Background
NICHOLS, Mike was born on November 6, 1931 in Michael Igor Peschowsky, Berlin, Germany (family name changed 1939). Son of Igor Nikolaievich Peschowsky and Brigitte Landauer.
( A Writers Guild Award nominee for Best Screenplay, here...)
A Writers Guild Award nominee for Best Screenplay, here is the complete script and special section "Talking with Nichols," with the director's comments on actors, directing, comedy, collaborations and more; commentaries on the production by Robin Williams, Nathan Lane and others involved in the film, stills, and complete cast and crew credits. 50 b/w photos. The Newmarket Shooting Script Series features an attractive 7 x 9 1/4 inch format that includes a facsimile of the film's shooting script, as chosen by the writer and/or director, exclusive notes on the film's production and history, stills, and credits.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1557042772/?tag=2022091-20
(More people are denied SSI and Social Security Disability...)
More people are denied SSI and Social Security Disability than are allowed benefits the first time they apply. This includes children and adults. Appeals can take a year or more. In a simplified step by step guide Mike Davis gives disability applicants the crucial information they need to know and exactly what to do to make the best case the first time around. A former SSI and Social Security Disability Claims Examiner, the author has worked on over 4000 cases over a seven-year period. "Too often I have had to deny a claim when I thought there was a genuine disability, but the case was not complete enough to render a favorable decision. What I have tried to do in this book is give the reader the information needed to present his or her case fully, accurately, and in the best possible light. I believe this will increase the chances of a favorable decision dramatically." Here is the inside scoop on what the decision-makers are really looking for and how you can help them to get it.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0595125743/?tag=2022091-20
( An evening of readings and discussion: Heller's friends...)
An evening of readings and discussion: Heller's friends and colleagues including Christopher Buckley, Robert Gottlieb, and Mike Nichols. They revisit his classic black comedy set at the end of World War II, one of the most important books about patriotism, honor, and the absurdities of war and beauracracy of the 20th century. The conversation is led by Lesley Stahl. An excerpt is performed by Scott Shepherd (Gatz). "The rock and roll of novels...There's no book like it." (Norman Mailer)
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B007Z8YY02/?tag=2022091-20
NICHOLS, Mike was born on November 6, 1931 in Michael Igor Peschowsky, Berlin, Germany (family name changed 1939). Son of Igor Nikolaievich Peschowsky and Brigitte Landauer.
The child Nichols came to America as a refugee at the age of seven. When the father died, the family had difficult times, but Nichols worked his way through the University of Chicago, and studied to be an actor.
He formed a comedy group with Alan Arkin, Barbara Harris, Paul Sills, and Elaine May, which led to the Nichols and May double act in the late fifties and early sixties—on stage, in clubs, on records. They were a brilliant team, and their dialogues had as big an effect on screenplays and how smart people talked and thought as Jules Feiffer cartoons.
It says something about the team that Nichols has been so much more successful and organized than Elaine May. More recently, it says a great deal about his producer's acumen that he allowed The Remains of the Day to be a Merchant-Ivory film (though Nichols retains a credit from his early ownership of the book’s screen rights). Did he know in advance that he couldn’t deliver the closed heart in that intriguing project?
He had a fairly obvious commercial success with The Birdcage, and made a good sharp comedy from Primary Colors. But, to my mind, Wit, done for 11 BO, with the maximum severity, made so many of his recent movies look fussy and decorative. Wit trusted the aching iron of its subject and the steel of its players. 1 think it is the best work lie has ever done.
( A Writers Guild Award nominee for Best Screenplay, here...)
( An evening of readings and discussion: Heller's friends...)
(More people are denied SSI and Social Security Disability...)
(This is a Brand New Color Playbill from Death and the Mai...)
Mike Nichols is an unquestioned figure in culture, a smart man, a funny man, a proven success in cabaret, on records, as a stage director, and as a deliverer of talking-point movies—movies that are smart, funny, “adult," “on the pulse," and “of their moment." It's hard to grasp a him in there, a movie director: after a dozen or so films, is there anything there more substantial than a high reputation and a producer's instinct for what smart people might want to see? Is there soul, intelligence, theme, or character holding these films together in series? Or, it Nichols is essentially a producer, a packager of things, then we have to note how well he fits the law of averages for producers. He is hit and miss. Virginia Woolf, The Graduate, and Working Girl were all nominated for best picture, and Nichols won the directing Oscar for The Graduate. The Fortune, Heartburn, and Regarding Henry, on the other hand, are movies that send audiences out into the night with the lament, “Why did they ever think of making that?”
Actually, you can see why. Warren Beatty and jack Nicholson competing to have or kill an heiress is a neat idea. Everyone smart thought that movie would make a bundle. Heartburn was a story about real infidelities in the smart set: there must have been ten thousand bold-type names from the columns who were wild to see that one. And Regan ling Henry is the sort of 1950s plot idea—smart husband goes back to zero because of brain damage—that usually guarantees Oscars (so long as you don’t cast Harrison Ford). Those are magazine stories; any one of them could have made a good segment on 60 Minutes as handled by Mike Nichols’s lovely and smart wife, Diane Sawyer.
Nichols makes movies from really neat, cute, smart ideas that can be grasped in twenty minutes. Sometimes they do go off the deep end—Carnal Knowledge and Silkwood, for instance, don't leave too much room for the comfortable feeling that just thinking smart will sort things out. In that respect, Working Girl was a knockout, smart picture: terrific entertainment, topical issue, Melanie Griffith in her underwear, and verv positive, smart ending: working women rule, okay? With a Carly Simon song.
The Graduate was the cutest package (oddly, it is a film that derides the plastics-packaging urge in America), in which a numb rebel (very intriguing concept) becomes a happy conformist, with terrific sideshows along the way, like Mrs. Robinson as a zipless fuck and great songs. Nichols never neglects the songs. With Postcards from the Edge one can only see the taming of a tough, wry book and the remorseless, smart casting that went for MacLaine and Streep instead of Debbie Reynolds and Carrie Fisher. Maybe it was smarter to have smart people just know who the characters were. And maybe someone thought MacLaine and Streep were better box office—which only shows the tangle being smart can get into.
Arabian horse breeding.
Married Patricia Scott, 1957 (divorced). Married Margot Callas, 1974 (divorced). 1 child; Married Annabel Davis-Goff (divorced).
2 children; Married Diane Sawyer, April 29, 1988.