Mike Nichols: Wizard of Wit

By Betty Rollin, Look Senior Editor

n American movie billed as a comedy used to be something that made you laugh throughout it. Or at least that's what it was trying to do. Anyway, it was happy. Tragedy was something else. That was sad. Well, Mike Nichols and a few other directors, writers and actors have changed all that. Look at Nichols's second film, The Graduate; or his first, the notorious Virginia Woolf. (Plaza Suite, his newest play on Broadway, doesn't make the point as well, but it's still very funny.) Both movies are totally mixed up. They don't seem to know what they are. They are alternately hilarious and horrendous and then, even worse, hilarious and horrendous at once -- like drama critic Walter Kerr's definition of comedy: "the groan made gay." Whatever it is, it's not exactly fun -- at least not Doris Day fun. There you are, you laugh at one moment and feel guilty because it's not really something funny; then you cry and feel stupid because, well, it's a comedy, isn't it? It may sound perverse, until you start thinking about how life is. Then it doesn't sound perverse any more. It just sounds true -- devastatingly true. Mike Nichols is a deft and imaginative miner of devastating truths. That's what he does for a living. Shoulders sloped, Nichols flaps in, falls into a chair and chews a honey-covered pumpkin seed. He is pale, and his skin looks soft, like that of a kid who never played ball. Except the eyes. They have played ball. The actors arrive exactly on time, 10 a.m. -- Anne Bancroft, languid; Dustin Hoffman, jumpy; Katharine Ross, unsure. They are there, on a bleak Hollywood sound stage, to rehearse a movie that is to become the finest of the season, The Graduate. (Not that every moment of The Graduate rings true, but every moment does ring interesting.) In Hollywood, it is considered peculiar to be rehearsing a movie. Normally, movie actors simply learn their words, and get shot. People on the lot seem actually suspicious of the whole idea. (It doesn't help when, later, the news breaks that Nichols is shooting in sequence -- an oddity.) Meanwhile, The Graduate company has more important things to worry about than what Hollywood thinks of their rehearsal. They have to rehearse.

Everyone is seated around the table now. Dustin and Anne have pushed their chairs together to make a "car." They begin to read the scene in the car, when it's pouring and Mrs. Robinson tells Ben to leave her daughter alone or else. "You threaten him with something so terrorizing," says Nichols through his nose, which is where he talks from most of the time, "that you know he has to do what you want." "Yes, yes," says Bancroft, rubbing her hands together like Lady Macbeth. "It's like sitting there with a gun in my pocket. Oh! If only I could do Humphrey Bogart!" "There, there," says Nichols, "you can do anything he can do. Just pretend you have an overbite... Now, Dusty," he says, turning to the young actor, whose face looks gray, "it's like you just won an award, say, for that Spanish picture you just did, and I say, "Listen, I have permission from SAG to see that you will never work again.'" The room is suddenly quiet. "It's to be running as fast as you can in a direction. Then you get stopped." Dustin nods dumbly. Anne sighs, more like a gasp. She claps the palm of her hand to her chest. "Oh, I have so much anger I can't breathe!" "She has the willingness to kill," says Nichols. "Absolutely," whispers Anne. "That's why nothing much has to happen," he says. Dustin shoots up suddenly, grabs a rope that is slung over a chair and starts jumping like a madman. It's his "preparation" for the scene. "He doesn't say it," stresses Dustin later, "but soon you realize he's asking for your peak every minute. So you give it -- not out of fear, but out of respect. He allows kidding around. But that's only because he knows you can be intense, but you gotta be relaxed. Sometimes I get overwrought, and he says, 'Hell, it's only a movie.' Mike has -- Kennedy had it -- grace under pressure."

"Let the car be an expression of what's happening to you," the director is saying. "Like on the line, 'I don't believe you,' use the brake." ..."Oh, no, I'm sick of that shirt off," he yawns when Dustin begins to strip for another scene. "We've got to have him dressed once in a while. It's not like he's Bardot." It's a scene in which Dustin asks Katharine to marry him.

As Nichols works, it's more like carving. The usual proposal-scene clichés are whittled away. You can almost see the dust. Dustin winds up playing the entire scene through a yawn. And it's believable because, according to the script, he has just awakened. "How about tomorrow," Dustin slurs, putting his head on Katharine's shoulder. "Good," yelps Mike. "That's what the line means. God, that's funny!" And later that day, in a hotel-room scene where Ben meets Mrs. Robinson for the first beat of their affair, she inhales a cigarette, and Ben kisses her; and you know something is peculiar, and suddenly you know what it is: when he stops kissing her, she exhales. "Hey, I got an idea," says Nichols, who is now chomping on a bran muffin. "What if Ben hasn't packed a toothbrush? Is it too much?"

"HUMOR IS A VACCINE against self-pity, self-indulgence," says Mike Nichols. "Laughing is a way to say, "Oh, yeah, I know that." It's when somebody sees what a fool he is, himself, it's somebody alive reacting to somebody dead. In The Graduate, the boy is open, alive; the woman is covered dead. How the vital, alive person reacts to the dead person is funny. Like I was on a plane once, and a man in front of me pushed a button for a stewardess -- you know those little buttons -- so the stewardess came over, but she got mixed up and smiled at the button. Those are things I look for. Things are all mixed up. There's not a serious play in which things are all mixed up. There's not a serious play in which things aren't funny. There are huge laughs in Hamlet, in Chekhov, Uncle Vanya tries to shoot himself. He screams, 'I missed, I missed.' It's a riot. Virginia Woolf gets as many laughs as The Odd Couple. You can't say anymore, this is a comedy, so we'll do these things or vice versa.

"THE GRADUATE IS ABOUT PEOPLE DROWNING. That's why the images like the fishbowl, the pool. Mrs. Robinson could have been an alive person like Ben, but -- well, she reminds me of a lot of starts I know. When you're surrounded by too many things, there's a lack of emotion. They say, 'What's happened to so-and-so? She has everything. She seems so dead.' When people have to do things that bore them to death to acquire things, they're in trouble. Buck [Henry] and I worked on the script for six months. What one of us doesn't think of, the other does. It's like working with Elaine. Rehearsal is essential. It gives the thing a chance to grow by itself. And the actors come on the set knowing what to do. Then I can throw new things at them. It's like everybody says, 'I got it,' and then they start rolling down the track, and you don't know if you'll get there, but you're all rolling, and the trip is a pleasure. If you're all swinging in the right direction, you find the same things. You're willing to find them. And that goes for everyone. Like one scene we were doing took place in a bedroom. Then, one day, Dusty said, 'No, it should be in the bathroom.' So [set designer Richard] Sylbert said, 'OK, I'll build a bathroom."

"MOVIES ARE MONEY. That's the medium. Like a book is ink; a picture is paint. A movie is money. One idea in a movie, it costs $20,000. A play costs $100,000, a movie, two to three million. There's tremendous tension between movies as business and movies as movies, and you can't be a director and ignore either one. In exchange for millions, you owe them consideration.

"CUTTING IS ALMOST THE GREATEST PLEASURE. That's where you can make happen things you failed to do before. I'm pleased with everything, then I put it together and I say, 'Blechh, it's so boring.' I think, 'Why didn't I do that, why did she do that?' In Virginia Woolf, I can think of ten things I wish I'd done.

"USING UNKNOWN ACTORS helps you see the characters as people. It's not another portrait by the well-loved so-and-so. Also, for The Graduate, I didn't want the actor to be Ben. I wanted him to see Ben. The actor has to be somewhat like the character -- otherwise, there's too much distance, and it's like a caricature, not real. But there has to be enough distance for him to have a witty opinion of the character.

"I NEVER WANTED TO ACT. I was in intense pain when I said other people's words. Except with Elaine, I wasn't that good as an actor. No, I don't have confidence as a director, either."  END

- Look magazine.