Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf and The Graduate was quite a one two punch to begin a film directing career.
For the general FYI, here’s a list of the films Nichols did: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001566/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1
The only ones I’ve seen are The Graduate and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, but I’m familiar with most of the others.
With Glen A. Larson having died on Sunday, I see a potential trifecta on the horizon.
His sketches with Elaine May were about thirty years ahead their time and (IIRC I was a kid then and am basing this on memory). They were extremely clever send ups of the same kind of New York neurotics that Seinfeld turned into gold. The sixties really were a golden age for stand up comedy.
Was he either married to or associated with Elaine May?
I still have my old Nichols and May albums. We used to laugh all night listening to the albums and knew many of them word for word. Thanks for the memories.
Rest in peace.
Prayers to Diane Sawyer and other family members and friends.
Way back when, he and Elaine May did a skit where Mike was mourning the loss of his uncle, and Elaine was a funeral director. She described their three tiers of service, which went along of the lines of .... At the top level, there was a walnut coffin, a harpist at the service, and a beautiful plot overlooking a lake. At the middle tier, the coffin was pine, a single soprano would sing at the service, and the plot would be in the middle of a large group of others. At the lowest tier, two guys named Guido would pick up his uncle from the hospital and do God only knows what with it.
In the early 1950, Mike Nichols was one of the first people hired at the Chicago Fine Arts radio station WFMT. He wrote this test to audition announcers on the station.
“The WFMT announcer’s lot is not a happy one. In addition to uttering the sibilant, mellifluous cadences of such cacophonous sounds as Hans Schmidt-Isserstedt, Carl Schuricht, Nicanor Zabaleta, Hans Knappertsbusch and the Hammerklavier Sonata, he must thread his vocal way through the complications of L’Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, the Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam, the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra and other complicated nomenclature.
However, it must by no means be assumed that the ability to pronounce L’Orchestre de la Societé des Concerts du Conservatoire de Paris with fluidity and verve outweighs an ease, naturalness and friendliness of delivery when at the omnipresent microphone. For example, when delivering a diatribe concerning Claudia Muzio, Beniamino Gigli, Hetty Plumacher, Giacinto Prandelli, Hilde Rössel-Majdan and Lina Pagliughi, five out of six is good enough if the sixth one is mispronounced plausibly. Jessica Dragonette and Margaret Truman are taken for granted.
Poets, although not such a constant annoyance as polysyllabically named singers, creep in now and then. Of course Dylan Thomas and W.B. Yeats are no great worry. Composers occur almost incessantly, and they range all the way from Albeniz, Alfven and Auric through Wolf-Ferrari and Zeisl.
Let us reiterate that a warm, simple tone of voice is desirable, even when introducing the Bach Cantata “Ich hatte viel Bekümmernis,” or Monteverdi’s opera “L’Incoronazione di Poppea.”
Such then, is the warp and woof of an announcer’s existence “in diesen heil’gen Hallen.”
He was apparently the grandson of German anarchist Gustav Landauer.