(Music playing)
(audience laughing)
I have been going with the same man
for the last 14 years.
Last week I got the shock of my life.
There, sitting at a sidewalk cafe,
was my intended with another woman.
I asked him, "What was the meaning of this?"
In reply, they both stood up
and gave me such a merciless beating,
even the waiters were shocked.
This is how I met Elaine.
I was eligible for two colleges--
the University of Chicago and Mexico City College.
I applied to both, I never heard from Chicago
and I was packing for Mexico City College
when I got a telegram that said report to Mandel Hall
Monday morning at 8:00.
They had forgotten to tell me I was accepted.
So there you are and you meet these phenomenal
improvisatory turn on people like Paul Sills, right?
Paul Sills was a busboy in the coffee shop.
So I would come and have my lunch
and Paul would be cleaning dishes off the neighboring tables
and we would bullshit about the theater.
This went on over quite a long period of time
and then he said they were starting a theater,
would I like to join.
Yeah, sure I wanted.
Paul put together a reading of "Miss Lonelyhearts"
and I was Shrike.
And I was extremely good.
I was a prick.
And then I started playing snotty pricks.
- I was very good at pricks. - Yeah.
(Both laugh)
- I don't know why. - I'll let that pass.
Nobody knows.
Paul directed some people and me
in that maddening play by Strindberg.
"Miss Julie." And we were so bad.
And Sydney J. Harris, who was the big critic downtown,
thought we were great.
- Oh, dear. - First--
one night there was a great-looking girl in the front row
and I couldn't stop looking at her.
And she was like...
(laughs)
And now the next day I'm reading the paper
and there's this rave about our hideous production.
I'm walking along the street, I run into Paul
and the beautiful girl from the night before
and I say, "Paul, look at this!"
And she read it over his shoulder
and there was only from her at one point a "Ha!"
That's all she said.
O'Brien: So the beautiful girl in the front row is Elaine.
Nichols: Is Elaine.
Our first conversation after the hideous play
and running into her with Paul
was downtown at the IC.
I said, "May I sit down?" and she said, "If you wish."
And I sat down next to her and she started that kind of spy thing.
She said, "I had heard from..."
And it started.
The first conversation we had was an improv.
And that's how we continued.
I was very excited because she was both beautiful and brilliant.
- O'Brien: And funny. - Nichols: And so funny.
Well, to jump way ahead,
one of our main pieces happened as follows.
It was like my 20-something birthday
and my wife at the time said, "Your mother's on the phone upstairs."
So I went up to the bedroom and I picked up the phone
and I said, "Hello?"
She said, "Well, 26 years ago tonight,
I didn't have such an easy time of it."
And I said, "Mom, can I call you back?"
I called Elaine and I said, "I have a piece for tonight."
And I told her only that line
and she said, "Oh, I can't wait.
Don't tell me any more. We'll just do it tonight."
Hello, Arthur. This is your mother.
Do you remember me?
(Audience laughing)
Mom, I was just going to call you.
Is that a funny thing? Do you know that I had my hand on the phone?
Arthur, you were supposed to call me last Friday.
Mother, honey, I know. I just didn't have a second and I could cut my throat--
Arthur, I sat by that phone all day Friday.
Honey, I was working.
And all day Friday night.
- Darling, I was in the lab-- - And all day Saturday.
- And all day Sunday. - Mom--
And your father finally said to me,
"Phyllis, eat something. You'll faint."
And I said, "No, Harry, no.
I don't want my mouth to be full when my son calls me."
Mom.
And you never called.
Mother, I was sending up a rocket.
I didn't have a second.
Well, it's always something, isn't it?
All right, honey, look, please--
You know, Arthur, I'm sure
that all the other scientists there have mothers.
And I'm sure that they all find time
after their breakfast or before their countoff...
- Down. - ...to pick up a phone and call their mother.
Honey, listen, now you have me on the phone.
- And you know how I worry. - Well, that's the point.
I read in the paper that you're still losing them.
Mother.
Mother, I don't lose them.
I nearly went out of my mind.
Honey, listen, I wanted to--
I thought what if they're taking it out of his pay?
All right.
We had the same mother.
And we did this all over on television many times,
at the White House.
We always figured her mother would think it was mine
and my mother would think it was hers, and they did.
O'Brien: So tell me about the Compass Players.
- Was Elaine part of that? - Nichols: Oh, yes.
We had many, many years as Compass and Second City.
And we were the only people
who would repeat pieces and work on them.
Good afternoon.
(Crying) Good afternoon.
Welcome to Long Dust. Can I help you?
Yes. I read your ad.
I'm interested in the $65 funeral.
Was that for yourself?
No.
For another?
May I ask, where did you catch that ad?
"TV Guide."
Just trying to find out where our trade comes from.
I am afraid that I'm going to have to ask you some questions.
- Yes, that's all right. - All right.
Can you tell me what was the loved one's name?
Seymour Maslow-Freene.
Is that hyphenated?
It was.
And the loved one's address?
441118 Southeast Huguenot Walloon Drive.
And may I ask what your name is?
- Charlie. - Charlie.
Charlie, I'm Miss Loomis, your grief lady.
Hi.
Is it Charlie Maslow-Freene?
- Yes. - You're related?
Well, that will be $65.
Thank you. I have the check all made out.
Oh, wonderful.
Before you go, Mr. Maslow-Freene.
I was just wondering
would you be interested in some extras for the loved one?
What kind of extras?
Well, how about a casket?
But that's how we developed the pieces.
We would improvise them and sort of say,
"Let's keep that one."
And what we ended up with, never planning it,
was a repertoire.
The great thing about improv
is if you do it long enough,
you can do it. You learn how to do it.
When it was good,
it was funny for the first time anybody said it.
One of her best improvs was when we used to do a DJ--
late-night DJ, that was me,
and she was a starlet.
It eventually became a set piece.
We were still working on it and one night I said--
to tell us about her new movie
and she said, well, it's--
she was just lucky enough,
along with the other things she was doing,
to have recorded the title song
from "The Brothers Karamazov."
(laughs)
And I said, "Oh, could you possibly sing it for us?"
And she said, "Of course."
And with no malice in her eyes or anger at me,
she sang on the spot.
"There was dashing Dmitri, elusive Ivan,
and Alyosha with the laughing eyes.
Then came the dawn, the brothers were gone,
I just can't forget those wonderful guys."
She didn't make that up.
- She improvised it and sang it. - On the spot?
This is a human female
who could invent that song in 30 seconds.
It's impossible.
It's also possible only if you've been improvising for years.
Yes. Yes.
And you do it every night and your head gets weird.
And it's capable of things you could never again do.
That's what happened when we were at the Compass.
First we got 28 a week, and then $35 a week.
Vacations-- you get a week's vacation one week a year.
But when you went for that week's vacation,
you came back and you watched this new stuff,
you would say, "Oh, I could never do that.
How do they do that?"
It was terrifying until you're back in it.
Well, tell me, how do you put your sketches together now?
Do you outline them or are they fairly well written out?
We don't ever write anything down
and we don't ever outline them.
It's a terrifying process
because the first time we do something,
we have to do it in front of an audience
without exactly knowing what we're going to do.
And Elaine usually comes up to me and says,
- "I'm insane with fear." - Psychotic with fear.
And I say that I'm gibbering with fright.
But it's really the only way we feel we can do it
because if we decide what words
we're going to say beforehand,
then it kind of closes us to all the things
that kind of occur to you when you're in front of an audience.
We rehearsed once and it was awful.
- Didn't work. - Didn't work out.
I was in New York by then.
A girl in my acting class said,
"Listen, I know a very good manager
if you and Elaine would ever want to meet him."
Why don't you audition for Jack Rollins,
who was Harry Belafonte's manager?
Big deal.
We auditioned on a Monday.
Tuesday night we went into the Village Vanguard
to open for Mort Sahl for that week.
Often Mort Sahl would say, "I don't want them to go on. I'm ready."
But on the weekend, they moved us to the Blue Angel.
Carol Burnett opened for us.
And then we got put on "Omnibus"
which was the long TV show that everybody watched on Sundays.
Then we did existing pieces. Three of them.
Big deal thing.
(audience laughing)
We then did this circle that became the show.
That is to say, we toured all those places
like casinos in DC and LA.
We were at the Mocambo and there were birds of paradise on the walls,
and every night during the show,
one or two birds would die and fall to the floor.
And then eventually ended up at the Golden.
What do you play in the picture, sweetheart?
Well, Jack,
it's really just a real great break for me.
- Uh-huh. - Because, I mean, I just--
- well, I don't swim in this at all. - Uh-huh.
Which is just--
- Terrific. - First chance.
And I was just lucky enough to get the part of Gertrude Stein, so...
(laughing)
I'm very, very surprised to hear that.
I had heard Gertrude Stein
was to be played by Spencer Tracy.
Yes.
Well, only as a child.
Elaine and I were finished with it
almost a year here at the Golden
and she didn't want to go on.
We were still selling out, but she didn't want to go on,
'cause it was much harder for her than for me.
- Because? - She was a real actress.
And I was beginning to be a real pain in the ass to her, too.
I remember this even when we were at the Golden.
I was very controlling.
"You were a little too slow tonight."
As you know, once that starts,
you're in very bad trouble.
- We could not recover. - No.
And Elaine, who is much too--
it's not that she isn't strong,
it's that she-- she doesn't battle.
And she wanted to close.
She said we had sort of done it long enough.
But she wrote a play for me
and we went to Philadelphia with a play.
It was a disaster.
Part of it was that instead of being together up here,
she was down there with the director looking at me
and something died.
I mean, at least for that
because I couldn't be up there judged by Elaine
with her as my taskmaster there.
It just didn't work.
And she knew it and I knew it.
And finally I closed it. I had the right in our deal.
It had to be the director that we had.
That director had been replaced.
Whatever happened, I closed it.
Nichols: The thing that changed me
was a girl I knew at the time
when I was a junior in high school.
Her mother used to give us theater tickets.
And this one time she gave us tickets
for the second night of "Streetcar Named Desire."
So there we were, 15 or 16, stunned.
We sat poleaxed. We didn't go to the bathroom.
- We didn't move... - Yeah, I'll bet you didn't.
...for the length of the thing.
And we sat silent during the intermissions.
We never got over it, either one of us.
Yeah, I'll bet.
She's a shrink now, by the way.
- As a result? - Yes.
Imagine seeing Marlon Brando for the first time anywhere.
I mean, some people saw his first play,
but one girl in my class, a real smart-ass...
(audience laughs)
...came in and said, "I saw a fabulous actor last night."
She said, "'Truckline Cafe.'
I mean, the play was nothing much, but you're going to hear about him.
He's absolutely fabulous."
She was, like, nine.
To this day, it's the only thing I've ever seen
that was 100% real and 100% poetic
both at the same time.
O'Brien: Yeah.
Nichols: And only those actors could have done it.
Only Marlon and Jessica Tandy
and Karl Malden and the whole bunch of them
could have done what they did.
But the things that Kazan added--
the voices, the scurrying behind the set,
the seeing through the set to a little bit of scurrying,
the supernatural things,
the scary things--
in a weird way, I never got over it
because it was like written in fire or something.
Everything that happened was shocking.
But let me just ask something here
because you're a junior in high school
and you're seeing maybe one of the seminal great moments
of American theater
and your response to it is basically
intuitively like a director.
- Not like an actor. - Not like an actor at all.
All I was looking at
was from the director's point of view, but I just never knew it.
Oh, this is the thing that I carried into directing,
which is...
to begin to revere the unconscious.
That not naming something,
not deciding what to do,
being brave and going out empty
is the only way.
And it's both terrifying and thrilling.
And what I didn't know
was that it applies to directing, too.
And the fact that I discovered that
with my first play that I directed, really--
- "Barefoot"? - "Barefoot."
I had five days.
What do you mean?
Well, what I mean is that Saint Subber, the producer,
whom I didn't know yet,
came and said, "Would you like to direct this play?"
And I said, "Oh, direct?
That interests me. I hadn't thought of it."
And it was called "Nobody Loves Me,"
which Neil Simon soon retitled "Barefoot in the Park."
And I said, "Look, why don't we try it out and try me out?
Why don't we do it in stock?"
- In five days? - In five days.
If the play is any good and if I'm any good,
we'll find out.
So we went up to Bucks County.
I said, "I want that blond guy I saw on "Playhouse 90" last week.
And that was Redford.
And then Elizabeth Ashley came with it
- because Neil Simon-- - O'Brien: Knew her.
Nichols: Knew her, but he and Saint
had already made a deal with her.
And we got up there and we're running through--
it's the first and only run-through.
And I'm perfectly happy.
And Neil Simon says, "This is impossible.
This isn't funny at all. We can't open.
We can't do this. We cannot do this play."
And I did my first grown-up thing of my life.
I said, "Look, they're coming tomorrow anyway.
Why don't we see what they think?"
(laughs)
Nichols: They went nuts.
Clearly a big hit.
And they were magnificent.
I mean, Redford and Natwick
and Ashley in her way.
I mean, she was so game.
I said, "I don't want you being cute.
I want you to be Joan of Arc when you're upset."
And then there was Dick Benjamin,
who was one of the people I met to replace Redford.
After a year and a half, he was moving on to Hollywood.
Who wouldn't?
And he said to me after sort of the second or third day
with a stage manager, "I can't learn all the business.
There's so much business. It never stops."
And I said, "That's right."
He said, "Why?" I said, "So you can't act."
(laughs)
I had forgotten how much business there is in it.
Yeah.
They never stop undressing, dressing,
putting ties into dictionaries,
pulling out the refrigerator,
getting out the chicken, eating the chicken.
And it's all buried so you don't notice it.
It looks like life.
And I have seen also what happens
when you do Neil Simon as though there are punch lines.
- It doesn't work. - No. They're accidental.
- The lines are accidental. - That's right.
- You have to live in them. - Right.
We had a crisis. We never knew how to end it.
And one night I had Lillian Hellman,
who had become a friend,
at my house with my then wife,
and she said, "I know there's a problem in the second act.
Let me tell you what I thought was going to happen.
When they went out for the big dinner
and they came back,
I thought that the mother had gone upstairs
with the neighbor and spent the night."
Of course she did, 'cause she was the same age as the mother.
Yes, and that would occur to her.
I said, "Can you excuse me for about an hour?"
And I left my own apartment
with my poor wife
and went to find Doc
and told him this idea.
And he was thrilled.
He wrote that the mother slipped on the stairs on the ice
'cause there was a storm, twisted her ankle.
He carried her upstairs 'cause they didn't want to upset her daughter.
Right.
She slept in his place and in the morning
the daughter discovered her upstairs in his bathrobe.
And she made the wrong assumption.
And then we were left with a scene on the couch
which was the two older people.
And what they did in the scene
was describe what they had done last night.
And it was so boring.
And we tried this, and we tried that.
We spent a whole day working on it.
And Kurt Kasznar was impatient.
He said, "I'm getting a little worried,
'cause, you know, we open in four days."
I said, "That's what I'm worried about."
(laughs)
"We're not done. We haven't solved this."
And after the whole day, I said,
"What if it seems funny to you as you recollect it?
What if you start to laugh at what happened last night?"
And they looked at me and they tried it.
And we had solved it.
They got hysterical.
They hadn't had sex, but they have connected.
- O'Brien: Right. - It was better than sex.
It was.
If only I had known that in time.
(laughing) The story of my life.
I then came to
appreciate
that this job that I so loved,
that I was clearly gonna be okay at,
needed the unconscious just as much as improv,
because what was about to happen to me
was a number of plays where that certainly was the case.
Most wonderfully, I thought, "The Odd Couple"
because I insisted
that we do only what you do around a poker table.
- No cheating. - Right.
Everybody sits around the poker table.
- When I see half a poker table, I sit. - Oh, me, too.
But that's when the good ideas come out.
- Who do you see win and why? - O'Brien: And how do you solve it?
- Nichols: Yes, exactly. - It's fun.
Nichols: Staging the first act
was one of the great thrills of my life.
O'Brien: Had to be. And they knew it, too, right?
Nichols: They knew it, I knew it, we all knew it.
We knew we were on to something incredible.
O'Brien: A lot of people feel "The Odd Couple"
is Neil's greatest play.
I think it's his greatest play.
I think it's the best thing I did on Broadway
either ever or for a very long time.
Who would dream that it could be
at the very heart of something?
Two guys who are separated from their wife?
Who gives a shit? What is that like?
Nothing.
Why was it like everything?
Because it was the perfect way to be funny about marriage.
It was a pseudo marriage
without any of the advantages of a marriage,
but some serious disadvantages
in it being these two guys.
And that turned out to be a great metaphor.
There are only three kinds of scenes--
negotiations, seductions, and fights.
I'm finished. That's all.
All scenes come into one of those three categories.
And as I said to Jack on the way over,
how often have you rehearsed a scene for two weeks
and then said, "Oh, my God, it's a fight"?
And you can do the same with seductions
and most of all with negotiations
because that's mostly what we do in life,
especially at home.
Art Carney and, for the first part of the run,
Walter Matthau were great.
Walter Matthau was a confusing person
because he wasn't-- he was not easy.
- Not happy, either. - He wasn't happy.
He made Art Carney, who was a saint, not happy.
- Destroyed our opening night. - Really?
Yeah, I was restaging something opening night.
Just a little something, took for a minute.
And I said, "Artie, I like when you come down and you do this."
Matthau said, "Mike, don't you think
Artie is a little faggy when he does that?"
And I thought, "Thank you very much. That's our opening night."
And you were off and running
as a major, major director.
And yet somewhere between
when you did "The Little Foxes"
and "The Apple Tree,"
something happened.
You directed your first film,
which was "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" with the Burtons.
Did you know you could do a film?
There were problems in my family.
My mother was very sick. We were refugees.
- Things were tough. - Okay.
- Now we're going back.
- All right. - Quite a ways back, okay?
So, in 1939, your father was a doctor
in Germany and he comes first.
He comes to New York a year before.
One-- because they're taking Jewish doctors, obviously,
by their initial, and his initial P was coming up.
- A patient warned him. - Warned him of what was happening?
- That the Nazis would take him? - Yes.
German Jews could not travel, could not leave the country.
They had to wait to be picked up for the camps.
Russian Jews, which is what we were--
our papers were Russian along with my father--
could travel.
O'Brien: So your father was smart enough to say, "I've got to get out.
And if I get out, I can get you out."
Nichols: Right. And a year later, my brother and I,
we were seven and four and we came alone on the Bremen.
First of all, we're stopped on the gangplank
'cause Hitler was making a speech.
Each lamppost had a speaker.
And traffic stopped when Hitler spoke.
And that meant that we couldn't get on the boat till the speech was finished.
I remember getting at the end of the gangplank.
I jumped as hard as I could
'cause I wanted to see the boat go up and down.
I hadn't quite figured out volume and...
And I had a fairly good time on the boat.
I spoke one sentence of English, which was
"I don't speak English, please don't kiss me."
My mother was in the hospital,
which is why she didn't come at that time.
She was ill. She had been ill then
and for much of the rest of her life.
- She came over a year after we came over. - O'Brien: I see.
Nichols: And then my father made it fun when we got here
'cause he was a very funny guy.
I remember him dancing in his underwear.
- That's my happiest memory. - How wonderful.
He also was something of a ladies' man, was he not?
Oh, yes. He was fine with anyone except his wife.
- Did she know this? - She had boyfriends.
She stayed with my father,
but they were about to separate.
When did he die?
He died in '44 when he was 44.
Because he had to get a job when we got here
and he hadn't yet passed his one medical exam that he took,
so he got a job running an X-ray machine for a union.
- Oh, no. - And he died of leukemia.
I wish I had known him longer.
We missed each other.
We were just getting to the point
where we might have found each other when he died.
That was tough, but--
but anyway, I didn't speak a word of English.
I only knew "I don't speak English, please don't kiss me."
I remember sitting on the school bus saying,
"What means 'emerghency'?"
(laughs)
Nichols: So what I would do after school every day
is go to the Beacon or the RKO.
Whatever movie was there, I would see it.
And it was sort of my playground.
That became part of me.
And then later I went to see "Virginia Woolf" on the stage.
And, again, like with "Streetcar," I was stunned.
I was paralyzed. I had never seen such a play.
It really got to me in some deep way.
When Elaine and I were here at the Golden,
at the Majestic was "Camelot"
with Julie Andrews and Richard Burton and Roddy McDowall.
A lot of pals, actually.
And we all became very good friends
'cause for that year we were all in the alley
and we all would go out for drinks afterwards
and I became good friends with Burton.
And then later when we were no longer in those two shows,
he said, "Come to Rome. Come and visit"
while they were shooting "Cleopatra" and I did.
And by the time I got there, he was with Elizabeth
and he said, "Listen, I'm shooting all weekend.
She isn't. Would you mind taking Elizabeth out somewhere?
The press is driving her crazy."
I said, "I guess so. That's all right."
(audience laughs)
For you, Richard, anything.
And I got my little VW
and went and picked her up.
Just said, "Put a babushka over your head."
We walked around all day. Nobody ever bothered her.
Once somebody said, "There's Mike Nichols."
(audience laughs)
So then we got to be friends.
Years passed. I think two.
And I read that they had hired her to do "Virginia Woolf"
and I said to a press guy who worked for both of us,
I said, "Tell Elizabeth" --
and I'm amazed that I had the balls to do this--
"that I should direct it."
And he called me back and said, "She agrees with you."
So that's how I got my first movie.
He was part of the deal as well?
Richard? No, I cast him.
I looked at it and looked at it and thought,
"Well, there's one obvious actor that should play it. It's Richard."
Because they're there already.
(Audience laughs)
And indeed, they were,
because the people in the play loved each other as they did
and had some complications
as they did.
Am I wrong about this?
He was more or less sort of the right age, but she wasn't.
She wasn't nearly the right age,
which led to a fight with Jack Warner which I won't bore you with.
You might bore us with a little of it.
All right.
I'll bore you with a little of it.
We were preparing
and I had the problem of the producer,
who was a writer/producer,
and what he had written.
And I had to throw out everything he had written.
Although I will tell you one thing he had written
just to put you on my side.
(Audience laughs)
The titles of the movie were George taking a walk at night
and he describes the things he sees at night during the titles.
And one of them is what was described as "two dogs fucking."
But it said in parentheses,
"This must be beautifully shot."
(audience laughing)
I showed this to a designer friend I had
and she said, "I can do it. I can do it."
She said, "I need Afghans and lots of fans."
But because I was in this sort of battle
with this producer/writer,
I had to restore the script to Albee.
That was easy.
Was Edward around at this point?
Nichols: No, Edward was not hired for the movie.
He was not consulted by anybody but me.
- Really? - That's Hollywood.
- He only wrote it. - (audience laughs)
What good is he to them?
At this point, Jack Warner,
who actually was sort of a person,
called us into his office and said,
"Boys, you can't do the picture in black and white.
New York says it's got to be color."
Now, there is no New York at Warner Brothers.
That's Warners. It's Warners.
It's called Warners and Warners owns it.
New York is only a city.
It doesn't care whether movies are made in--
he was pretending he had a sort of
release organization in New York.
He said, "Well, I'm sorry, but Elizabeth is 32.
The character is 56.
Her makeup is going to look like shit.
You can't do that to someone."
And she had lost weight. And I said, "No, no.
You're supposed to gain weight now."
And she said-- oh, she was thrilled.
She said, "You want me to gain weight?"
I said, "I certainly do."
And I explained to Warner that you couldn't do it.
And the sets we're building can't be done.
He said, "Well, I'm sorry, but you have to do it."
And I said-- discovering that I had that ability--
I said, "Well, then, you make it.
I'll go home. I like it at home."
To my surprise, he said,
"All right, all right. Damn it. Black and white."
And then I had gotten it.
I understood what you did with the old guard in Hollywood.
You went ahead anyway.
Oh, I had a famous cameraman
that I had wanted.
One day I ran into this guy.
He said, "Mike, Mike, I've got to tell you something.
I thought of how you're gonna get that look like Fellini.
The secret would be
to shoot it in color,
but print it in black and white."
I said, "Oh, Harry. You're fired."
I said, "I'm so sorry.
'Cause I know you're working for the boss,
but I've got to really shoot it and print it in black and white.
That's all we're gonna do."
But here's the thing also about black and white.
It's why it was so sad to say good-bye to it.
It's not literal.
It is a metaphor automatically.
And my orientation is that that's the point.
A movie is a metaphor.
What is the metaphor, you ask,
when you're trying to solve the problem.
If you're in black and white, it's partly solved.
It is already saying, "No, this is not life.
This is something about life."
It's like an oil painting. It doesn't move.
It does something else.
A version of life.
Mike, what about the length of the script?
It's a long play.
We cut it.
Did you shoot in sequence the way the play is written?
As much as we could, yes.
'Cause that would be important or probably helpful to you
at the beginning of your film career to think that way.
Or didn't it matter?
It did matter to me, for the actors especially.
O'Brien: For them, yes, I would think so.
Nichols: Now, we rehearsed the hell out of it.
And also the fact that it had been a play
gave me something I could not have had otherwise--
a very good map of the events
and how long each arc takes.
That is to say, I could say to Elizabeth,
"No, keep going. Keep crying.
This feeling,
this explosion of emotion isn't over yet.
'No!' is when it's over."
And then she breaks down crying.
That was incredibly useful to me
because I had seen the events brilliantly dramatized on the stage.
It was a big crutch for me.
I also realized that I had better really buckle down to the camera.
I had about two weeks till we started shooting.
So I had one friend, Tony Perkins,
who had made a lot of movies.
And I said, "You've got to tell me some things about the camera quickly."
For instance, let me give you an example.
They're coming in the door.
I want to shoot Elizabeth comes through the door,
Richard comes through the door.
But when the door opens, won't they hit the camera?
And so he had to explain lenses to me.
He said, "See, if you're in a wide lens--"
I said, "Wide lens?"
He said, "Yes, if it's a wide lens,
then they can come right towards you, but not hit the camera.
Not neither with the door or themselves."
And so stage by stage he explained
the principles of movie photography.
In how much time?
Three days.
Now, I had looked at all these movies.
I had seen "A Place in the Sun"
maybe 150 times.
'Cause it was not only my favorite movie,
it was my bible.
There's nothing that you can't learn
from George Stevens, the way he shot
"A Place in the Sun" and what it is.
So you are armed with three days of lessons
when you go to do your first day of shoot, is that correct?
Nichols: That's right.
O'Brien: Did Burton or Elizabeth or anybody
have an idea different from yours?
Nichols: Once Richard--
being a big deal British actor,
they're all very in a friendly competition with each other
and they're all very aware
of this one is better than him at this,
and Larry is this and this one is that.
And he confessed to me
that he was trying to figure out how to cry
that none of them had done.
And I respected that and left him alone.
He's found something of hers
that tells him that they had sex.
And what he did was
he laughed.
(laughing)
(continues laughing)
(sniffling)
(crying)
Did you just get it once?
No, no, no.
He had found that he could do it as often as I wanted.
Now and then,
he had had a couple of drinks.
I mean, that wasn't only a joke, because he--
we were shooting and he was religious about that.
He did not drink when shooting
except a couple of times.
And when he came in pissed off,
I knew.
And this one time I thought, "Oh, man.
This is gonna be really tough."
'Cause it was the bergin speech,
which is a long damn speech.
We did it and he couldn't get through it.
And then that magic thing that happens on movies happened
and he did it and it was incredible.
It just took off.
And it was perfect all the way through
and I said, "Cut. That's it.
Oh, Richard, that was the best."
And when the dailies came back,
the scene had been overexposed by, like, 10 points.
- (Audience groans) - That's what I did.
(Audience laughs)
And I said to the DP,
I said, "Start working on it,
because he's never gonna do it again."
And one time in the bunch of us
there was this boy
who was 15
and he had killed his mother with a shotgun
some years before.
Accidently, completely accidently
without even an unconscious motivation, I have no doubt.
No doubt at all.
And this one time this boy went with us
and we order our drinks.
When it came his turn he said,
"I'll have bergin.
Give me some bergin, please.
Bergin and water."
Well, we all laughed.
He was blond and he had the face of a cherub
and we all laughed.
And his cheeks went red and the color rose in his neck.
And the waiter who had taken our order told people at the next table
what the boy had said and then they laughed.
And then more people were told and the laughter grew
and more people and more laughter.
And...
no one was laughing more than us
and none of us more than the boy who had shot his mother.
Soon everyone in the gin mill knew what the laughter was about
and everyone started ordering bergin
and laughing when they ordered it.
Soon, of course, the laughter became less general,
but did not subside entirely
for a very long time.
For always at this table or that,
someone would order bergin
and a whole new area of laughter would rise.
We drank free that night.
And we were bought champagne by the management,
by the gangster father of one of us.
And, of course, we suffered the next day,
each of us alone
on his train away from the city
and each of us with a grown-up's hangover.
But it was the grandest day
of my youth.
The Burtons, who loved each other very much at that point
and didn't exactly fight often,
there were days.
And those days between them fed into the movie.
And what starts to happen on a good movie
is that you allow all the things
that are useful to feed into the movie.
And it's like one more gift.
If I just said to you, the screen door,
was that you?
Yeah, but it was us
in that Elizabeth was unbelievable.
George, who is out somewhere there in the dark.
Who is good to me.
Whom I revile.
Who can keep learning the games we play
as quickly as I can change them.
Who can make me happy and I do not wish to be happy.
Yes, I do wish to be happy.
George and Martha.
Sad, sad, sad.
Whom I will not forgive for having come to rest.
For having seen me and having said,
"Yes, this will do."
Who has made the hideous,
the hurting, the insulting mistake
of loving me
and must be punished for it.
George and Martha.
Sad, sad, sad.
And we didn't do a lot of takes.
I knew this was gold.
And that's why you can't stop it.
It's one of the great things on earth to do
because there are these gifts
that come from the inside of the artists
who are playing the parts.
And even the DP, who was my nemesis,
did a beautiful job.
And what begins to happen
is that you don't dare say it,
but you think this thing is alive, I think.
The winner is...
Irene Sharaff for "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?"
The winner is Haskell Wexler for "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?"
Sandy Dennis in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?"
Richard Sylbert for "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?"
And George James Hopkins.
And the winner is...
Miss Elizabeth Taylor.
It seems that almost hard upon the heels
of this phenomenal first experience,
there's a property called "The Graduate."
I actually got it before "Virginia Woolf."
A guy I didn't know, a producer, Larry Tuerman,
sent me a book.
He said, "I think this would make a good movie. What do you think?"
And I read it and I said, "Yes, this is a movie."
It was a great story.
But I was already signed to do "Virginia Woolf."
I knew that the guy who was gonna adapt this was very important.
And I struck out with two writers in a row.
I gave, they wrote, we talked.
They wrote, I read, no.
'Cause I knew exactly what I wanted
to be the spine of the movie.
A boy who was drowning in things and objects,
in affluence.
Finding there's no way he could fight his way out of it
except madness.
And madness was what he found to save him.
I was at a party in LA
and one of the guys I was talking to
was Buck Henry, whom I had weirdly known
when we were both seven.
We were at Dalton together when we were seven and eight.
- Were you friends? - No. I don't know.
- I don't remember, but he remembered. - Yes.
'Cause here was this little kid who spoke only German.
And what he said to me about it
was that I was an outsider in every possible way.
So I'm talking to him at this party
and I say,
"Would you be interested in writing a script?"
And he said, yes, he's thought about it.
He would be interested, 'cause while I had been in the Second City,
he had been in the Premise, another improv group.
And I very soon knew he was the guy.
I had rented a house and we went into
what Buck called the Stone Room
and we wrote the screenplay.
I mean, he wrote the screenplay.
And there wasn't a lot of money for it.
Nobody had any great hopes for it.
And I wasn't gonna use big stars.
- Well, you didn't. - I didn't.
Because this was Dustin Hoffman's first film?
Did you know Dustin Hoffman at that point?
No, no. I had seen him playing
a transvestite Russian fishwife.
- (Audience laughs) - In an off-Broadway play, I need hardly add.
And after we had tested a lot of people
and seen hundreds of people,
I said, "I did see a very talented guy.
I have no idea if he's right for this.
Let's get him out here and let us test him."
And he came out and he was Dustin
and he had the thing that Elizabeth had.
And it's very, very rare, people who have it,
which is what seems to be a deal with a lab
that they get better in the bath overnight.
That what you see on the floor when you're shooting
is good, but what you see on the screen next day
is quite a lot better.
Dustin had an astonishing amount of life behind nothing.
I mean, he's not moving anything,
he's not doing anything, but he's panicked.
I don't know how we know, but we know.
- Uh-- - Excuse me.
Yes, sir?
A room. I'd like a room, please.
A single room or a double room?
Single just for myself, please.
Just sign the register, please.
- Anything wrong, sir? - What? No, nothing.
Do you have any luggage, Mr. Gladstone?
Luggage?
Yes. Yes, I do.
- Where is it? - What?
Where is your luggage?
Well, it's in the car. It's out there in the car.
Very good, sir. I'll have a porter bring it in.
- Oh, no. - (rings bell)
- Hello? - Ben: Mrs. Robinson?
- Yes. - It's Benjamin.
- Yes? - Benjamin Braddock.
Benjamin, where are you?
Can you look through the glass?
- Can you see me now? - Yes, I can.
- I got a single room. - That's fine.
But there's one thing.
The desk clerk seemed to be a little bit suspicious.
Now, I don't know what the policy is--
Well, do you want to go up first?
Yes, I think that would be good.
I'll be up in five minutes.
Good-bye, then.
- Benjamin. - Yes?
Isn't there something you want to tell me?
- Tell you? - Yes.
Well, I want you to know
how much I appreciate this, really.
- The number. - What?
The room number, Benjamin.
I think you ought to tell me that.
Somebody told me when Jack Warner at lunch
did nothing but tell jokes,
somebody said, "You know that you whimper when he's telling jokes?"
And I said, "I do?"
He said, "Yes, you sit there and you go..." (whimpers)
(audience laughs)
And I told that to Dustin.
- And he did it. - And he did it.
(Brushing teeth)
(spits)
(whimpers)
What of "Virginia Woolf"
informed "The Graduate"?
Did you bring anybody with you?
My editor. Sam and I were very good friends
and he had been an assistant editor,
which was required by the union, for eight years.
His first movie was my first movie.
And Billy Wilder, who had been very helpful to me in every way,
a great pal when I was getting ready for "Virginia Woolf,"
lent me his supervising editor.
Who left in three days.
And what he does is he devises a cutting scheme
and tells you what it is.
And he left because I didn't follow his scheme.
Now, what he didn't know is I didn't understand his scheme.
(Audience laughs)
And the reason I didn't understand it
was I could only shoot
what I knew was happening.
And there was only one place for the camera
to show what was happening, it seemed to me.
And that's, I think, how you find out
how you want to shoot something by asking that question
and then deciding how you could best see
the thing that is specifically happening
in this moment-- these moments that you're shooting now.
That shot where Dustin is bringing Katharine home the first time
and you see her and him and then not,
and then you see them again in the next window and so on,
the editor, who had wonderful instincts,
he went and found it and suggested it
because it was about they were beginning to connect.
Good night.
Are we getting married tomorrow?
No.
Day after tomorrow?
I don't know.
Maybe we are, and maybe we're not.
(Bell tolling)
(man whistling tune)
I had said to Buck
that I wanted to find a way
to do a montage
when he's getting laid every night
and he's getting anesthetized every night.
And he's trying to move out of his life
- into some... - Other.
- ...other place... - That's right.
...by humping and it wasn't going to work.
And I wanted to express that zombie
going through his regular life at home
with his parents and everything
in a new way.
And then we would move into the Stone Room
and write those montages shot by shot.
Now, okay, and when we look at them,
how do we separate this from Simon and Garfunkel?
"Hello, darkness, my old friend." Which came first?
Well, this is the thing that you have to know about movies.
You get lucky in various strange ways.
My brother sent me that first LP
of Simon and Garfunkel
and I would play it in the morning
when I was getting up and going to the studio.
About the third week of playing it,
I thought, "Holy Christ, this is--
this is our score. What am I doing?"
So I took the record into the cutting room
'cause I spent Saturdays with the editor, my editor,
and we had that thing happen
that has happened to me before and since
that you say, "Let's try this song
over this section."
And it fits to the frame
and it transforms the section.
♪ I've come to talk with you again ♪
♪ Because a vision softly creeping ♪
♪ Left its seeds while I was sleeping ♪
♪ And the vision ♪
♪ That was planted in my brain ♪
♪ Still remains ♪
♪ Within the sound of silence ♪
♪ In restless dreams I walked alone ♪
♪ Narrow streets of cobblestone ♪
♪ 'Neath the halo of a street lamp ♪
♪ I turned my collar to the cold and damp ♪
♪ When my eyes were stabbed ♪
♪ By the flash of a neon light ♪
♪ That split the night ♪
♪ And touched the sound of silence ♪
♪ And in the naked light I saw ♪
♪ 10,000 people, maybe more ♪
♪ People talking without speaking ♪
♪ People hearing without listening ♪
♪ People writing songs ♪
♪ That voices never share ♪
♪ No one dared ♪
♪ Disturb the sound ♪
♪ Of silence ♪
♪ "Fools," said I, "You do not know ♪
♪ Silence like a cancer grows ♪
♪ Hear my words that I might teach you ♪
♪ Take my arms that I might reach you" ♪
♪ But my words ♪
♪ Like silent raindrops fell ♪
♪ And echoed ♪
♪ In the wells of silence ♪
♪ And the people bowed and prayed ♪
♪ To the neon god they made ♪
♪ And the sign flashed out its warning ♪
♪ In the words that it was forming ♪
♪ And the sign said the words of the prophets ♪
♪ Are written on the subway walls ♪
♪ And tenement halls ♪
♪ And whispered ♪
♪ In the sound of silence. ♪
And then there was the weirdest thing of all
which is I wanted them to write a new song
about Mrs. Robinson.
And when we were recording, Paul said,
"You want to hear the song about Mrs. Robinson?"
I said, "Please. Of course."
And he sang it and I said, "I hate it."
(audience laughs)
"That's not the song. I can't use that.
What else have you got?" He said, "Nothing.
That's what I wrote."
I said, "Don't you have anything you could try?"
He said, "Artie."
And they went in the corner and they talked a little whil.
And then they came back and they stood in front of the mic
and they sang "And here's to you, Mrs. Robinson."
And I said, "What the hell?"
(audience laughs)
"How did you do that?"
"Well," he said, "I'll tell you the truth.
I've been working on a song
called 'Here's to You, Mrs. Roosevelt.'"
(audience laughs)
And they just changed it to Mrs. Robinson.
(Audience laughing, applauding)
(music playing)
(vocalizing)
♪ And here's to you, Mrs. Robinson ♪
♪ Jesus loves you more than you will know ♪
♪ Whoa, whoa, whoa... ♪
When you look at the movie, there's no verse.
They go, "Dee-dee-dee-dee-dee"
because that's instead of a verse.
They just have-- they just have the chorus
which is all they had when we were recording.
I watched the film a couple nights ago
and I didn't really fully either remember
or appreciate the very ending.
There they were, him pounding on the pane,
"Elaine, Elaine."
And she turns and she screams, "Benjamin."
And they run out and he uses the cross
and locks the Presbyterian church.
- Who hasn't? - Yeah.
And they run to the bus and they get on the bus
and you think, "Wow!"
And they go to the back of the bus and they sit down
and then the film doesn't end.
No.
Will you tell me about that ending
and what happened and how that happened?
Yeah, that was-- that ending
was what taught me
what movies really are.
And it's hard to talk about,
but it's very important to me
because it's where I really did get it.
It's that I've been a prick on set
and I've been okay and I've been nice,
but on that movie, we had a very special feeling about it
and I was just darling to everybody.
(Audience laughs)
The crew didn't think so, but I did.
And I...
suddenly when we were shooting that running from the church
and getting on the bus,
I said to Dustin and Katharine,
I said, "Now, listen, guys,
we've stopped traffic for 20 blocks
and we have police cars and everything.
They're not gonna stay with us very long.
Please, just get on the damn bus,
turn around, see everybody staring at you, and laugh.
Please. You've got to do it.
I can't do this over and over."
And I looked at them and they both had tears in their eyes.
They hadn't seen me like this-- impatient.
I said, "I'm sorry. I'm sorry, but--
let's just try to do it."
And the next day I was showing the dailies
and I said, "Holy shit.
They're terrified."
Who knew? Not me.
And that's when I understood
that whatever is happening to you,
if you're-- if you've been concentrated,
if you've all been together,
and if you found this place that all of you meet--
which is what you have to do to make a movie--
then they're--
your own unconscious is a very important part of it.
And you-- especially if you're the director
or the writer or the lead actor.
(laughs)
(music playing)
♪ Hello, darkness, my old friend ♪
♪ I've come to talk with you again ♪
♪ Because a vision softly creeping ♪
♪ Left its seeds while I was sleeping ♪
♪ And the vision ♪
♪ That was planted in my brain ♪
♪ Still remains ♪
♪ Within the sound of silence... ♪
There's something about a band of people making a movie
when it's not with the giant machines and the cranes.
You have to do it sometimes,
but you have to work out your stuff
in a room without the cranes,
with the people.
And it's that.
It's finding what's happening.
What is A doing to B
and what happens next
that I still get terribly excited about
because there's-- one minute you don't know,
the next minute you suddenly get it.
And that, as we all know,
is that's the great thrill.
Whether it happens in your life,
in your work, in your study,
in watching something,
when you get it
and everything shifts and everything changes
and says some simple--
at least clear if not simple thing, that's a thrill.
That's exciting. That's why we're here.
Because there's nothing else like it.
There's nothing like getting it.
That part of us
that comes out of the unconscious
when we're hot.
When the thing is happening
is what we have to nourish.
The winner is Mike Nichols.
(Cheering)
Until this moment,
my greatest pleasure in "The Graduate" was making it
because it's a picture made by a group
and we cared for each other
and we cared for what we were doing.
So this award quite literally
belongs to them at least as much as it does to me.
I'm grateful to them and to the academy
and to the movies themselves.
(Cheering)
- (exhales) - I know.
Well, here's the deal.
I've never had a worse afternoon.
No, it's a nightmare.
- You're no fucking fun. - I know.
Must be a grotesque embarrassment to both of us.
Yes. Well, maybe we can get them to destroy it.
Okay, then. This is it, we're done.
(Music playing)
(vocalizing)
♪ And here's to you, Mrs. Robinson ♪
♪ Jesus loves you more than you will know ♪
♪ Whoa, whoa, whoa ♪
♪ God bless you, please, Mrs. Robinson ♪
♪ Heaven holds a place for those who pray ♪
♪ Hey, hey, hey ♪
♪ We'd like to know a little bit about you for our files ♪
♪ We'd like to help you learn to help yourself ♪
♪ Look around you, all you see ♪
♪ Are sympathetic eyes ♪
♪ Stroll around the grounds until you feel at home ♪
♪ And here's to you, Mrs. Robinson ♪
♪ Jesus loves you more than you will know ♪
♪ Whoa, whoa, whoa ♪
♪ God bless you, please, Mrs. Robinson ♪
♪ Heaven holds a place for those who pray ♪
♪ Hey, hey, hey ♪
♪ Hide it in a hiding place where no one ever goes ♪
♪ Put it in your pantry with your cupcakes ♪
♪ It's a little secret ♪
♪ Just the Robinsons' affair ♪
♪ Most of all, you've got to hide it from the kids ♪
♪ Coo-coo-ca-choo, Mrs. Robinson ♪
♪ Jesus loves you more than you will know ♪
♪ Whoa, whoa, whoa ♪
♪ God bless you, please, Mrs. Robinson ♪
♪ Heaven holds a place for those who pray ♪
♪ Hey, hey, hey ♪
♪ Sitting on a sofa on a Sunday afternoon ♪
♪ Going to the candidates' debate ♪
♪ Laugh about it, shout about it ♪
♪ When you've got to choose ♪
♪ Every way you look at it, you lose ♪
♪ Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio? ♪
♪ Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you ♪
♪ Whoo, whoo, whoo ♪
♪ What's that you say, Mrs. Robinson? ♪
♪ Joltin' Joe has left and gone away ♪
♪ Hey, hey, hey ♪
♪ Hey, hey, hey. ♪