From plastics to pearls: Mike Nichols reflects

Just as there are those who say rock music died in 1972, so there are movie buffs who swear by a similar expiration date for great movies. The maverick filmmakers of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, they say, were cinema’s last best hope.

A short list of these lamented raging bulls would include directors Hal Ashby, Sam Peckinpah and Francis Ford Coppola.

And Mike Nichols.

Except Mike Nichols, at 72, is still busy working. He assuredly doesn’t think movies are dead. He cites talented younger directors such as Steven Soderbergh, Alexander Payne and Anthony Minghella as proof of the vitality of the craft.

Mr. Nichols would know, because he’s friends with all of them. And, whaddya know, their movies — with a punchy style, carefully mannered realism and deadpan social satire — often look like movies directed by … Mike Nichols.

It all comes full circle in filmmaking, as Mr. Nichols well knows. He admits to borrowing liberally from Hollywood’s Himalayan legends: Billy Wilder, George Stevens, Preston Sturges, among others.

“We all steal from each other all the time,” the director says in a phone interview. “When something is properly stolen, you can never identify it.”

By his own count, he has attempted to filch a scene from Leni Riefenstahl’s propaganda movie “Triumph of the Will” at least three times — a frame in which the camera tracks behind a crowd of people and creates the illusion that its subject is floating.

Try and find it in “The Graduate” or “Carnal Knowledge” or “Catch 22” or “Biloxi Blues.”

But movies have been only a part-time job for Mr. Nichols. As the director of hit plays such as “The Odd Couple,” “Plaza Suite” and “Barefoot in the Park,” it’s safe to say he conquered Broadway, too.

And, oh, there was that pioneering little improvisational revue he co-founded with Alan Arkin, Paul Sills and Elaine May after graduating from the University of Chicago — the Second City comedy troupe.

The director, one of only a handful of grandees to have won an Oscar, a Tony, an Emmy and a Grammy (in 1962, for the cast recording of “An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May”), can now add Kennedy Center Honor to his laurels.

“It’s an honor to be in the company I find myself in,” says Mr. Nichols, who was born Michael Peshkowsky to Russian Jewish emigres who fled Berlin before World War II.

As far as directorial debuts go, Mike Nichols’ is hard to beat — 1966’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” He learned quickly about two words every artist cherishes: creative freedom.

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