Elaine May Gets Lincoln Center Career Retrospective
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- Elaine May sold her 1975 gangster film Mikey and Nicky to a sham production company (Alyce Films) to retain editorial control from Paramount; a judge ordered her to deliver the film, and she withheld two reels until the studio let her supervise the final cut.
- Mikey and Nicky, starring John Cassavetes and Peter Falk as childhood friends caught in a Philadelphia underworld, opened in winter 1976 to largely unfavorable reviews; audiences expecting comedy (as May was known for via Nichols and May) walked out, but its stature has grown over five decades.
- May and Julian Schlossberg, then a Paramount VP, bought back Mikey and Nicky's rights in 1978 and released a revised cut whose legendary status has only grown since.
- May's 1987 buddy comedy Ishtar, a prescient satire of US meddling in the Middle East co-starring Warren Beatty and Isabelle Adjani, lost an estimated $40 million and effectively ended her directing career; it will also screen at the Lincoln Center event.
- Film at Lincoln Center's retrospective runs June 26 to July 2, featuring the 2019 4K restoration of Mikey and Nicky ahead of a wider US release this summer.
- May paid a steeper career price than male peers like Stanley Kubrick, Francis Ford Coppola, and Michael Cimino for going over schedule and budget, Schlossberg argues, because a man with her temperament is called 'strong' while a woman is called 'difficult.'
- Lena Dunham, Martin Scorsese, Greta Gerwig, and Josh and Benny Safdie count themselves as major fans, with retrospective programmer Daniel Sullivan calling May 'a major artist' whose methods 'feel exceptionally modern and obviously relevant.'
Why it matters: The retrospective repositions May from a Hollywood cautionary tale—a woman who clashed with studios and flopped spectacularly—into a canonical auteur, timed to Mikey and Nicky's 50th anniversary. Her roster of A-list admirers (Scorsese, Gerwig, the Safdies) signals that the industry is now absorbing her into the canon that male peers like Kubrick and Coppola were always granted, while the screening of Ishtar invites a long-overdue second look at a film once written off as one of Hollywood's biggest disasters.
Ask SkimNews
