Description
Celebrate the 50th anniversary of Elaine May’s Mikey and Nicky and the release of Hollywood Renegade: Elaine May, Mikey and Nicky, and the Making of a Masterpiece at Symphony Space! Join us for an exclusive presentation of May’s overlooked 1970s masterpiece, followed by a conversation with Hollywood Renegade author Todd Berliner and filmmaker Ira Sachs.
Small-time mobster Nicky (John Cassavetes) holes up in a fleabag motel after the bosses hire a hitman to kill him. Terrified, with nowhere to run, he calls on his oldest friend, Mikey (Peter Falk), the one person he thinks can save him. Inspired by events from filmmaker Elaine May’s own childhood and anchored by electrifying performances from Cassavetes and Falk, Mikey and Nicky paints a harrowing portrait of male friendship.
Elaine May’s Mikey and Nicky stands out in the history of Hollywood. After a troubled production, massive cost overruns, and lawsuits between May and the studio, the film received scathing reviews and failed at the box office. But the very qualities that initially alienated viewers and reviewers led later generations to regard the film as an overlooked masterpiece.
Copies of Hollywood Renegade: Elaine May, Mikey and Nicky, and the Making of a Masterpiece will be for sale. There will be a Q&A and book signing following the film.
Todd Berliner is a professor of film studies at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. He is the author of Hollywood Renegade: Elaine May, Mikey and Nicky, and the Making of a Masterpiece (University of Texas Press, 2026) in addition to Hollywood Incoherent: Narration in Seventies Cinema (University of Texas Press, 2010), and Hollywood Aesthetic: Pleasure in American Cinema (Oxford University Press, 2017).
Ira Sachs is a NYC-based filmmaker whose feature films include The Man I Love, Peter Hujar’s Day, Passages, Little Men, Love is Strange, Keep the Lights On, and Forty Shades of Blue. He is also the Founding Director of Queer|Art, an arts organization built to support queer and trans artists in film, performance, literature and visual arts.