It'll be 50 years ago in June that Mike Nichols made one of the all-time audacious movie directing debuts. His scabrous adaptation of Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf announced the arrival of a risk-taking dynamo, seasoned on Broadway and more than ready for the big screen. For an encore, the following year, he dropped The Graduate, which merely flipped the popular perception of youth culture upside-down.
Those heady days are now back in and on the air, with a confluence of releases reminding us of Nichols' biting wit and blinding talent. This Friday HBO premieres Becoming Mike Nichols, a documentary on Nichols' life and career through The Graduate. The film arrives less than a month after the PBS series American Masters premiered its new season with a more thorough look at Nichols, directed by his formidable improv partner Elaine May.
The cherry on top: Criterion released its extras-laden Blu-ray edition of The Graduate on Tuesday. Bring on the plastics.
The heat from Nichols' supernova start remains mighty. Arriving from the live theater world, where he turned a little Neil Simon play called Nobody Loves Me into the smash hit Barefoot in the Park, Nichols immediately developed a nimble hybrid of stage and screen technique. He was also smart enough to surround himself with craftsmen born to the cinema, chiefly ace film editor Sam O'Steen, with whom he collaborated throughout his career.
In interviews back then he always seems to be striving for a bit of humility. Among Criterion's Graduate extras is an interview with Barbara Walters that took place in the brief period between Virginia Woolf and The Graduate. "A performance belongs to an actor," he tells Walters. "You can't cause anyone to do what they can't do. "But you also get the sense he knows he's almost always the smartest person in the room. His fully formed talent, confidence and intellect remind me a bit of the young Orson Welles, had Welles decided to play moderately well with others instead of devoting himself to food, drink and globetrotting mischief
Nichols was born to a German mother and Russian-Jewish father; the family escaped Europe just ahead of the Nazi reign, when Nichols was seven. His work is infused with sympathy for the outsider. He and producer Lawrence Turman initially envisioned The Graduate's Benjamin Braddock as a Robert Redford California type, before they decided the less glamorous Dustin Hoffman better fit the character and the film's themes of alienation.
As the director David O. Russell puts it in another Criterion Graduate extra, "He cast an outsider to play an insider who feels like an outsider" - which, come to think of it, is a pretty good description of Nichols, the power player of modest origins.
Becoming Mike Nichols is made up of conversations, public and private, between Nichols and director Jack O'Brien, conducted shortly before Nichols' death in 2014. Nichols tells has some great stories, particularly about Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. Nichols had already cast Elizabeth Taylor as Martha, one half of a poisonous alcoholic couple who let all their demons out during a long night of the soul. The question of who to play her other half, George, struck Nichols as a no-brainer: "There's only one actor to play him, and that's Richard Burton. Because they're already there."
Nichols has no sophomore slump. His command of film grammar in The Graduate is stunning for a second-time filmmaker. Every shot means something: The opening sequence, with that moving sidewalk pushing Ben through the airport like a widget on a conveyor belt. The suffocation evoked by that diving suit at the bottom of the swimming pool. It's hard to think of a film that wastes as little as The Graduate.
Nichols did plenty more between the time of The Graduate and his death. Among the highlights: Carnal Knowledge, Primary Colors and the HBO adaptation of Angels in America. But it was that burst from the gate, first with May, then on Broadway, and finally with that one-two movie punch, that made him a legend. It's a thrill to relive the ride.
