“Can we get away with the language on film?” I asked him.
Mike, whose recent film The Graduate had taken the world by storm, was the hottest director in Hollywood. He said, “We can do anything we want.”
“Give me thirty seconds to think it over,” I said. And then, after five seconds, “Okay.”
The summer before production began, Mike instructed Jack Nicholson (Jonathan) and Art Garfunkel (his best friend, Sandy) to start hanging out with each other. He wanted a natural camaraderie on-screen that reflected an authentic relationship between these two horny young men as we observe their sexual journey over thirty years, from romanticism to rejection to disillusion to cynicism to misogyny.
This was my toughest piece of work since Little Murders, a play about sex in my time as I had lived and observed it in and around the Village and its environs. We were in the early years of the women’s movement and a rising tide of feminism. I chose this moment to dramatize the little-noted or understood fact that too many heterosexual men liked sex but didn’t like women. Men liked the parts you could play with in a woman: breasts, ass, vagina, soft and pliant, inviting and scary flesh … Men liked every part of a woman except the part that talked. The uninhibited yackety-yack that men endured in order to bed a woman down. And then the conversation after. What men wanted to avoid at all costs was the discussion over what now, what next? A relationship? Commitment? Permanence?
Women, comfortable with conversation, came up against men who talked primarily to make a point, their point. About themselves, jobs, sports. Men used talk to flatter, tease, seduce, and cajole a woman into bed, but they were at a loss afterwards. Conversation following coitus was an irritant and a bore.
Before marriage and domesticity, men occupied center stage. They were good at talking while their women listened: “How interesting, go on, dear.” After marriage and the children and the house and the dinner parties with other couples with other children, the women moved onto center stage. Domesticity was not natural male turf. The men, off balance, were now the ones who found themselves saying, “Yes, dear, go on.”
Men longed for relief, time off, dreamed of those golden years of irresponsibility when they did the talking and the women’s role was, “Yes, dear, go on.” Men had little left to say to women they lived with. On occasional boys’ nights out, they had more to say, a lot to catch up on, too much to drink, and then one might get lucky and meet another woman. The luck lay in the fact that afterwards he never had to see her again.
This was the journey I took with Carnal Knowledge, two men descending that sexual slope from the innocent lust of young manhood to the muddled misogyny of middle age.
My first choice for director had been not Mike Nichols but Alan Arkin. After Mike had failed to respond to my Little Murders script, I began cutting him at parties. He looked anxiously uncomfortable around me. And why shouldn’t he? He had behaved inexcusably. We were friends. He had not liked Harry, the Rat with Women and told me so, and I wasn’t at all angry. But to not respond to Little Murders because—I was never to know a reason. All I could think was that he didn’t like the play and felt awkward about disappointing me. Maybe he thought that by not saying anything he was saving my feelings. I thought he was saving his own.
After almost two years of not a word exchanged between us, I was invited to one of the later screenings of his new film, The Graduate, about which I had heard nothing. I attended the screening, hoping to hate the movie. I wanted a flop for Mike and what I saw instead—and I knew it from the first shot onward—was a revolutionary breakthrough in American cinema, a kind of Nicholsian blending of French New Wave (particularly Truffaut) with Mike and Elaine’s sensibility—but better than anything they had done. It was deep, incisive, and honest and, at the same time, romantic, telling tough truths encased inside a movie gloss, an effective piece of sleight of hand. I was blown away.
I went home and immediately wrote Mike a fan letter. I gushed. My grudge seemed trivial compared with his extraordinary achievement. Within minutes, it seemed, he sent me a graceful acknowledgment by messenger. Our breach was healed. When Arkin’s revival of Little Murders opened at the Circle in the Square a year later, Mike was there and rushed over at the end to hug me and say, “I didn’t get it! I just didn’t get it!”
But it was Arkin who didn’t get Carnal Knowledge when I offered him the script. He thought it was too dark; he wanted a more upbeat play. Later he was to direct The White House Murder Case, darker and more nastily cynical about our nation’s leaders and their wartime lies than my cartoons. He gave it a fast, farcical, hilarious production that softened not a blow. But Carnal Knowledge, which was about men and women, was too dark for him. Politics, yes; sex, no.
Working with Nichols on adapting my play into a screenplay was like a tutorial on writing and editing. Mike made me go through the script, line by line, defending virtually every word spoken by every character. “Why does he do this?” “Why does she say that?” “What does this mean?” “This is very funny, but I’m not sure it belongs in the script. Why does it?”
At times I felt like a witness undergoing cross-examination. I had to keep my story straight, avoid contradictions, make up on the spot reasons for inconsistencies so that they sounded plausible enough. I had to sound as if I’d given thought to the questions Mike was raising when, in more cases than not, his questions—sharp, pointed, penetrating—took me by surprise. I was adrift in my own dopiness and managed (just) to make it to shore by way of improvisation and wit.
I lied my way through my tutorial. I had not given enough thought to my characters, so I invented answers for Mike on the spot. And in the act of acrobatic improvisation, I came to understand the questions that had to be asked and answered. I learned how to study, to prepare—and most important, I learned how to be teacher and student to my own work. Not for a minute did I think Mike was trying to put me on the spot. His tutorial was as much for him as for me. He was trying to learn everything he could about the characters he was responsible for bringing to life on-screen.
Each night, after the day’s shoot, we’d watch the dailies and discuss what was right and what wasn’t. The night before we were to shoot the Jonathan/Bobbie fight, in which Jonathan (Jack) goes berserk because Bobbie (Ann-Margret) wants to get married, Mike called me into his office. We sat over glasses of wine. He said he didn’t think he could shoot the scene. Too ugly. Jonathan’s behavior was too repellent for an audience to stomach. They would recoil from his character and never get back into the movie. The danger was that we could lose the entire picture over that one scene.
Now, the scene he was talking about was perhaps my favorite piece of writing in the movie. I believed it to be essential, but I didn’t say a word to Mike, I didn’t argue with him, I didn’t defend my scene. I let him talk. We had now worked together for many months. I had seen the level of integrity he brought to my script. I concluded that no argument of mine was likely to change his mind, that it might do the opposite, harden his position. I thought that if anyone could bring him down from his case of nerves, the fear that he was going too far out on a limb, it wasn’t me. It was Mike himself. And I was convinced that he was up to the job. It wasn’t conceivable for him to do the high level of work already in the can and then sell the film out.
We broke for dinner. Mike drove us to a restaurant and talked more, going into every aspect of Jonathan’s character and every reaction of Bobbie’s. He talked about all of the things that could go wrong with the film if we shot the scene. He thought about what we could replace the scene with, what might fill the hole, what might work, what might not work.
Then, as we pulled into the parking lot of a Chinese restaurant, Mike looked at me and said, “No, I guess we have to shoot it … because that’s what would happen.”
I had told myself all along that this was the decision he was bound to arrive at. But a moment after he said it I realized how shaken I was, how scared I’d been.
The scene as wr
itten had so many levels for Nicholson to act that it was hard for me to imagine how he would approach it and what he would finally make of it. Jonathan, in his attempt to circle around the threat of marriage, is defensive, enraged, contemptuous, and bullying. The scene is brutal but funny, stacked with ironic overtones that were, I thought, self-evident on paper but that I couldn’t imagine coming through in the heat of performance. And this was acceptable to me. If Jack got half of everything I put into that scene, I would be more than satisfied.
Jack got everything. And he got it on the first take. Staggered by the level of performance, I approached my director. “What did you tell him?” I asked Mike. He grinned at me. “Nothing. I told him absolutely nothing. He came up with it all himself.”
If there was any question that Nicholson was on his way to becoming “Jack,” the superstar with shades, it was answered when the director Bob Rafelson flew up to Vancouver to screen for us a rough cut of his recently assembled film, Five Easy Pieces. The entire Carnal Knowledge company sat there loving the film and, more than that, awed by Jack’s performance. “Trust me,” I remembered Mike telling me a year earlier, “he’s going to be our most important actor since Brando.”
Later in the week, I asked Jack and Arty Garfunkel to join me at a party Robert Altman was giving. Altman, who for some years had been an Elaine’s drinking buddy, was shooting his new film, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, up the hill a couple of miles away. His stars were Warren Beatty and Julie Christie. Two films by two great directors that turned out to be classics, shot at the same time within a mile or two of each other. Go figure.
Jack, Arty, and I stood outside in the hall observing the mob scene in Altman’s living room. Altman loved partying and parties loved Altman. Jack had but one focus and that was on Warren Beatty, who stood in the corner of the room holding court. They had not yet met, I was about to introduce them, but Jack felt at a disadvantage. “He’s the right height for a movie star. I’m too short for a movie star.”
Carnal Knowledge turned out to be everything I hoped it would be and more. Some nine months later, after the Directors Guild screening in Hollywood, Mike and I stood outside the screening room in Westwood during the reception, engaged in the official meet and greet. The great Hollywood director William Wyler shook our hands warmly and said to both of us, “Uncompromising.” The great director John Frankenheimer shook our hands warmly and said, “It was like open-heart surgery.”
I leaned over to Mike and whispered, “We’re dead.”
The film was all I could have hoped, a critical success, an audience success, and controversial in a way that left me self-satisfied. It was assaulted by some women writers as sexist and exalted by other women writers as the first film conceived by men to show what we’re really like: creeps.
Hollywood hated the movie. It was too raw, too revealing, it stuck in their craw. The only Academy nomination it was to receive was for Ann-Margret, one of Hollywood’s own. She deserved her nomination. But so did Nichols, who didn’t get one, so did Nicholson, who didn’t get one. So did I, also left out.
Mike Nichols and Jules at Mike’s stable in Connecticut, 1970
© Mary Ellen Mark
Jack Nicholson, Art Garfunkel, cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno, and Mike Nichols shooting Carnal Knowledge, Vancouver, Columbia, 1970
© Mary Ellen Mark
I was shunned by Hollywood for ten years after Carnal Knowledge, not a single offer, blacklisted, it seemed, because of my piece of “open-heart surgery.” And then one morning Robert Evans, the producer, called and asked me if I would consider writing a screenplay for his movie version of Popeye. It was to be a musical.
Now, although I loved Popeye and I had loved movie musicals since early childhood, I was once again prepared to look a gift horse in the mouth. I asked Evans, “Which Popeye do you have in mind, Max Fleischer’s (the animated cartoon) or E. C. Segar’s (the newspaper strip)?” I expected Evans to give me the wrong answer and I would politely decline. But Evans, producer of Chinatown, Love Story, The Godfather, and The Godfather: Part II, well knew how to deal with an unemployed, self-sabotaging screenwriter whom no one was after. He replied, “I want to do any Popeye you want.”
Popeye was one of the earliest cartoon characters I drew as a kid. One drawing after another of Popeye beating up bad guys or getting beaten up by bad guys. Sheer heaven for a seven-year-old cartoonist. Now, for my first effort at writing for children, I was being asked to write my own version of Popeye. About five years before Evans’s call, I had picked up a Nostalgia Press edition of the 1936 Popeyes, the daily strips as created, written, and drawn by E. C. Segar, the genius who gave us the immortal sailor.
Here is an extract from what I later wrote about the sailor in the Fantagraphics anthology Popeye: I Yam What I Yam:
In Popeye’s world everyone (but our hero) was cheerfully corrupt, giddily greedy, amoral, immoral, without a sign of compassion or conscience—in other words, a farcical cartoon version of Depression-age America…. No strip has more contradictions, a noisy tenement of clashing impulses: gentleness meets with nastiness; courtesy meets violence; greed, loutishness, and brutishness knock heads with kindness, righteousness, and moral vigor. Brute strength, used by all sides, is so run-of-the-mill, it is like steak and fries. And fistfights are uncommonly good-natured. Popeye … in Segar’s vision, was a flawed common man as Walt Whitman might have imagined him, Frank Capra directed him, and Samuel Beckett, mixed with Eugene Ionesco, hired to write his dialogue.
Evans’s first choice to play Popeye was his good friend Dustin Hoffman. I wrote a first-draft treatment loosely based on the 1936 Popeye strips, trying to fuse Segar’s anarchy and nonsense with a relationship story built around Popeye, Olive Oyl, and Popeye’s papa, Poopdeck Pappy. Evans and his producer, my friend Richard Sylbert, the production designer of Carnal Knowledge, liked my basic approach but wanted changes. We met at Evans’s house, around the corner from the Beverly Hills Hotel, and I made copious notes, went home, and wrote a new treatment. Evans liked it; so did Sylbert. Evans wanted changes. I wrote a third treatment. Evans liked a lot of it but wanted a fourth treatment, more changes.
I went back to New York to think the situation through. I spent a day or two devising a plan, then writing a script in my head as to how I would present it to Evans. I called Evans in Hollywood. I told him that I didn’t think it was a good idea for me to write additional treatments. I was not going to be able to produce this great treatment in the sky that would answer his questions or satisfy his doubts. Popeye was going to rise and fall on characterization, which meant taking these overly familiar comic strips and animated cartoon characters and transforming them into film reality. I said that nothing was going to please him until I showed him the interaction on paper of Popeye and Olive Oyl. Actual scenes with dialogue. Only then would he know—and I know—whether I was the man for the job, and possibly whether this was an idea worth pursuing. I asked him to advance me $10,000 to write fifty pages of script. He agreed immediately.
I wrote the fifty pages and sent them on to Evans and Sylbert. I found that it was a relief to get away from my own cartoon characters. My work for much of the past year had lost interest to me. I had begun recycling old strips, redrawing them as if they were new. And the new strips too often read to me like Feiffer imitations. I had entered the age of self-parody, so it felt good to write from inside the sensibility (or what I hoped to be the sensibility) of another cartoonist, one I venerated.
Working on Popeye took me away from who I was (boring!) and channeled me into who Segar was. But when I began work on the script, I found that I couldn’t make the transformation of Segar’s characters come alive in screenplay form. Popeye and Olive Oyl remained stuck on the comic page, refusing to budge out of the place they called home. The model I had in mind for them was Hepburn and Tracy as they were in Garson Kanin’s film Pat and Mike. So knowing the story I wanted to tell, I abandoned the cartoon characters Popeye and Olive Oyl for Pat and Mike
types whom I called Sam and Minnie. By this means I hoped to escape the intimidating presence of Segar as I tried to honor him. With Sam and Minnie as my beard, my two leads took on life. They began to act and interact, and within a day or two I was able to discard their false identities, riff on Segar’s style of humor, and watch my hero and heroine go through their paces.
Evans loved the fifty pages. He sent them to Dustin Hoffman. He loved the fifty pages. As I was walking from the Beverly Hills Hotel to Evans’s house, Dustin drove up in his Mercedes convertible and offered me a ride. We had known each other since I had seen him as an unknown off-Broadway actor give an amazing performance fifteen years earlier in Ronald Ribman’s play The Journey of the Fifth Horse. As we drove to Evans’s house, he gushed over my script. Not since The Graduate had he seen a script this promising. It reminded him of Beckett, it reminded him of Kafka. On and on he went, and when we got to Evans’s house, Evans and Dick Sylbert joined in the praise.
I floated back to New York, finished the first draft, sent it on to Evans and Sylbert. They loved it as much as the earlier pages, sent it on to Dustin, who asked for a new writer. He demanded that I be fired.
Evans could not find out from Dustin what he thought was wrong with the script. He urged me to intervene. Dustin was now in New York, staying at the Carlyle Hotel. “Talk to Dustin,” Evans told me. “You’re the only one who can save the project.” I was flattered, also stupid enough to believe him. I went to see Dustin, who could not have been more friendly, more pleasant, more voluble, more intelligent, open to discussion on any subject—theater, film, books, politics, anything but my script.
I urged, I cajoled. He would not bite. Nary a word out of him on Popeye. We ended up in a screaming match. In my rage, I picked up a script that happened to be lying on the coffee table in the sitting room of the suite where we met. I screamed, “You make me jump through hoops to find out why you won’t do my beautiful screenplay, and instead you’re going to do this piece of crap?” The piece-of-crap script I was waving in my hand was Kramer vs. Kramer, which was to win the Oscar for best picture along with an Oscar for Dustin for best actor.
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