Elaine May (born Elaine Berlin in 1932), the daughter of Jewish theater actors, started her career in her father's traveling Yiddish theater company.
She got married when she was still a teenager and moved to Chicago in 1950 to study acting. In 1955 she enrolled in the improvisational theater group Compass Players where she met Mike Nichols. In 1957 the two formed
a stand-up comedy duo, Nichols and May, and moved to New York in 1960.
In 1961 they broke up and May began writing plays:
"3 x 3" (1962), "A Matter of Position" (1962), "Not Enough Rope" (1962),
all the way to her best known play, "Adaptation" (1969).
She had divorced her first husband in 1960 and remarried in 1962 and divorced again after one year and marry again in 1964 (her own psychoanalyst).
Her first film was the screwball comedy A New Leaf (1971), thus becoming
the first major Hollywood woman director since Ida Lupino.
This was followed by the more substantial The Heartbreak Kid (1972), scripted by Neil Simon,
and by the psychological drama of Mikey and Nicky (1976),
which is only superficially a crime thriller.
The story is focused on the madness of a detestable selfish man who has betrayed everybody and now is being betrayed by his best man.
The film's highlight is the virtuoso performance of John Cassavetes.
A panicking man, Nicky (John Cassavetes), is hiding in a small and dark hotel room. He telephones his best friend, Mikey (Peter Falk), who rushes to his place, but Nicky appears to have lost his mind and can't quite articulate what he wants.
He only repeats that someone wants to kill him. Nicky doesn't seem to trust Mikey either but Mikey proves that he is concerned about his health. Mikey dismisses Nicky's fears of being chased by a hitman but advises him to leave town.
Just when Nicky has gained enough trust of Mikey and accepts to leave the hotel room, we see Mikey make a phone call to the hitman and tell him where Nicky
can be found. While Mikey and Nicky chat in a coffeeshop about their families
(both are married with a chil, but Nicky is separated from his wife), we
see the hitman take the wrong road, which causes him to show up late.
We learn that Nicky stole money from their boss, a mobster.
Nicky is unstable and obnoxious, and decides to leave the coffeeshop to go and watch movies.
Mikey finds an excuse to call his wife and tell her where they are heading so
she can tell the hitman.
Nicky causes trouble wherever he goes. They stop in a bar where everybody is Black and Nicky offends a Black man. Mikey has to drag him out with force to avoid
a brawl. Then they take a bus to the movie theater and Nicky beats up the bus
driver who wants him to follow the rules. Nicky decides to get off at the
cemetery to visit his mother's grave. The cemetery is closed by Nicky convinces
Mikey to jump the wall. They spend a few minutes yelling at each other among
the graves and we learn that Mikey has been wronged by the wild and selfish Nicky. Meanwhile, the hitman got the address of the movie theater from Mikey's wife
and is waiting in vain for them in front of the theater. Nicky takes another
detour: he decides to visit one of his girlfriends, Nellie, a shy woman who
wants to be told that he loves her when in fact he only uses her.
He forces her to perform oral sex on him while Mikey waits in the kitchen,
and then offers the woman to Mikey. The woman rebels and kicks them out.
Mikey is furious at Nicky and they get into a fight. Nicky breaks Mikey's
watch, which is very valuable to Mikey because it was given to him by his
father. Mikey, fed up, sends Nicky to hell, while Nicky is protesting that he was just kidding. But instead of heading home Mikey meets the hitman, gets in
his car, and tells the hitman where to find Nicky. Nicky, however, even more delirious, is still moving quickly. Mikey and the hitman drive around the dark streets of the neighborhood but can't find Nicky.
The reason is that Nicky went back to Nellie's apartment, but he manages only
to humiliate her more. She tells him that she knows that he describes her as
a nymphomaniac who can sleep with anybody.
Meanwhile, the mobster orders Mikey to go home and orders the hitman to patrol
the streets around Mikey's home.
Mikey goes home and is clearly upset by the whole night in which he has tried
to have his best friend murdered. Spending all those hours with the insane and
fearful Nicky brought back a lot of painful memories of his own childhood,
particularly the difficult relationship with his father.
Nicky does show up at dawn. He bangs at the doors begging Mikey's wife to open,
but Mikey gestures to his wife not to open. Nicky sees the hitman's car
approaching and becomes hysterical. Mikey and his wife barricade the door
to keep him out. The hitman shoots and kills Nicky.
Due to the box-office failure of that film, she couldn't direct for a decade.
She wrote the
screenplays of Warren Beatty's Heaven Can Wait (1978) and
Reds (1981) and of
Sydney Pollack's Tootsie (1982) before directing
the comedy Ishtar (1987).
She also wrote the
screenplays of Mike Nichols' The Birdcage (1996) and Primary Colors (1998).
All the while she kept writing plays for the theater:
"Mr Gogol and Mr Preen" (1991), "Hotline" (1995), "After the Night and the Music" (2005), "In And Out Of the Light" (1998), "Taller Than A Dwarf" (2000), "The Way of All Fish" (2008), etc.
