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While not unknown, the films of Elaine May and the importance of her career have been hidden in plain sight. Beginning her career in stand-up comedy with her long-time collaborator Mike Nichols, while he would go on to win major awards for his directorial work, May’s four features — A New Leaf (1971), The Heartbreak Kid (1972), Mikey and Nicky (1976) and Ishtar (1987) — have until recently spanned from the forgotten to the unobtainable to the maligned. Presenting a fascinating set of challenges for how film history, gender, authorship and other subjects are typically approached, this introduction outlines why May is important, why her work long overdue critical reassessment, and outlines the broader approach of the book ReFocus: The Films of Elaine May.

Elaine May began her career as a filmmaker during the 1970s when the mythology of the New Hollywood male auteur defined the decade; and the number of women directors, boosted by second wave feminism, increased for the first time in forty years. May’s interest in misfit characters, as socially awkward as they were delusional, and her ability to seamlessly move them between comedy and drama, typified the New Hollywood protagonist who captured America’s uneasy transition from the hopeful rebellion of the 1960s into the narcissistic angst of the 1970s. However, the filmmaker’s reception, which culminated in the critical lambast of her comeback film Ishtar in 1987, was uneven: her battles with studio executives are legendary; feminist film critics railed against her depiction of female characters; and a former assistant claimed she set back women directors by her inability to meet deadlines. This chapter investigates Elaine May’s career within the lore 1970s Hollywood to understand the industrial and cultural circumstances that contributed to the emergence of her influential body of work; and the significant contributions to cinema she made in spite of, and perhaps because of, the conflicts in which she was faced.

Elaine May’s 1971 directorial debut, A New Leaf was a watershed moment within May’s career, but as a film important to the contemporary development of American comedy cinema. This chapter will examine A New Leaf as part of a greater comedic tradition, particularly in terms of pre-code and 1930s/1940s screwball comedy, later black comedies, and romantic comedies about unlikely couplings between unsympathetic protagonists, forging a connection between the theme of romance, finance, and mortality. This chapter argue that A New Leaf represents an important development in this subgenre, and examines A New Leaf in connection to the relatively unsentimental romantic comedies of the ‘60s and ‘70s concerned with unlikely couplings that concern an unlikely romance that develops as the result of a search for fortune.

Is it possible to reclaim certain works as part of the feminist film canon, even if they were never intended as such? If Elaine May ever self-identified as a feminist, her public stance on the topic was one of comical obfuscation. This chapter reclaims May’s second film The Heartbreak Kid from the second-wave feminist critiques that dismissed it as sexist. It reads the film through a contemporary feminist lens, specifically looking at May’s framing of key scenes within the film as a representation of the ‘female gaze’. It looks closely at the contentious character of Lila (played by May’s daughter, Jeannie Berlin), who has been dismissed as many critics as a caricatured representation of Jewish womanhood, as key in May’s critique of both the character of Lenny and the filmic canon of her male contemporaries. May looks beneath the caricature represented by Lenny’s resentful and self-loathing gaze, and finds the humanity within Lila.

Elaine May's documentary Mike Nichols: An American Master (2016) surveys Nichols' life and, in particular, work as a noted Hollywood director. The American Masters series, described on the PBS website as "an award-winning biography series", is designed to produce biographies of leading figures in American culture. May's contribution to the series is at first sight a conventional short form television documentary profile of an artist. However, it repays examination both as an example of May's artistry (the opening includes a signature sly moment, importing archival footage of a blustery Adolf Hitler to reference Nichols German Jewish background, reminding us of May and Nichols' shared heritage) and as a launching pad for dissecting the way May and Nichols' careers have become intertwined in fact and in Hollywood legend. I will frame the documentary's content by considering other May tributes to Nichols (such as speeches at the AFI Life Achievement Awards and at the Kennedy Center Honors) and her early comedy work with Nichols, as well as biographical background to material which is suggested or touched on in the documentary

Before Elaine May was a film director, she was famous for her improvised comedy skits with Mike Nichols. While May's subsequent films may not be improvised in the literal sense, this essay will argue that in many respects they can be seen as extensions of the principles guiding her early work with Nichols, in particular the notion of performance as a shared act of creation in the moment. This chapter establishes connections between the sketches of Nichols and May and two aspects of May's filmmaking above all. First, all of her films are built around double acts, implying a complicity between performers even when the characters they are playing are at odds or deceiving each other―an extension of the “yes, and...” principle associated with the tradition of theatre improvisation founded by Viola. Second, the allegedly “troubled” production histories of all her films can be seen as implying a commitment to filmmaking as existential adventure which places her at odds with standard Hollywood practice―and which can be linked to the way the films explicitly question conventional notions of success and failure.

In Elaine May’s professional biography, her role as actor tends to traditionally fall somewhere in line after the fields for which she is most immediately recognized – comic, screenwriter, director. Yet across a range of feature films in particular, May demonstrated a clearly highly developed skill for performing a range of different roles to camera. For a figure whose achievements are associated so readily with language, what becomes apparent when watching May act on film is how much she relies on the unspoken for lasting effect: gestures, facial expressions and movement inform her characterizations often just as much as dialogue and script. This chapter considers not only May’s performance in perhaps her most well-known screen role as Henrietta in her directorial debut A New Leaf, but more also in her numerous collaborations with a range of acclaimed directors where her role was solely as actor.

In February 1971, while her studio-seized debut feature A New Leaf was being readied its premiere, Elaine May took a job-for-hire – adapting Lois Gould's newly published, fictionalized semi-memoir Such Good Friends for director Otto Preminger. Her work on the film was pseudonymously ascribed to Esther Dale, in keeping with May's general policy of not taking credit for projects for which she lacked authorial control, and has tended to be regarded as little more than a footnote in her career. Yet Such Good Friends is characterized by themes and styles which typify May's oeuvre: betrayal of a partner; the conflict between the roles we play and our ‘true’ selves; abrupt, seemingly spontaneous, tonal shifts; a particularly intellectual, highly verbal brand of New York Jewish humour counterpointed by vulgar farce; the spectre of impending death. Further, the film shows us that, even when working as intermediary between Gould and Preminger, May's outlook remains thoroughly existentialist. This philosophy, popularized by Jean-Paul Sartre, is not merely reflected in the content of her work but also shapes her entire approach to creative endeavours. Indeed, it's fascinating to see how May's inherent spontaneity, manifested as an inescapable subjectivity, merges with Preminger's highly- controlled, deliberately composed objectivity.

Elaine May’s Mikey and Nicky (1976) bears an obvious indebtedness to John Cassavetes, not just because of his commanding presence as one of the film’s two primary stars, but in a kindred approach to cinematic form, acting style, and narrative construction. But what makes Mikey and Nicky so original has to do with her own idiosyncratic vision, and how she absorbs and manipulates the Cassavetes persona to suit her ambitions. It is evident May has built the film around Cassavetes, with regards to his particular brand of drama and an unpolished aesthetic he helped popularize. Each influencing and complementing the other, May and Cassavetes revel in a shared penchant for authentic spontaneity and improvisational interactions. It is a candid cinema that hinges on unrestrained, painfully intimate physicality and an audacious desire to push all facets of viewer engagement beyond the norm. The Cassavetes influence is undeniable, but this is an Elaine May film, made by someone with a reverence for the ground-breaking work that came before her, but also by someone who successfully carves out her own niche in American cinema.

This chapter is an interview with Allie Hagan, the screenwriter of When in Doubt, Seduce, a forthcoming film based on the comedy collaboration between Elaine May and Mike Nichols. Hagan discusses the current rise in interest in Elaine May, the relationship between May and Nichols, and adapting a real relationship to the screen.

Elaine May began her career as one half of a comedy duo in collaboration with Mike Nichols, before both ventured into their own projects in writing and directing. This chapter takes as its focus the capacity for this early partnership to satirise the social and cultural expectations of the late 50s and early 60s, and the development of May’s comedic voice through her association with Nichols. Drawing initially on early biographical information, this will centre primarily on an analysis of their early sketch comedy, and extending through to their (often uncredited) collaborations on Nichols’ later cinema. I will confront the ways that the May/Nichols partnership shaped the writing and comedic sensibilities of May’s career, and the role Mike Nichols played in the development of May’s own distinctive creative perspective.

If there is a single moment of ‘fame’ that can be ascribed to Elaine May, it is one clouded by notoriety. So savage was the response to her 1987 comedy Ishtar that it effectively ended May’s directorial career. Siskel and Ebert’s declaration that it was the worst film of 1987 and May’s ‘winning’ the Worst Director award at the Golden Raspberry Awards seemed to only add insult to injury, the film’s flaws thoroughly out of whack with the scale of the derision it received. In 1987, Ishtar-hating was the critical sport of the year. This chapter maps the context and details of this initial career-ruining treatment of May, through to the determination of its fans and the recent reclamation of it by high-caliber film critics, art curators and other representatives of highbrow culture, positing questions and theories as to why this film and the director in particular triggered the response that it did