Todd Berliner’s Hollywood Renegade offers a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at Elaine May’s Mikey and Nicky and the extraordinarily complicated production behind it. What began as an ambitious New Hollywood project became a troubled production marked by cost overruns, studio conflicts, lawsuits, and an eventual box-office failure. Yet Berliner demonstrates how many of the qualities that frustrated the studio and contemporary critics helped make the film so distinctive.
The book provides an especially interesting examination of May’s unconventional directing style and her meticulous attention to character and performance. Her approach gave Peter Falk and John Cassavetes the freedom to create wonderfully nuanced performances, while even the film’s smaller characters and seemingly minor scenes received considerable attention.
Berliner also places Mikey and Nicky within the larger history of New Hollywood and May’s unique position as a female filmmaker in an era dominated by men. For anyone interested in the filmmaking process, Elaine May, or the unconventional films of the 1970s, Hollywood Renegade offers an insightful look at how a troubled production eventually came to be reassessed as an important work of American cinema.
