s death.

Back at my parents’, in a moment of optimism, I asked if my mom knew if he had at least died in his sleep…but she had no idea. “It was in the evening,” she said, with a touch of uneasiness. But I’m still holding on to the idea that he turned into bed early that night, and peacefully directed the hell out of his dreams when he passed away. You will be missed, Mr. Nichols.

“It’s not a film-maker’s job to explain his technique, but to tell his story the best way he can.”