Mike Nichols: 1931 – 2014

Mike Nichols, the Oscar-winning director of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and The Graduate, has died at the age of 83. I first saw those two movies on TV when I was in middle school. It was clear to me even then, even to a tween at the beginning of my adventures in Oscarology, that the films of Mike Nichols represented something unique. Something previously unseen. Because, before the mid-’60s, few American directors ever had the right combination of clout, talent and balls to film such things. It seemed to 7th-grade me that Mike Nichols must surely have helped pull American movies out of the strangle-hold the self-imposed “production code” had used to enforce stale ideas of onscreen morality for nearly 30 years. I wasn’t sure about details because I was still groping around to connect the dots, but anybody with eyes and ears could see and hear how movies had grown up in the ’60s virtually overnight. To a pubescent kid the difference was stark: there were movies where sex was whispered about and then suddenly there were movies where sex was yelled and screamed about, movies where sex was no longer a hint but the primary hot topic. Those late-night TV broadcast were my first introduction to Mike Nichols. Because by then his movies were already classics, Nichols was one of the first contemporary directors whose name I latched onto. It took a while longer for me to understand that his position on the cusp of that dramatic change in American cinema meant something more: Mike Nichols was largely responsible for that change.