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15 Apr 09

Film - For Mike Nichols, a MoMA Retrospective - NYTimes.com

  • If his movies have a common denominator, it’s probably their intelligence and, though Mr. Nichols doesn’t think of himself as a writer, their writerly attention to detail. They’re almost invariably based on good scripts, from which he extracts extra layers of nuance.
  • “It’s painful and hard to remember now how long and how carefully we worked. I really do think it’s important to sit with a text for as long as you can afford to, reading and talking and doing what I call ‘naming things,’ which is just explaining what happens in every scene. Now you have to do it all in your head, and you have to do it pretty damn fast, because nobody’s going to pay you to do prep. You’re going to have to do it on your own time. It can be done, of course, but it’s just much harder
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13 Apr 09

Film - For Mike Nichols, a MoMA Retrospective - NYTimes.com

MIKE NICHOLS, the subject of a two-week retrospective starting Tuesday at the Museum of Modern Art, is not an obvious choice for a place as artsy and highbrow as the MoMA film department. MoMA retrospectives tend to be awarded to brooding European auteurs — Bernardo Bertolucci and Milos Forman were the last two — and not to commercial Hollywood directors who include on their résumé pop hits like “Working Girl,” “The Birdcage” and, just recently, “Charlie Wilson’s War.”
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Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

The director Mike Nichols is the focus of a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art.
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Video Mike Nichols Trailers Charlie Wilson's War (2007) Closer (2004) Primary Colors (1998) The Birdcage (1996) Postcards From the Edge (1990) Working Girl (1988) Filmography: Mike Nichols MoMA Schedule: Mike Nichols
From top: Courtesy MoMA Film Stills Archive, Universal Pictures/Photofest via MoMA, MoMA Film Stills Archive, Photofest via MoMA

A Mike Nichols sampler, from top: Candice Bergen and Jack Nicholson in “Carnal Knowledge” (1971), Tom Hanks and Philip Seymour Hoffman in “Charlie Wilson’s War” (2007), Anne Bancroft and Dustin Hoffman in “The Graduate” (1967) and Al Pacino and Meryl Streep in “Angels in America” (2003).

Except for a puzzling string of duds in the mid-’70s, almost all of Mr. Nichols’s movies have made money, and a few, like “The Graduate” and “Carnal Knowledge,” have been recognized as cultural landmarks. But because of their commercial shimmer, their way of eliciting exceptional performances by top-of-the-line stars, it’s sometimes hard to say what makes a Nichols movie a Nichols movie. They seem like vehicles for actors, not the director, whose stamp is in leaving almost no trace of himself.

“If you want to be a legend, God help you, it’s so easy,” Mr. Nichols said the other day over coffee in his Times Square office. “You just do one thing. You can be the master of suspense, say. But if you want to be as invisible as is practical, then it’s fun to do a

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film directors howto direct tips Nichols interview

29 Jan 08

Melissa Silverstein: Have You Seen a Woman Director Lately? - Entertainment on The Huffington Post

  • Whatever stories a director wants to tell, the 10 days of Sundance is the time to toot her own horn and take advantage of being the center of attention. It disappears all too quickly. Jamie Babbit and Angela Robinson learned from their experiences of having shorts at the festival and very smart in exploiting the business opportunities that came their way. They are up front with their ambition and comfortable working in TV as well as film. Both are young, gay and able to look at directing from a business perspective. The raw ambition they exude has at times shocked other women -- Robinson caused a furor on a panel several years ago at when she talked about wanting to model her career after that of George Lucas. "I want action figures," she said. "I want a studio." Babbit got an agent from Sundance, as did Robinson, and made sure that she had a script ready for potential investors. Robinson immediately got a studio gig directing Lindsay Lohan in the Disney's remake of Herbie Fully Loaded. She's been an executive producer on The L Word and did a web feature, Girltrash!, that just got sold as a graphic novel. She's entrepreneurial and thinks about creating brands and intellectual property, goals not commonly expressed by women directors.



    As Allison Anders says, "Sundance is the only hand that feeds for women directors." She implores women to be more prepared and not get caught in the "grateful to be there" mode not quite knowing how to move forward. She says: "Acknowledge that you could encounter every single person who could possibly finance your next feature and have a goddam screenplay ready."



    The bottom line is that until there is a critical mass, it's going to be a struggle for all women directors. The next step is to figure out how the films from festivals like Sundance get seen by more than just industry folks with enough money to spend a week in the Utah mountains.

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