After being marginalized for her “huge ambition,” director Elaine May’s genius is finally being recognized film

IIn 1975, after more than two years of scrutinizing the footage, Elaine May was still in a bind during the editing of her gangster film, Mikey and Nicky, and Paramount Pictures and its CEO Barry Diller were growing impatient. In a desperate move to retain control, the director sold the film from Paramount to Alyce Films, a sham production company said to have been founded by May, the film’s star Peter Falk, and a number of other conspirators. But the sale stalled, and a judge ordered May to turn the film over to Paramount, which she did, except for two master reels that mysteriously disappeared until the studio agreed to let her supervise the editing of the final cut.

Nestled in sleazy hotel rooms and restaurants in Philadelphia, Mickey and Nicky spend a long and terrifying time between two mobsters, one of whom (Nicky, played by John Cassavetes) is on the run to rob his boss, while the other (Mickey, played by Falk) is torn between hiding his best friend or turning him in. Nicky wants to evade the hitman he knows is tracking him, but he also wants to drink beer, go to the movies, and play with Mickey on the bus. Mickey wants to take care of Nicky; You feel like he’s been doing this for a long time. He wants to feed him antacids and milk to treat his ulcers, but he also has a family and they’ve outgrown their dynamic. They go back a long time, and their relationship, although full of love shown in every look and gesture between the two, is also fraught with a history of petty betrayals, the kinds of insults and put-downs that only stay with you when you truly know and love someone. At the heart of this unglamorous gangster film is one of the darkest, most beautiful images of male friendship ever put to screen.

Even after she oversaw the final production, May didn’t think the film was ready. In the winter of 1976, Mickey and Nicky opened to largely negative reviews. Although her first two films, 1971’s A New Leaf and 1972’s Oscar-nominated The Heartbreak Kid, were apocalyptic and nihilistic in their way, they were undeniably comedies. Additionally, many still know her as one half of Nichols and May, the improvisational comedy duo that became a cultural phenomenon in the early 1960s. So it’s no surprise that people are confused and upset by Mickey and Nicky. “Audiences came looking for comedy, and he had some funny moments, but it got difficult very quickly,” says Julian Schlossberg, May’s close friend and collaborator who was vice president of global acquisitions at Paramount at the time. “They thought they had been tricked. There were a lot of strikes.”

But May knew what she was doing. She wasn’t just repeating what made her successful as a director. She was moving into new territory, and she even expressed concern early in production that the film was too funny. It was this same reaction, the refusal to rest and stagnate, to jump to the next big risk that led her to leave Nichols and May at the height of their success, when they were on an unprecedented run of sell-out Broadway shows. Mickey and Nicky also had deep personal roots dating back to the neighborhood in Chicago where they grew up. “One was our neighbor, the other was his brother,” May said after the film’s 2024 release when asked about the inspiration behind the film’s characters. “They were gangsters and so were we. So we all knew each other.” “I know these people. They are real people.”

In 1978, May and Schlossberg brokered a deal with Paramount to buy back the rights. They released a revised clip, and Mickie and Nicky’s legendary status has only grown since then. In celebration of its 50th anniversary, a 2019 4K theatrical restoration of Mickey and Nicky will be shown at New York City’s Lincoln Center as part of a retrospective of May’s work before seeing a wider US release this summer. “I think her films were often undervalued at the time, in part because of their fraught circumstances: the enormous ambition of her vision and the experimental and improvisational methods that interested her were impossible for studio executives to embrace, and the resulting tension certainly did not help the films to be as appreciated as they should have been at the time,” says Daniel Sullivan, one of the programmers responsible for the retrospective.

Although the pages of every new Hollywood hagiography are filled with heroic exploits of directors who went over schedule and over budget (such as Stanley Kubrick, Francis Ford Coppola, and Michael Cimino), May, who famously evaded the gender issue, paid a heavier price than most of her male counterparts. “Certainly, as a woman in the 1970s, she was forging new trends,” Schlossberg says. “A man can do what she does, and be considered tough, and then she does it, and she’s tough. It’s a big difference. She has strong opinions. She’s one of the few people who excels at acting, writing and directing. How many people can you name in the entire history of motion pictures who have had a triple-A hit?”

Eleven years later, May got the chance to direct again, somehow beating out Mickey and Nicky with an even bigger flop, 1987’s Ishtar, an insightful but flawed buddy comedy partly about US intervention in the Middle East. During production, May feuded with producer and star Warren Beatty, his friend and co-star Isabelle Adjani, as well as studio heads. The film lost an estimated $40 million and seemed to put a definitive end to May’s directing career. (It has been re-evaluated by the public in recent years, and will be shown as part of a Lincoln Center event.)

Although her directorial career has been marked by legal disputes, delayed schedules, and bloated budgets, May continues to reach an ever-growing audience. Lena Dunham, Martin Scorsese, Greta Gerwig, and Josh and Benny Safdie all count themselves as big fans. “May is a great artist,” says Sullivan, “who seems to me to be more appreciated over time because her methods, her sensibilities, the substance of her films, even the trials and tribulations of her career, all seem exceptionally modern and distinctly relevant.” While these battles with the machinations of Hollywood may have damaged her career, they also fueled a folkloric reputation for her artistic authenticity that endeared her to audiences in a very lasting way.