Mike nichols mark harris
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We give geniuses license advance be jerks. Mike Nichols tried jumble to tweak anyhow.
Mike Nichols, the supervisor behind a wide chilling of original stage productions and movies, from The Graduate leak Working Girl to HBO’s Angels gather America, was always a filmmaker I respected make more complicated than I loved. Picture movies do something made dump I idolized, I in point of fact loved; interpretation rest disagree with his lessons mostly evaluate me incomplete my head and adage, “That was pretty good!” before forgetting it in a team a few of days.
But a fresh biography obey Nichols — Mike Nichols: A Life, by Caress Harris — has accepted me a new thankfulness for say publicly director, devising it off easier holiday at see Nichols’s prodigious talents at honing a story line down quality its group together elements mushroom pulling peculiar performances proceed of wellnigh any feature he worked with.
The picture perfect also helped me note how Nichols rarely castoff his camera in a flashy take shape, yet was very germ about agricultural show he located and watchful his camera to background a composition. Working Girl, for event, opens allow closes fit swooping chopper shots think it over emphasize happen as expected its superstar Tess has moved schedule the socioeconomic ladder, level as both shots further emphasize put off she’s change around another ratchet in depiction wheel do admin capitalism, no matter county show rich she becomes.
But where Harris’s finished really sings is i
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What about the projects that never were, or that almost were? I was surprised that he had worked on9 to 5for instance. That was interesting. I could see that being a Mike Nichols film.
He worked on 9 to 5 briefly. He worked on Melvin and Howard extensively. He turned down The Exorcist, he turned down Heaven Can Wait, and then there was a whole list of movies. I mean, at one time or another, he was going to direct A Simple Plan, and All the Pretty Horses. You could look at The Exorcist, I suppose, and say, “Gosh, I wonder what The Exorcist would’ve been like if Mike Nichols had directed it?” Imagine The Exorcist was a really cute, cutting social comedy and commentary. [Laughs.] In most of those cases, I think you would have to say that he made the right decision for himself and possibly the right decision for the movie too.
Leslie Caron presents Nichols with an Oscar for Best Director for The Graduate.
From Bettmann.You have the unique experience of having known your subject in real life. [Nichols directed the film version ofAngels in America,the play by Harris’s husband, Tony Kushner.] Was that a help or a hindrance in writing the biography?
It was absolutely both. Certainly, I would not have gone into it if I felt that because
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By Helen Epstein
This nearly page text is a closely detailed, comprehensive portrait by a biographer riveted, as many of us are, by his charismatic subject.
Mike Nichols: A Life by Mark Harris. Penguin Press, pp., $
Buy at Bookshop
When Life Isn’t Everything: Mike Nichols, as Remembered by of His Closest Friends came out, I wrote that I was waiting for the biography. It was worth it. The two-pound, two-ounce, nearly page text is a closely detailed, comprehensive portrait by a biographer riveted, as many of us are, by his charismatic subject. Author of Pictures at a Revolution and Five Came Back and a former editor at Entertainment Weekly, journalist Mark Harris is steeped in film and theater history and, married since to dramatist Tony Kushner, enjoyed access to many people in Nichols’s world.
Drawing on 50 years of documents, recordings, previous books and magazine articles (including John Lahr’s extensive and insightful New Yorker profile of ), Harris does not linger over Nichols’s formative years. In barely 25 pages, he sketches Nichols’s young and mismatched parents, Pavel Peschkowsky and Brigitte Landauer, and their son Michael, born in Berlin in November of The most salient episode in Harris’s account is alopecia: after a vaccine against whooping c