Today's director for our Female Filmmakers blog is an absolute legend. I've long admired her career and since this is a holiday week, I wanted to treat myself by writing about someone I love. Her films admittedly do not have a lot of nudity, but she is far too influential to ignore. Let's talk about Elaine May!
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Elaine May herself is hot. I'll get that out of the way now. She has acted a lot, but she has never gone nude, but go google early pictures of Elaine right now. She was stunning! And men LOVED her. It's said that everyone was in love with her. Richard Burton once said: "Elaine was too formidable, one of the most intelligent, beautiful, and witty women I had ever met. I hoped I would never see her again." That's when Richard was with Elizabeth Taylor - uh oh!
How did everyone fall so madly in love with a Jewish girl from Philly? It's because she was THAT funny and beautiful. Elaine May was a child actress in Yiddish theater, so she had the chops from day one. When she was a young high school dropout, she moved to Chicago with only seven dollars (allegedly) because she heard she could take classes at The University of Chicago without a diploma.
She moved to Chicago and quickly fell in with the group of bohemian improvisers who would become the prototype for American improv in general and they would later go on to found The Second City.
I'm talking about The Compass Players, a group of improvisers at The University of Chicago that changed American comedy forever. Members included Paul Sills, Jerry Stiller, Alan Alda, Ed Asner, Del Close, Valerie Harper, and Jane Alexander (who has gone nude) among so many more.
Elaine was a pivotal member and she quickly formed a fast friendship with another Compass Player, Mike Nichols. In fact, she and Mike found out that they had such a similar sense of humor and they worked well together that the two of them formed their own act. Their act took OFF. They began performing sketches that made fun of the modern intellectuals that surrounded them at the University of Chicago.
They became so big that The Compass Players asked them to leave because their fame was not in harmony with the group. They hit Broadway, released albums, and appeared on television. Their Broadway show An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May even won a Grammy.
You know how this story goes: with great success, comes a great downfall. The two of them began to disagree on what to do next with their career after four years together. Elaine wanted to do more experimental comedy and improv and Mike Nichols liked being serious. He even wanted to write and direct which he would soon do with 1966's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and the 1967 classic The Graduate.
She took to writing plays and wrote several notable ones. She made her writing and directing debut in 1971, A New Leaf. She followed that up with 1972's The Heartbreak Kid which later got remade by The Farrelly Brothers. Her version did not have any nudity in it (her daughter, Jeannie Berlin, starred), but the Farrelly Brothers version of The Heartbreak Kid had A LOT of nudity.
In 1987, she directed a comedic musical that wound up being such a monumental flop that she did not try to direct again. It's a shame because, honestly...this movie is NOT that bad. I'm talking, of course, about Ishtar.
Ishtar stars Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman as lounge singers who have a gig at a hotel in Morocco, but they are thrown into an international scandal and used in a power play by the CIA to overthrow the Moroccan regime. It was supposed to be funny, and expensive, but it was a total bomb.
Not even Isabelle Adjani's breast flash could save the film's reputation. You may recognize Isabelle from the 1981 film Possession.
So what happened here? Why was this movie considered such a flop? Apparently, there were a lot of fights with the unsupportive studios, Beatty and Elaine fought often, the film was expensive to make, and Elaine was a bit of a control freak which caused her to clash with studio executives.
She was taking too long to edit the film due to the eight hours of footage that she shot, so they threatened legal action! All of these stories hit the papers, so word about this "disaster" spread faster than any reviews of the film itself.
I love Elaine because she once said, "If all of the people who hate Ishtar had seen it, I would be a rich woman." See? She gets it. She knows that haters just have to hate.
And she was right! Famous Far Side cartoonist Gary Larson made a cartoon called "Hell's Video Store" that was only stocked with copies of Ishtar. He actually apologized years later and said that he had never seen it until recently on a plane and he actually liked it.
What was Elaine supposed to do after making one of the biggest flops in movie history? Don't worry - she quietly kept working. In the 80s she was actually an uncredited script doctor on A LOT of major films such as Wolf, Dangerous Minds, Tootsie, and Labyrinth.
She and Mike Nichols reunited to write one more monumental protect: 1996's The Birdcage. Nichols described their reunion to feel like coming home. He said it was "like getting a piece of yourself back that you thought you'd lost." They also wrote 1998's Primary Colors which was their last project together.
She has since acted a good deal and was awarded a National Medal of Arts in 2013 She is supposed to direct her first film in more than 30 years and it is supposed to star Dakota Johnson. Nothing is known about it other than the fact that Dakota Johnson is attached! How exciting is that?
This Thanksgiving, gather the family around and watch Ishtar. I guarantee you'll be entertained!
