Hollywood Renegade: Elaine May, Mikey and Nicky, and the Making of a Masterpiece with Todd Berliner (U Texas Press, 2026)

Yeah.

It's funny you mentioned that because initially I conceived of writing about this movie, which I've loved for decades.

I saw it in the mid or late 80s for the first time.

And I just thought it was my movie.

I thought, okay, I love this movie.

I would watch it pretty much yearly for decades.

And I rarely taught it because I didn't have much to say about it.

I just loved it.

And I didn't know that anyone else would um although i would turn it on to my friends uh or turn my friends on to it i should say uh because they knew of my love of the movie and i would say you know have you seen this movie it's a really interesting movie uh and then um i went so i thought of writing a book about it i went to my editor whom i worked with at university of texas press jim burr and i said i You know, there's this movie you've never heard of, but I'm thinking of writing a book about it.

I don't know that anybody would ever want to read this book, but it might be of interest to some people.

And he said, you know, I really gave it a bad sell.

Like, I did not sell it well.

And he said, you know, tell me about it.

And so I did.

And I'd also...

I didn't just bad sell.

I also had a good sell because I said, this movie is now in the Criterion Collection.

It is streaming on several services.

It seems to be... have a rising stock in the culture.

And I was learning over time that there were people who, like me, loved this movie.

And we had kind of found each other eventually and enough to create a sizable niche market for it.

Enough to justify a 4K transfer, etc., I loved the movie.

I've never written a book about a movie before, and I thought this would be an interesting topic, especially the deeper I got into it and learned about its... strange and troubled production history, learned that Elaine May was the only female director in Hollywood at that time, and only the third woman admitted to the Director's Guild in history.

The previous one was Ida Lupino, and she was admitted in the early 50s, right? And I also learned about how unusual her talents were.

I didn't know, you know, here you have this comedian, Elaine May, who was a famous comedian, both on stage and then for comic, two comic movies at the time.