Elaine May + Screen Slate Year-End + Werner Herzog's Brain + It's Carax + More

Dear Last Thing I Sawfolk,

My latest conversation on The Last Thing I Saw is with Thomas Beard of Light Industry, a venue with a reliably incredible slate of original programming. The lovely episode starts with The Old Dark House (because of when we happened to record) and becomes an account of curating film history that I found quite inspiring and hope you do too.

You may have also seen that the mighty Screen Slate’s Best of 2024 is out now! I help out with this delightful feature, and I’m so happy and grateful to everyone who shared favorites from the past year and beyond. Great place to find movies to see, and to see what directors of some well-loved movies this year have been watching.

But wait, there’s more! I wrote up a screening I went to last week: Mikey and Nicky at Metrograph, with Elaine May in person. (Let me know if you like this sort of thing.)

Plus some interviews and reviews and whatnot. And there ya have it! With thanks as always to all the supporters of The Last Thing I Saw.

Nic

THE PODCAST

Thomas Beard of Light Industry on The Old Dark House, Japanese Paper Films, Community Action Center, and More

Thomas Beard is a founder and director of Light Industry, a venue for cinema in all its forms. For more information about Light Industry, check their site and calendar.

Episodes of The Last Thing I Saw are also available at many other podcast places.

RECENT WORK

The 2024 edition of Screen Slate’s year-end feature is here! Have a look – great ideas for movies to watch in the Favorite First Viewings category. (Also: the aggregate ranking for best new releases, if you’re into that.)

I wrote up It’s Not Me, the new film from Leos Carax (Holy Motors, Annette, Mauvais Sang, Lovers on the Bridge), for The New York Times.

Werner Herzog answered my questions about his brain documentary, Theater of Thought, and, uh, offered me some spiritual advice, at the Sloan site.

For Documentary Magazine, I spoke to director Miguel Coyula and Lynn Cruz about Chronicles of the Absurd, their IDFA-premiered documentary about her experiences as an artist in Cuba where apparently independent filmmakers must register with the government. Their movie opens with a Kafka quote which feels increasingly right.

And I interviewed the director of Flow, an animated feature about animals, which is mostly what I talked about.

AT THE CINE-CLUB

An occasional look at where I went

Last Friday, director, writer, performer Elaine May made a very rare appearance for a Q&A, following a Metrograph screening of Mikey and Nicky (1976), part of an ongoing ACE (American Cinema Editors) series. In a full house of May admirers, editors Phillip Schopper and Jeffrey Wolf moderated the conversation, with May crediting Schopper for his integral role in the film’s restoration. I’ve recommended Mikey and Nicky, her third feature, more than once in this space: John Cassavetes and Peter Falk star as two mob buddies in Philadelphia, one in hiding after stealing from his boss, the other his best friend, who stays by his side on the run.

The long dark night for these two looked better than ever in the restoration, but the big draw was hearing from May, 92, firing off commentary afterward with her dead-on comic timing. Mikey and Nicky came out of her family’s memories and lore, she said: “I know these people. They’re real people.” Her “Mikey and Nicky” were a neighbor and his brother, people her mother used to tell stories about—one condemned by a mob boss, the other sent after him, in a pattern she described as unfolding inexorably “like a Greek play.” Those who stole from gangsters were killed, and invariably, the best friend turned them in, leaving the condemned man to await the hit “as though it was their fate.” (Falk apparently wanted to know more about all this. “He didn’t know gangsters. I sent him to my mother,” May said.)

May wrote the story early in her career when she was at Second City in Chicago, in the 1950s. When she started making movies, she thought, “This would be a good movie,” and expanded the one-act into a screenplay. Casting Cassavetes and Falk was a no-brainer, as she described it, but what they did on set wasn’t improvisation, contrary to what viewers sometimes think after seeing their natural back-and-forth: “They sounded improvised because they really sounded like they were saying it,” as she put it, which of course is harder than it sounds. She did point out one improvised moment: she asked an extra in a bus scene to come up with a line, without telling Falk and Cassavetes (the “No smoking on the bus” scene).

Mikey and Nicky ran into grief with the studio, who, according to May, eventually wanted to take the movie away from her. The whole saga is better described in full elsewhere, but it’s worth recounting a portion of May’s story about how the film reels were saved. In her telling last Friday, she was advised by a lawyer to leave the movie where it was, presumably in an editing suite, with the door unlocked. It subsequently disappeared. “I had no idea where it was,” she said. “It was almost as interesting as the movie.” She said (if I heard right) that her husband at the time, an analyst, took the movie and gave it to a surgeon for safekeeping “somewhere in the hills.” In the end, the studio gave up on the film, fearing a flop, and the reels sat “on a shelf in the kitchen,” until a distribution offer came along... The rest is history.

Anyway, see Mikey and Nicky!

THIS CRITIC’S PICKS

Dahomey (MUBI) Superb Mati Diop doc

Man’s Castle (Criterion) Borzage, restored

Hale County This Morning, This Evening (Le Cinema Club) RaMell Ross’s essential doc

Bleak Moments (Criterion) Mike Leigh

High Street Repeat (Vimeo) Storefronts

Also, just watch all of the John Waters “Adventures with Moviegoing” segments.

THE END

Here I may end with a song.

ABOUT ME

Welcome to The Last Thing I Saw! I’m your host, Nicolas Rapold. You can get in touch re: writing, editing, programming, moderating, podcasting, etc. at

nicolas.rapold[at]gmail.com

Besides hosting the podcast, I’m a writer, editor, and programmer. My features, interviews, festival reports, and reviews are published in The New York Times, Screen Slate, Sight & Sound, Filmmaker, Air Mail, The Financial Times, and W Magazine. (Dearly departed publications include The Village Voice, Stop Smiling, The New York Sun, and The L Magazine.) I’m also proud of the film series and one-offs I’ve programmed, revivals and premieres, so do drop me a line if you’d like to collaborate.

Editorially speaking, I worked as editor-in-chief of Film Comment magazine, where I was for 15 years in all. I assigned and edited both web and print, hosted The Film Comment Podcast and Talks, curated and hosted Film Comment Selects screenings, learned from brilliant writers, and wrote a lot, including interviews with Spike Lee, Robert Pattinson, Juliette Binoche, Pedro Costa, and Frederick Wiseman. Film Comment received the Film Heritage Award from the National Society of Film Critics.

The Last Thing I Saw is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.