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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.

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.

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.

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.