Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
Men 1975, after more than two years of sifting through the pictures, Mrs. Elaine he was still in the grass editing his gangster film, Mikey and Nickyand Paramount Pictures and its CEO Barry Diller were losing patience. Desperate for control, the director sold the film from under Paramount to Alyce Films, a mobile production company said to have been founded by May, the film’s star, Peter Falk, and several other co-conspirators. But the sale was stalled, and May was ordered by a judge to hand over the film to Paramount, which he did, except for two crucial reels that mysteriously disappeared until the studio agreed to oversee the final edit.
Set in the flophouses and diners of Philadelphia, Mikey and Nicky are one long, terrifying space between two gangsters, one (Nicky, played by John Cassavetes) rushes to steal from his boss, while the other (Mikey, played by Falk) is torn between hiding his best friend or betraying him. Nicky wants to evade a contract killer who she knows is on the way, but she also wants to drink, go to the movies and play hot hands with Mikey on the bus. Mikey wants to take care of Nicky; you realize he’s been doing this for a long time. They want to give him antacids and milk to heal his wounds, but he also has a family and it’s beyond their control. They go back a long way and their relationship, although full of love that is evident in every look and gesture between the two, also has a history of small deceptions, small colors and dirty things that only happen to you when you really know and love someone. At the heart of this gritty crime film is one of the most beautiful and subtle depictions of male friendship ever shown.
Even after overseeing the final cut, May didn’t think the film was ready. In the winter of 1976, Mikey and Nicky opened and mostly met negative reviews. Although his first two films, 1971’s A New Leaf and 1972’s Oscar-nominated The Heartbreak Kid, were serious and reckless in their approach, they were undoubtedly playful. In addition, many still know him as one half of Nichols and May, the duo that became a cultural phenomenon in the early 1960s. So it is not surprising that people were confused and pushed by Mikey and Nicky. “Audiences came looking for a comedy, and it had some funny moments, but it quickly became difficult,” said Julian Schlossberg, May’s close friend who was Paramount’s vice president of worldwide acquisitions at the time. He thought he was drunk.
But May knew what she was doing. He was not content to repeat what made him successful as a director; was moving into a new territory, and expressed concern at the beginning of the film’s production that it was too funny. It was this same mindset, rejecting comfort and stasis, and jumping into the next big risk that led him to leave Nichols and May at the height of their success, when they were on an unprecedented journey to sell out Broadway shows. Mikey and Nicky also had deep roots that went back to the Chicago suburb where they grew up. “One of them was our neighbor, and the other one was his brother. And they were criminals and so were we. So we all knew each other,” May said after screening the film in 2024 when asked about the inspiration for the characters in the film. I know these people, they are real people.
In 1978, May and Schlossberg agreed with Paramount to restore the rights. They also released an updated version, and Mikey and Nicky’s reputation just got bigger. In celebration of its 50th anniversary, the game’s 2019 4K remake of Mikey and Nicky will be shown on new York City’s Lincoln Center as part of a review of May’s work before seeing a major US release this summer. “I think that his films were often not appreciated at the time because of their complexity: the great ambition of his vision and the experimental, analytical methods that pleased him were impossible for the studio to destroy, and this inconsistency did not help the films to be appreciated as they should have been at that time,” says Daniel Sullimervan, the program’s author.
Even the pages of New Hollywood hagiography are full of powerful instances of directors who went over time and budget (think Stanley Kubrick, Francis Ford Coppola and Michael Cimino), May, who has been very hostile to the issue of gender, paid a higher price than most men. “Really, as a seventy-year-old woman, she was breaking new ground,” says Schlossberg. “A guy can do what he does, and he’s considered strong, and then he does it, and he’s considered tough. It’s very different. He has a strong mind. He’s one of the few people who is good at acting, writing and directing. How many people can you name in the history of motion pictures that have won three ways?”
Eleven years later, May got the chance to direct again and in a way Mikey and Nicky came up big, 1987’s Ishtar, a well-known but misguided comedy about US involvement in the Middle East. During production, May clashed with producer and star Warren Beatty, his friend and star Isabelle Adjani, and studio executives. The film lost $40m and seems to have ended May’s directing career. (It did has been was tested again and listeners in recent years, and will perform as part of the Lincoln Center event.)
Although her directing career has been defined by legal disputes, delayed schedules and high budgets, May continues to reach an ever-increasing audience. Lena Dunham, Martin Scorsese, Greta Gerwigand Josh and Benny Safdie both consider themselves big fans. “May is a great artist who, it seems to me, is being appreciated more and more as time goes on because his methods, his imagination, the content of his films, and the trials and tribulations he faced throughout his career, all feel so modern and relevant,” says Sullivan. Although these battles with Hollywood practices may have harmed his career, they also created a folkloric reputation for the reliability of the art that made him always loved by the audience.
