Elaine May

Elaine May is exactly the kind of woman I'd be totally in love with if we had been contemporaries - beautiful, funny, highly intelligent, and Jewish. I would have had competition, though - just about every man whose path she crossed fell immediately in love with her, and for good reason. "Everybody wanted Elaine, and the people who got her couldn't keep her," said her longtime comedy partner Mike Nichols. She was described by the legendary Richard Burton as "too formidable, one of the most intelligent, beautiful, and witty women I had ever met. I hoped I would never see her again.” She was admired and, more importantly, respected, to a degree that was no easy feat for a woman in the 1950s. Elaine May is Awesome.

May was born into a Yiddish theater troupe in 1932, and eventually landed the recurring role of a boy named "Benny" in their shows. Constantly travelling around the country, she attended 50 schools by the time she was ten years old and, as a result, became disillusioned with education. After the death of her father at age 11, she and her mother settled in Los Angeles. She attended Hollywood High School briefly, dropped out at age 14, married a toy inventor, got divorced, and began taking acting classes. LA just wasn't for Elaine, though. She needed a fresh start, and like so many other comedy stars, her destiny lay in the city of Chicago.

In 1950, with $7 in her pocket, May hitchhiked to the Windy City with hopes of enrolling in the University of Chicago - the only college she knew of that accepted students with no high school diploma. She began auditing classes - Mike Nichols recalled her coming into his philosophy class, saying "something outrageous", and leaving. Nichols and May quickly became friends, and in 1955 the two "dead broke theater junkies"
joined a satirical improv group (yes, apparently those existed in 1955) called the Compass Players.

May's influence soon turned the Players into the hottest ticket in town. She often held court at social functions, with admirers and fellow performers hanging on her every word. None of it seemed to go to her head, though - she welcomed newcomers, including the Players' first black actor, and worked to democratize the troupe's hierarchy. She "took creative leaps" that "improved everyone's work", according to writer Gerald Nachman. She was an incredibly generous performer whose encouragement inspired Nichols to get over his reservations about improvisation. According to Nichols, May "was the only one who had faith in me. I loved it... We had a similar sense of humor and irony... When I was with her I became something more than I had been before."

In 1957, Nichols and May's meteoric rise in the comedy scene led the Compass Players to suggest they strike out on their own (they "were so good, they eventually threw the company off balance," said club manager Jay Landsman). The newly independent team of Nichols and May moved to New York and eventually made their Broadway debut with "An Evening with Nichols and May", a series of semi-improvised sketches. Their brand of humor mixed highbrow and lowbrow, and changed perceptions of what could be possible not only for women in comedy (Producer David Shepherd noted that May specialized in "challenging, sophisticated and worldly women" that "might include the woman as a doctor, a psychiatrist, or an employer") but for comedy in general. At the dawn of the 60s, Nichols and May seemed poised to take over the world.

Things didn't quite work out that way, though. May's newfound stardom demanded repetition of the same material, which sapped the joy of improvisation from her work, and she decided to step away from the partnership at the height of their popularity. She spent the rest of the 60s directing theater and in the 70s began working in film as an actress, director, and writer. She wrote the Oscar-nominated screenplays for 1978's Heaven Can Wait and the Bill Clinton satire Primary Colors, as well as 1996's The Birdcage and the criminally underrated Ishtar. More interestingly, she was an uncredited co-writer on the Jim Henson/David Bowie epic Labyrinth, the Dustin Hoffman cross-dressing comedy Tootsie (particularly Bill Murray's scenes), and 1995's Dangerous Minds.

Elaine May was (and is) a comedy pioneer, a brilliant and talented woman, and a role model to people like Lily Tomlin, Tina Fey, and my as-of-yet unborn daughter. She is a Grammy winner, an Academy Award nominee, and a recipient of the National Medal of Arts. She's pretty awesome.





You should also check out this great interview with Nichols and May that was in Vanity Fair's comedy issue last year (May hadn't done an interview since 1967).

The Americans

I can't find anyone to talk about The Americans with, and this makes me very sad. The day after an episode of Mad Men or Breaking Bad airs, you can hardly swing a dead cat without hitting someone who's dissecting every single aspect of the show. But when I ask around the office if anyone has seen The Americans, they respond as if I just asked them to discuss last night's Sean Saves the World. I just don't get it though, because The Americans combines the period-specific fetish for fashion, automobiles, and design of Mad Men with the nail-biting tension and violent action of Breaking Bad. Plus it's about Russian spies! Needless to say, it's incredibly awesome.

Philip and Elizabeth Jennings (Matthew Rhys and Keri Russell) are just your average, sexy, American couple living in the suburbs outside of Washington D.C. in 1981. By day, they run a travel agency together and raise their two children. By night, they are ass-kicking spies for the Soviet Union whose hand-to-hand combat skills are second only to their impressive array of wigs and disguises. On top of undertaking dangerous missions and maintaining the elaborate charade of their day-to-day lives, Philip and Elizabeth must come to terms with their arranged marriage. Do they really love each other, or is love a complication that spies just can't afford? Oh, and the FBI agent in charge of investigating the KGB in the Washington area just happens to be their new next-door neighbor.

It's safe to say that I have a soft spot for the early 80s. Much like baby boomers watch Mad Men and see themselves in Sally Draper, I much more identify with young Henry Jennings. The period details of The Americans might not be as distinctive as those in Mad Men - it takes place during the brief time between the trademark aesthetic weirdness of both the 70's and 80's - but you can't miss the Star Wars sheets, the giant boxy sedans, and turtlenecks, turtlenecks, turtlenecks. Which is to say nothing of the tunes - as has been noted elsewhere, The Americans' use of music rivals that of Eastbound and Down or Breaking Bad.

Speaking of Breaking Bad (again), The Americans takes pretty much everything that has come to define awesome cable dramas and improves on it. Yes, the main characters are involved in a web of lies and schemes that threatens to fall apart at any moment, but the Jennings' delicate balancing act makes the lives of Walter White and Don Draper look positively uncomplicated by comparison. The show's got plenty of sexy, sexy sex, but as graphic as it gets (and good lord, does it ever), it somehow never feels gratuitous (I'm looking at you, Game of Thrones). You want moral ambiguity? In their quest to win the Cold War for the Motherland, Philip and Elizabeth leave a trail of broken hearts and necks in their path while still making you root for these crazy kids.

There's so much more I could say about The Americans - I haven't even begun to touch on the many badass spy missions or the tragic travails of all-American FBI guy Stan Beeman - but you really just need to see it for yourself. Not only will you give it a tiny but much-needed ratings boost, but maybe I'll finally have someone to talk about season two of this awesome show with.

Fifty/Fifty

The Cannon Group was a film production/distribution company formed by a pair of Israeli cousins whose specialty it was to make big, dumb, and (most importantly) cheap movies throughout the 1980s. They are responsible for some of the most awesome B movies ever, including American Ninja, The Delta Force, Cobra, and Masters of the Universe. They finally bit off more than they could chew when they got the rights to make Superman 4: The Quest for Peace and realized too late they were way out of their league (the movie, if you've never seen it, is a giant stinky mess). A series of financial disasters later, Cannon resurfaced for one last gasp in the early '90s and released a few final films - one of which was 1992's Fifty/Fifty - before fading into the history books.

Fifty/Fifty (directed by character actor and Air Bud director Charles Martin Smith) tells the story of two former CIA operatives (Peter Weller and Robert Hayes) who bump into each other while playing on opposite sides of a failed third world coup. After they escape the island together, they are hired by the CIA to return to the generic dictatorship and train the rebels there. The duo heads back into the jungle and whips the locals into fighting shape, all the while cracking wise and flirting with the rebellion leader's niece, who also happens to be the least Asian-looking woman in the village.

I expected to enjoy this movie for purely ironic reasons, but holy crap was it so much more. The action is awesome and cool-looking, featuring gun battles and helicopters and tanks and grenade launchers and explosions and all sorts of badassness. Weller and Hayes are great, which sadly comes as a surprise because they're two actors who will never really escape their iconic roles (Robocop and Airplane!, respectively). Their chemistry is fantastic, and their "buddy cop" dialogue rivals that of any Shane Black script. Plus the locations were pretty beautiful, perhaps owing to the fact that Cannon probably owned a
secret jungle island somewhere.

Some things about it are weird, though. Weller and Hayes train the residents of the rebel village in what is meant to be a heartwarming training montage, although I couldn't help but think that instead of facing the rich kids' team in the championships, these people were going off to face almost certain death. And lo and behold, [SPOILER ALERT] THE ENTIRE VILLAGE, including the not-so-Asian love interest, is killed before the ragtag bunch even makes it to the President's palace. I mean sure it makes it more dramatic when the CIA cancels the mission at the end but Weller and Hayes DO IT ANYWAY, single(double?)-handedly mowing down the President and wave upon wave of his cronies in a hail of hot lead and bursting squibs, but come on guys. I was really starting to like that one weird dude with the eyepatch.

So why is Fifty/Fifty so awesome? Well first of all, much like Smith's Trick or Treat, it's a cheesy 80s genre film that's much better than it has any right to be. It's a competently made movie that has lots of great performances and practical effects. But more importantly, it's a great example of the kind of action flick that simply doesn't exist anymore - a big, kickass movie where the heroes smoke cigarettes, drop the f-bomb, and actually kill people. And that, my friends, is awesome.