Wallflower at the Orgy

by Nora Ephron

  Q: This is a naïve question, but film is a very mysterious thing to me, and I don’t understand how you just went out there and made a movie. How did you find out about all those mysterious sound devices and mysterious words like “looping”?

  NICHOLS: I just held my nose and jumped in.

  Q: But did you feel like an imbecile?

  NICHOLS: I still do.

  Q: You do?

  NICHOLS: Oh, of course. All the time. Don’t you?

  Q: Oh no, because I’m not doing anything terribly hard. It’s just me and a typewriter. It’s not me and a million technicians and budgets and deadlines.

  NICHOLS: Well, I’ll tell you two stories. One is about the first day of shooting on Virginia Woolf. The scene was Richard and Elizabeth coming through the front door, going to the living room and turning on the light. And her saying, “Jesus H. Christ,” or whatever she said. And it was not only my first day on the picture, it was my first day on a movie set. I had thought and thought about it and had drawn little pictures and made little plans, and Richard and Elizabeth were all made up and ready to go and there were a hundred and fifty men standing around with their arms folded, and I suddenly thought, How do I get them through the door? If the camera is facing the door, won’t the door hit the camera when it opens? And if it’s far back enough, won’t they walk into the camera when they come in?

  Q: But you knew cameras moved, right?

  NICHOLS: Well, I did know that. But didn’t know where to put it because I wanted to see them close. And then I thought, If it’s too close, the door will hit it. Well, everybody had all sorts of suggestions. I mean, it was clear that I was in naked panic. And I had special advisers. And finally the cameraman said, “See, we’ll do this and they’ll come in and we’ll move and we’ll pan them and they’ll disappear momentarily behind the wall as they walk toward the kitchen and we’ll see them reappear again and it will be very interesting.” And I said, “Well, what’s it for?” He said, “Well, it’s interesting.” And I thought, Oh, Christ. Now I have to do this very hard thing. They know more than I do, but I have to decide what it’s going to be because I know what I am going to tell and they don’t. That was a terrible minute. And I just said, All right. Pull yourself together and do it. And I did. And then, you begin to learn it. You begin to discover what it is. There are various sorts of mysteries that are cleared up by accident. The cameramen are always saying—and this is absolutely their domain—they are always saying, “Two-eight.” Or, “Three-five.” Or, “Four-eight.” And I would think, Well, they know why they want it at two-eight. It’s not my business. We’ve talked about the mood of the scene and how I want it to look. Weeks and weeks of the cameraman’s saying “two-eight” and “three-five” had gone by. One day, I happened to be looking through the camera at a stand-in, and he said, “Two-eight.” Then he said, “Change it to three-five.” And as I looked, it got brighter. “You mean that’s it?” I said. “That’s all it is? It’s just a diaphragm that opens up or closes down?” He said, “Of course, you ass. What did you think it was?” And you begin to discover that most of the technical things are rather like that—they can be explained, they can be understood, and they can be dealt with. The big decision, the hard decision, is how to use them. To understand them is not that rough. You know what it’s like? Do you remember in kindergarten when you had subjects like shoelace tying?

  Q: Yes. Only we had apple cutting.

  NICHOLS: We had French. When I was five I couldn’t tie my shoelaces yet, but they started teaching us French from playing cards. We never cut apples. We did tie shoelaces. And it’s very much like that thing where you think, I’ll never tie this shoelace; I don’t understand. And then after a while you are tying it and then you forget about it and then you know how to tie a shoelace.

  Q: There was a long piece in The New Yorker on The Graduate which I had a little trouble reading.…

  NICHOLS: I couldn’t finish it, I have to admit.

  Q: Well, in the end, the writer said of you that you had thus far attempted nothing that strained at the limits of your talent.

  NICHOLS: Well, I think that’s a difficult thing to know about someone else. As far as he knows—what if I have exceeded the limits of my talent and there is nothing more I can do? It’s very hard to know that about someone else. As to the article, the writer was more interested in the picture than I am. He wrote so long—I have never seen such a long piece on a movie.

  Q: The other night I met a man who told me he was writing a book on how to write movie criticism and how to judge a movie. And I thought, Oh, God, no. I find it horrifying that people take these things so seriously.

  NICHOLS: I couldn’t agree more. It’s like writing a book on how to judge a person. You know, first you must size up the appearance and size of the breast. Then you must watch very carefully how she eats her dinner. A movie is like a person. Either you trust it or you don’t. That’s all. You’re not going to watch the person very carefully and say, “Well, I liked her very much until the last course. But then, frankly, I thought the way she handled her silverware was influenced by Sue.” I’ll tell you one thing. Agnes Varda (the French director) and I were sort of friends. We met a few times and we liked each other a lot. Then I saw one of her pictures and I thought certain things about it but I thought, Well, she knows what she is doing and I like her and that’s that. Then she did a public interview about The Film—about Films, you know, that religious way that French people have—and she put down The Graduate. Which was fine with me. You know, anybody can put it down and I’m best of all at putting it down. But what I kept thinking was, Does she really literally think that films are more important than friendship? What an odd way to think. I mean, if you’re going to make a religion of something, why make it of films when there are better things to make it of? And therefore I agree with you about books about film criticism.

  Q: Most of the articles written about you say you had a lonely childhood.

  NICHOLS: Lonely? No.

  Q: Was it a happy one?

  NICHOLS: Not particularly.

  Q: I remember reading that after you came here from Germany, you went to the Cherry Lawn School and someone held your head under water.

  NICHOLS: I don’t even know if I can remember it exactly, but there was this guy who, you know, as has happened to everybody in school, there are guys you fight with, and there was this one guy who held me under water and stood on my head, so that I stayed under for some ten minutes and almost drowned. Now this was when I was, I don’t know, eight? nine? And unfortunately for myself and others, I have total recall. I remember almost everything. So some years later, when Elaine and I were playing at a night club, he came to see me, and he tapped me on the shoulder and said, “You don’t remember me, but—” And I said, “I remember you very well. Your name is so-and-so and you are shit.” And he blanched, and I said, “What are you doing now?” And he said, “I’m working in a used-car lot.” And I said, “I’m very pleased.” But I’ll tell you something about that. I think when people do things, they do them out of a variety of motives. Let’s say, arbitrarily for a minute, you can divide why people act into three motives: vengefulness, despair, and celebration. Dig? I think for a long time, mine has been vengefulness. There was an element in everything I did of I’ll-get-you-you-bastards. I think it’s changing now because of things that have happened to me. I don’t know if I can ever achieve celebration, though.

  Q: That’s fascinating, because I am totally motivated by—I call it revenge, but you called it vengefulness, and it’s the same thing. So is my husband, and he has a fantasy about a person named Roland Mantifle.…

  NICHOLS: They are all named Roland Mantifle.

  Q: Roland Mantifle used to grab my husband every day after school and beat him up and take away all of his baseball cards and say unprintable demeaning things. So Dan has this fantasy that he will someday pull up in front of Roland Mantifle’s low-income housing project in a Maserati and knock on t
he door and Roland Mantifle will answer in a T-shirt carrying a beer can, and Dan will say, “I don’t know if you remember me, but my name is Dan Greenburg and I’d like to show you my bank statement.”

  NICHOLS: You’ve got to keep that story in. Would you do that for me? But listen, there are two things about that. One is that, unfortunately or fortunately, when you get to that moment, revenge is not sweet, because you’re overcome, to your surprise, by sympathy for the other person. You can’t do it when the moment comes. And so you’re left with something—I’ve thought about this a little bit—you’re left with something very strange. It’s not possible to divide people into two categories, but if it were, I think that it’s possible that there are people to whom all the good things happen in the first part of their lives—the Kennedys are the world’s great example of this—and then, because they can’t escape this, all the terrible things happen. And then there is the other half of us, where the not necessarily terrible but the pretty bad things happen in the first part, and then things get better and they get better and then they’re great. There is only one drawback, and that is that one is poisoned forever by the bad things that happened in the beginning. So that if one had a choice, I think, one would choose to be the first kind: they are the lucky ones, because they get to experience the untainted good half. Otherwise, although you can fight it and overcome it and make something joyful and pleasurable out of your life, there is always some poison left from before. And you never get rid of it.

  Q: You seem to have gone to about ten schools.

  NICHOLS: Well, not really.

  Q: Why so many?

  NICHOLS: Well, we got to the United States and I went to Dalton. I forget why. And then I didn’t and I forget why. Then I went to P.S. 87, where Mrs. Bullock used to come into the boys’ room to make sure we weren’t spending too much time in there and pull us out with her long red nails. Then I went to Cherry Lawn, which was a postprogressive co-educational boarding school, where you slept on sleeping porches in the winter, with screens instead of windows and no heat. That was to toughen your character. In my case, it didn’t work. Then I went to Walden, which was very progressive. They took us on trips ostensibly to see things like Williamsburg but really to encourage sexual intercourse as early as possible. And they were very liberated. They were liberated before anyone. The motto was “Black and white, shoulder to shoulder, against the lower class.” We were all good liberals. You weren’t meant to actually work or learn anything—it was much more important to be a member of your peer group. For instance, I was skipped several times in order to be a member of my peer group, and, as a result, I never had geography or penmanship. I literally do not know anything whatever about geography or penmanship, and I’m always having arguments with my girl about whether Asia is in Africa, whether Egypt is in Asia, or whether they’re all separate continents. And she explains and then I forget again. I also skipped penmanship, with the very awkward result that I can’t write with my hand. I can sign my name and I can write things that I can read and I can print when I print a note to someone, but I can’t write anything that anyone else can read.

  Q: What were you like at the age of sixteen?

  NICHOLS: Let me think. It was my first year of college. I got out of high school at the age of fifteen and I registered at NYU. I hadn’t taken the College Board exams, somehow, which made me eligible for, I believe, three schools: NYU, Mexico City College, and the University of Chicago. I opted for NYU because I was in New York. And I went there for one day. I was very self-conscious and sort of awkward and they made us stand and sing the NYU school song, which was called “Oh Grim, Gray Palisades,” and I left. I went home and took a job for a year as a shipping clerk at a costume jeweler’s. Then I got bored with that and tried out for Mexico City College and Chicago. I was accepted at Chicago and went there and that was when I was sixteen and it was a very very happy year for me. It was sort of—and I think I’ve said this before—it was the first time I realized that life wasn’t frozen in that high-school pattern forever. You know, in high school you think, Mike Tenzer can beat me up and I can beat up Dave Halpern. And Laura Lichtenstein will go out with me and Lenore Firestein will never. And life will be like this forever. Do you remember that?

  Q: Oh, God, yes.

  NICHOLS: And I got to college and I thought, Jesus, the world is full of possibilities. And the world is not frozen and I am not frozen. And I was very happy at sixteen.

  Q: But you soon dropped out of school.

  NICHOLS: Yes. I don’t know if you know about the Hutchins system (after Robert M. Hutchins, former president of the University of Chicago), but at the time, when I went to Chicago, you first took a placement exam, and if you knew something, you didn’t have to study it. You took a test where you mark the paper and the machine decides if you’re right. Well, later on they caught this and it was no longer possible, but there was one girl who didn’t understand any of the biology questions, so she drew a duck, using the little spaces, with her electromagnetic pencil, and she got a B. I placed out of math and physics, which I knew nothing about, through luck. Anyway, then they tell you what you have to study and you don’t have to go to class. So, of course I never did go. I sort of hung around and talked to people and drank and sometimes read the texts and sometimes didn’t, and at the end of the year you take a comprehensive exam. Which I did and sort of got through the first year. But then the next year the whole thing began to disintegrate. I hadn’t gone to class and I enjoyed my friends and drinking and living more and more, so I ended up not taking the comprehensive exams either. And then I wasn’t in school any more. But there were lots of us like that and we just sort of lived in Chicago, and it was a terrific community and a very happy time. We all lived in the same neighborhood, and you came out of your house and ran into your friends and had breakfast in the drugstore, and the theater that we formed began to come out of that. I’d known Elaine, but then something happened between us that led to many things—to the theater and the cabaret and so on.

  Q: I read that you were very depressed after you broke up the act with Elaine May. What was that period like?

  NICHOLS: It was like hell. I was the leftover half of something—both professionally and otherwise. I didn’t know what the point of me was, or what I was supposed to do next. So I bummed around and felt sorry for myself and was a pain in the ass to my friends and complained a lot and did dopey things like acting on TV shows and directing at the Vancouver Festival—oh, and acting in it. I was the Dauphin in Saint Joan opposite Susan Kohner.

  Q: No kidding.

  NICHOLS: Yes. I played the Dauphin to her Joan. One night while she was giving us her Joan, I knocked one of her teeth out. By mistake, needless to say. That wasn’t a success in any way. Also it was in Vancouver, and if you haven’t been in Vancouver, it’s very hard to describe. But I also would have fits in the middle of rehearsal where I would fall on the floor and start screaming, “I’m in Canada. I’m in Canada.” And they would all just stare at me. And then I would have temper tantrums, and once I said, “Blow it up. We’ll get our ginger ale somewhere else.” I hated it. And then Saint Subber (the Broadway producer) thought maybe I could direct a play. He offered me Barefoot in the Park, and I thought, Let’s try.

  Q: I wondered if you had anything to say about improvisation as training for acting or for life.

  NICHOLS: As training for acting, I think it makes you very comfortable with the audience and it makes you think, I can take care of you guys. Don’t worry. But what I really thought it was useful for was directing, because it also teaches you what a scene is made of—you know, what needs to happen. See, I think the audience asks the question, “Why are you telling me this?” And improvisation teaches you that you must answer it. There must be a specific answer. It also teaches you when the beginning is over and it’s time for the middle, and when you’ve had enough middle and it’s time already for the end. And those are all very useful things in directing.

  Q: A
nd what about as training for life?

  NICHOLS: Nothing trains you for life.

  On Location With Catch-22

  March 1969

  It is a moment of intense concentration. Mike Nichols is sitting in a blue director’s chair, his face contorted, his hands clenched, his eyes squeezed shut. He finally opens his mouth to speak. “Bladder,” he says. “Whimsy. Dailies. Rumble. Barren. Crystal. Pastry.”

  “No,” says Tony Perkins, who is seated next to him. “Not pastry.”

  “Strudel,” says Nichols triumphantly. “Strudel. Pepsi. Cancer. Stopwatch.…”

  A film is being shot here. Not at the moment, of course. At the moment, the director of the film is playing a memory game with one of the actors while the crew figures out how to work a broken water machine that is holding up the shooting. The name of the film is Catch-22. It is budgeted at eleven million dollars, is on location in the Mexican desert, and is based on Joseph Heller’s best-selling World War Two novel. “I’ve tried, as they say, to preserve the integrity of the novel,” says screenwriter Buck Henry. “Don’t print that unless you put after it: ‘He said this with a glint in his eye and a twitch in his cheek and a kick in the groin.’ Because if that line so much as looks as if I said it seriously, I’ll kill you.” Among the graffiti scrawled on the wall of the portable men’s room on the set is one that reads, HELP SAVE JOE HELLER.