Joe’s Reviews > Miss May Does Not Exist: The Life and Work of Elaine May, Hollywood’s Hidden Genius > Status Update
Joe
is on page 68 of 400
On the album jacket of Improvisations to Music, she and Mike wrote their own biographies: "Mike Nichols is not a member of the Actors Studio, which has produced such stars as Marlon Brando, Julie Harris, Ben Gazzara, Eva Marie Saint, Carroll Baker, and others too numerous to mention," Mike wrote. Elaine's said simply, "Miss May does not exist."
— Apr 29, 2025 06:16PM
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Joe
is on page 179 of 400
"I was much smarter twenty years ago," Elaine said that night. "I was much smarter in my first movie than in my second. I was much smarter in my first play than in my second. The only thing I think experience teaches you is what you can't do. When you start, you think you can do anything. And then you start to get a little tired."
It would be eleven years before she directed again.
— May 04, 2025 06:01PM
It would be eleven years before she directed again.
Joe
is on page 177 of 400
Elaine, years later, thought it better to stick to the not-nice routine from the start. "I think the real trick is, for women, start out tough. They don't start out tough. They start by saying, 'Don't be afraid of me. I'm only a woman.' And they're not only women, they're just as tough as guys. In that way, I think I did have trouble. But only because I seemed so pleasant."
— May 03, 2025 09:15PM
Joe
is on page 162 of 400
"There's a big technical side which she could never master," Paul Sylbert, the film's production designer, explained. "She can't light a cigarette without burning her hand. She works on impulses, intuitions. It's easy to do on a typewriter, but impossible to do when you have other people standing around." Elaine herself would go along with that. "I'm not a pro as a director. I'm a pro at thinking about movies."
— May 03, 2025 08:50PM
Joe
is on page 118 of 400
Though Elaine's capacity for self-editing was limited, when it came to others, she was a scalpel, killing darlings with precise reasoning. Plays operated with the same rules she and Mike had established for their sketches. Never go for the easy laugh, she taught McNally: "When characters deal in gags and jokes, you pay a terrible price for them. You're left without characters, and you're left without a play."
— May 03, 2025 07:57PM
Joe
is on page 69 of 400
The audience would laugh--though only sort of, the lines blurred to the point where they weren't quite sure what was part of the sketch and what was reality, where the onstage action warranted amusement and where it warranted genuine concern. "The nice thing," Elaine said, "is to make an audience laugh and laugh and laugh, and shudder later."
— Apr 30, 2025 06:58PM
Joe
is on page 53 of 400
The Village Vanguard was perfect for them, casual and the charming kind of crappy, just like the bars they had played back in Chicago. Doing their act in front of relative peers would be a comfortable wade into the New York scene. There they would open for Mort Sahl, a stand-up who presented himself as the antithesis of the slick comic. Mike and Elaine, meanwhile, weren't getting onstage and telling jokes.
— Apr 29, 2025 05:52PM
Joe
is on page 34 of 400
"It was the University of Chicago--we talked about everything that was wrong. We did not speak about anything that worked," Elaine explained. "You don't have a scene if you do that. People don't have a comedy act if they do that. You are in some way, one way or another, criticizing."
— Apr 28, 2025 06:13PM
Joe
is on page 22 of 400
"She knew everything about the theatre and psychoanalysis," one of her suitors said. "She didn't know about anything else."
— Apr 28, 2025 05:52PM
