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Mike Nichols summoned me to lunch years ago, after he saw The Substance of Fire, to tell me that if he had directed my play, hed have ruined it with jokes. This was his way of saying, Lets be friends. Even before we were friends, I knew we would become friends someday. His gimlet eye had provided insight into what this country was about. I had been in Africa and South America for much of my childhood, and needed a handbook. He had essentially writ it large, along with Elaine May at first (record player, Durban, South Africa, me age 12, dreaming of being clever in the States) and then as a filmmaker (also Durban, me a teenager by then, now dreaming of being wise and funny in the States).
After I was unceremoniously fired from Brothers & Sisters, a TV show I created, we were at yet another lunch, and I was bemoaning the cost to me financially of my very public criticism (a series of essays at the Huffington Postnow gone, thank G*d) of both the studios intractability during the writers strike and how dreadful it was to make a show in the utterly cynical corporate environment of the time. (I think I wondered in print how C.E.O.s could take food off the plates of writers children, or something dumb like that.) Because it was during a strike, the studio somehow invoked a force majeure clause to let me go, and I did not think Id ever have a chance to make that kind of money again. (I wont, but its fine.) And he said this thing to me, which lifted all the clouds. Listen, I used to have horses, he saidthis was at Tratoria dell'Arte, his clubhouse at the timeand it was an absurdly expensive hobby, but it gave me a lot of pleasure, so I said, f**k it. Robbie, dont you see: your expensive hobby is telling the truth. And like that, it was magic, I was O.K. with all of it. And he always knew the right thing to say. Watching him direct a rehearsal of Odetss The Country Wife a few years ago, I saw that he worked via anecdote and that, no matter what story he told, deep within its bones there was a point to be had about the beats being rehearsed. He knew that autobiography was how you get to a truth. You always had to relate the experience in the piece to your own equivalent, and there always would be one.
Related: Heres to You, Mr. Nichols: The Making of The Graduate
But mostly this morning I have been thinking about Mikes having been the perfect man for the American Century. He was in every sense the ideal post-war American artist: He was an exile, which gave him an insatiable curiosity for what really was going on around him. He arrived here as a little kid from Germany, fleeing the Nazis, with no English. He learned quickly that, in order to survive and thrive in America, you had to be a very close watcher of how the culture was moving around you. He became the master of predicting that cultural weather. He pinpointed the sweet spot of sophistication that followed Freud and Lubitsch and money and sexual freedom (finally) into the age of prosperity that was bestowed upon this country in the last century. In an utterly ambivalent time, where there was abundance in abundance, he picked up the very funny whispers of anxietysensual, material, political, external, and internal all at onceand used them to make the most knowing art there was. He loved Randell Jarrells one novel, Pictures from an Institution, because it contained a passage that described the exact way in which one character knew everything there could possibly be to know about another character, before they even spoke. And that was Mike. I once told him he was like Hannibal Lectors good twin, and we were all Clarice Starlingwith him telling us where to look for the clues to what made us who we really were. He could not stop laughing, but it also bugged him.
At our last lunch together, he wondered about whom he had hurt in this life. The bruises we leave just by being alive, just by living. He was coming out of a serious illness, and was quietly exhilarated, looking so forward to making a film out of Terrence McNallys brilliant Master Class with Meryl Streep, the rights to which had been acquired for him by David Geffen and presented as a tonic, the perfect one at the right moment. And we both knew it was going to be a summation and a perfect small jewel.
So much is now gone. New York (Manhattan mostly) really isnt New York anymore. Its mercantile, and literal, no longer a land of dreams, just another playground for the 21st centurys global rich. And with Mike gone, theres one fewer person to find the glory in subtext, the code that is buried deep in American life, at that intersection where l**t, nervousness, ambition, and comedy all meet. He ran that intersection for decades.
Related: Mike Nicholss Life in Photos
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Source: http://www.vanityfair.com/vf-hollywood/2014/11/mike-nichols-jon-robin-baitz
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