Margin Notes: An Interview with Carrie Courogen

Sometimes the match game of cinema means meeting a movie at precisely the right moment of need. Which is to say: according to hasty scribbles on a now-damnable calendar square, I first encountered Ishtar (1987) on April 23rd, 2020. Plenty of sharper minds than mine have approached and reproached the operations of Elaine May; I confess that on initial viewing of that fourth feature from the filmmaker, I could hardly be anything more than Isabelle Adjani in the nightclub crowd, exhausted by the assault of the world outside the gates and tearfully renewed by impossible singing. I detect in Ishtar the same doomed grace that animates community theater, two kindred storky spirits that look deep into the eyes of ineptitude and weasel out a song anyway. “Nobody knows where the beginning part starts out,” goes the famous song. “But being human we can live with the pain.” I am still unsure what grace really is. But I suspect it’s present in the way Clarke’s voice is seemingly surprised at the words it’s producing in that moment. In the joke, a certain transcendence.

Who, then, wrote the joke? Included in the constellation of criticism linked above is the first essay I ever read that spoke about Elaine May, author, auteur, force. In a 2019 essay about May’s male presences and female protagonists, the writer, editor, and director Carrie Courogen outlines a portrait of the artist as a difficult woman in the most essential terms. “She’s a devoted perfectionist, but she’s also so stubborn, uncompromising, and possessive that she’ll walk from projects when her vision is threatened,” Courogen writes, offering a framing that cuts through the myths of May, including the ones Hollywood dumped on her and the ones she maintains herself. “In many ways, May is everything women are warned not to be if they want to be loved,” Courogen goes on. “But in moments that make me feel too difficult—too tough or too cynical or too cutting, my body all sharp edges in a world that tells me to be soft—and therefore inherently unlovable, I like to think of Elaine May as the difficult girl’s fairy godmother. She’s there to remind me that I’m alright and not at all alone.”

What a gift then, that Courogen has written an essential portrait of the artist, in that essential language that navigates how we tell the lives of ourselves and our beloveds and frustrations. It would have been enough if Miss May Does Not Exist were simply a rigorously researched, caringly composed study of Elaine May, an artist too often spoken about as if the speaker knows them already. The book is those things. But in seeking to write to and not just about the shapes and rhythms of living, it’s also an inquiry into how and why we tell the stories of living at all. It takes nothing for granted, not May’s art, not the rush of encountering it, not the sublime and thrilling difficulty of levying written language to it.

Courogen will be in conversation with Rachel Syme on June 5th at McNally Jackson Seaport at 6:30, and then again at The Midtown Scholar Bookstore on July 19th, at 7:00. In advance of those evenings, I spoke to Courogen about encountering Elaine May, writing a biography, and (here’s grace again) the dangerous business of telling the truth.

Carrie Courogen: When I first got the book deal and there was that excitement, that rush, I remember my roommate at the time was like, Are you already thinking about the party and the fun stuff? And I was like, A little bit! But even after doing it, I think I feel stuck in feeling that the work just doesn't end. Working on it felt sort of like vibing with Elaine in a way—I really got how she consistently got tripped up into constantly editing, constantly rewriting pieces just to sort of keep from finishing. To keep from feeling like it’s not good enough. If I didn’t have a deadline, I’d still be writing right now.

CC: I mean, I think the thing that Elaine and I share is that nothing is ever really finished, it’s just parted with. Every single thing I look at that I’ve ever written, I see how I would do it differently. And I’ve read this book so many times in all the versions of proofing and stuff, and I’m consistently thinking, Why did I write that? I wish I could go back and actually explore this more. But then there’s the feeling of like, do you get another one? Do you want to do another one? And do you know how to do it again?

There’ve been a couple fellow writers I’ve talked to, asked Is it normal to like, want to just completely take back your manuscript and set it on fire? And they’ve all been like, Yeah, that’s why you have to start on the next one right away. How do you emotionally separate yourself from this thing that you’ve just spent years on, turn to focus on something else? There’s the stress and anxiety of knowing you can do anything else when it comes out, printed, on paper. There is nothing left that you can do. So I totally understand why Elaine was like, Take my name off it.

CC: The flaw of so many movies about writers or journalism is that writing is so unsexy. It’s boring. All you would see is me sitting on my floor on a Friday night in the middle of winter, not going out. It’s I have to finish this, I have to finish this chapter and it’s just me and a zillion tabs open and handful of books and my outline and my notebook and a bunch of empty Diet Coke cans and snacks that I have abandoned and this feeling of being locked in and loving it but also hating it at the same time. 

I’ve never been a big outline person until this book. I have to know where I’m going because there’s just so much. And handwriting it, that was helpful for me, to slow down the thoughts, to have an idea and then another idea while I’m literally writing. I had to really think through things, and I think going through that process and that shaping, and having a dump draft to reshape…I always think of it as sculpting, in a way. Like there’s lots of drafts that you throw everything at, and then it keeps getting refined. I feel like I’ll forget the thought if I just try to work it all out in my brain. 

CC: It does not always come back. 

CC: Oh yeah, Tootsie (1982). Because I definitely first encountered Elaine May with Nichols and May, when I was in middle school going through a whole comedy-obsessed phase, feeling like I had to know everything, borrowing Mike Nichols and Elaine May Examine Doctors (1961) from the library. So I knew that, and I loved movies, and I loved Mike, loved The Graduate (1967) and Postcards From the Edge (1990). I remember, at 14 or 15, reading Syd Field’s Screenplay, how that book makes a big deal about how Tootsie is a perfectly-constructed screenplay, how it’s like, the perfect comedy. And I might have seen it once before, but then I went back and rewatched it and it was truly one of my favorite movies throughout high school and college.

And all this time, I kind of forgot about Nichols and May. At the time, I didn’t know anything about her film career, I only knew her from the act. I went so long without knowing that it was Elaine who wrote like, a good 90% of Tootsie. I don’t remember when I found out, but I remember being like, Of course. 

CC: Oh for sure. A lot of people have really downplayed the screenwriting. Or because they know she was such a great script doctor, they’ll say, Oh she also helped on Heaven Can Wait (1978). She wrote Heaven Can Wait! She got credit for that. The worst is when I see people say that she reunited with Mike and she helped him on The Birdcage (1996)—that is a credited script fully by her. I feel like people, if they do acknowledge the other things she’s done, it’s still somehow minimized. Which sucks. I think the screenplays that she’s written that other people have directed, interestingly, are some of her best. 

CC: I was definitely thinking about auteur theory, about who gets considered an auteur. I wanted to think of Elaine as part of a specific community of filmmakers who worked together in different combinations. Warren Beatty, Mike Nichols, Elaine May…I don’t think they necessarily have a clear stamp of “auteur” together, but rather, that they’re clearly made by a community of really talented filmmakers. And by filmmakers, I mean the entire crew: screenwriters, producers, script doctors. Elaine has a stamp, but also, her films share a lot with the other people she collaborated with. That was something I wanted to explore in the book. 

CC: I think that makes sense. I want to tread carefully: I definitely heard, while writing, this constant refrain either from her or other filmmakers—especially other women filmmakers—that making a movie is hard for everyone. Everyone has difficulties. And like, well, yes. But it’s also harder for some people. But then I think like, in terms of agency, the more I researched, the more I realized that yes, it was hard for her, but she also kind of made it harder than it needed to be. She didn’t take certain chances she could have, she didn’t make certain compromises. She did everything completely her way which, kudos to her for that, but also means that things were hard for her. I don’t know. I can see that happening to other directors. Male or female, you can play the game a little bit. And she didn’t want to play the game.

So talking about how things were hard, it’s interesting that like, here’s how the culture enabled that. But at the same time, there’s no such thing as a perfect victim and Elaine is not a perfect victim because Elaine had agency. I think both things can be true. She was, in a way, victimized by a system, but at the same time, she didn’t not try to play that system the way that other people did. And that’s where it gets interesting and complicated and I don’t know. It’s how it doesn’t become like, Girl Boss. It keeps it from that narrative. 

CC: And completely fucking brutal. Her plays especially. I knew her movies were dark, where even the lightest among them is still like, girl! But knowing what she probably wanted to do beyond those movies (just based on the plays she wrote before), the stories are all about date rape. They’re about the failure of American society structured as a game show. It’s such a bleak view of the world.

CC: I think in terms of writing about failure, and about her failures, they were more interesting to me than the successes. They showed me what she really thought of the world. They showed me more who she really was, which was this like, incredibly fucking stubborn person who was incredibly insistent that she was right and everyone was out to get her. Suspicious of other people and untrusting. I think the failures told me more about her.

And yeah, they helped me “know Elaine better”, but they’re also just more interesting! I think it’s more thrilling to look at a piece of art, ask, Where did something go wrong? You can pretty easily suss out why something works—the arc of this story is brilliantly constructed, the casting is great. But a movie like Reds (1981) is a movie where everyone on paper spells disaster and yet it works and I can’t quite put my finger on how. I liked writing about failure as a concept.

In the book, I frame the early sixties as Elaine May’s “flop era”, but what is a flop era? Who has a flop era, who consistently has one versus who consistently has failures but doesn’t “flop”? It was interesting to apply this sort of modern, slangy reference, this way of thinking about failure, to the sixties to try and contextualize something that happened a super long time ago in today’s terms, only to realize the past was not radically different than today.

CC: I think the two biggest, and maybe most important ways in which Elaine was incredibly modern is that she was real, and she was radical. By which I mean: What made Nichols and May such key players in this ushering in of modern comedy is that they were always asking themselves "What is this really like?" Their characters were real people and not caricatures; they realized that, sure, you could get the laugh by dramatizing something or making the exaggerated theatrical choice, but what they found more interesting was getting the laugh by making the real life choice. It's interesting, now that I think about it, that they broke right around when method acting was taking hold. Both ways of thinking and grounding performance in a sense of real-life truth and not stage truth absolutely revolutionized their respective art forms. And it's that focus on the truth—at times to her own detriment, because, you know....sometimes what we do in real life is mundane and boring and not compelling to watch and that's why you do occasionally need to make the dramatic choice or introduce theatrical stakes, etc etc—that colors all of her work since Nichols and May.

But also—it's so fascinating to me how curious she was, how she was always asking why? and had such radical ideas for blowing up the agreed upon forms of things. Her sense of structure was so ahead of her time. She was always asking "why can't this be that?".... Why can't this comedic play be three hours long? Why can't I pitch a TV show to CBS that's 45 minutes long—not 30 minutes, not 60, but 45? Why can't I put completely serious murders in a screwball comedy? Why can't we just script and create an entire new scene out of tape from the cutting room floor and overdubs? All of these are real things she did, back when few, if any others, were. Ask any of these questions today and it's like, Uh, why wouldn't you? but back then they were always going, This is an insane idea! she's out of her mind!

CC: I think she had an ability to look at the current culture and reflect it back to people. And sometimes looking at the current culture is looking a little bit ahead. She had the wherewithal to stop the act with Mike, because she knew it was going stale. She knew with Kennedy in office, the comedy needed to move. Like, people laugh at themselves now. The president laughs at himself. We're not in this stuffy little Eisenhower era anymore. We're gonna go out of style soon, let's end on top. Or making Ishtar (1987) and having the incredible insight into what a shit show American diplomacy was and would become. Being ahead of her time meant being ahead in terms of what a movie or a play could be.

But then, she has some pretty shitty views. Her actions were feminist, but she’s not. I think she's one of those Silent Generation people who’s very much, If I got a seat at the table as a woman, it's because I'm just as good as the men. Which is to say, if you didn't, it's not because you're a woman, it's because you're not good enough. It's a competitiveness with other women in a space where the number of seats for women was so limited—she never would have thought or framed it in terms of asking why there’s only one seat for a woman. There's a casual racism that comes up in her pieces. Because her comedy is so honest and so cruel, I don't think she had the modern thought process of, Okay, this is honest but who is it being targeted at? Is it speaking truth to power or am I punching down?

Something like The Birdcage (1996)—that's a great movie, it's a really good script, but also the question that a lot of modern people would ask, but she never would is, Am I the best person to tell this story? I think there's a selfishness to her, for better or for worse. Progressive and trailblazing and modern in some ways, but really backwards in a lot of others.

CC: I’m Julie & Julia (2009). I’m Amy Adams and Chris Messina. That scene where she says “She’s perfect,” and he’s like “The Julia Child in your head is perfect, the Julia Child that doesn’t understand what you’re doing is not perfect. The one in your head is the one that matters.” And Amy goes, “I’m never gonna meet her,” and he says “But you already know her.” That’s how I feel in terms of closeness. The push and pull, the back and forth—I feel extremely close to her in a way that is uncomfy. I'm forever sort of attached to this person who I don't know. I’ve literally never met her. But I know her. I know more about her than some of her close friends. It's a weird feeling. I wish I could maybe be a more disciplined biographer, write about a subject and then separate myself and move on.

But then, early on, I had a long conversation with Sam Wasson. And we had a long phone call about writing, about all of his trials and errors trying to get Elaine to talk for Improv Nation, just talking about how a biography can kind of drive you crazy. And he asked me at one point, Okay, so who is Elaine to you? Who is she in your life? Because when you’re writing a biography, you know that person. Is she your mom? You sister? Is she your favorite? And to be honest, I feel like it’s in a way presumptuous, but I feel a little bit like she’s me. There’s self-recognition, not because I’m a genius or anything like that, but little things, the relentlessness, the scrappiness, the refusal to take no for an answer, the fixation on work and the obsessive drive. And like, if I weren’t disciplined, I could also see myself becoming some of the worst qualities of Elaine.

I’m sure some shrink would probably say, That’s a parasocial relationship, girly. You gotta cut the cord, move on. I wish I could, but I can’t. I don't think I could write another biography—it sort of screws with your brain, thinking that much about somebody else all the time. I would have dreams where she'd show up and she'd either be yelling at me, or scolding me. I was in the middle of a chapter and it was one of those marathon weekends where I decided to just finish it, stay in and finish it. And I took a mini nap in the middle of the afternoon and then in my nap dream, I was writing, and I decided I needed to get out of my apartment and walk around the block. I decided to go across the street and get a pack of cigarettes (I don't smoke) and I went across the street and Elaine was the person behind the counter. And she made fun of me for buying ultra lights.

It's just such a screwy thing for your brain. I think it's similar to how some actors talk about how when you're acting, your body doesn't know it's not real. You're feeling those emotions when you're writing about somebody so much. You're thinking about their lives so much, your brain doesn't recognize that you don't actually know the subject.

CC: The thing that's shitty is that it’s determined by the marketplace. It's really hard to sell a nonfiction book, specifically biography, if you don't have access, if it is not authorized. Because then it becomes like a legal liability. Or then that was definitely feedback I heard when it was still in the proposal stage. And I think these books are becoming increasingly rare because yes, there have been so many unauthorized biographies that are sloppy, completely restructured on other people's quotes and it's super gossipy and salacious. And maybe it’s an entertaining read, but not an accurate one. But not all unauthorized biographies are bad. And I would argue that an unauthorized biography—one done well—is way better than a memoir or an authorized one. If this is being okayed by the subject, how honest is it?

It’s a challenge trying to get sources to talk to you. It was weird. A ton of sources wouldn’t talk without checking with Elaine first. There’s a veil of secrecy and protection around her. A lot of actors would not talk to me unless Elaine herself told them that it was okay. And some of these people talked to Mark Harris for the Mike Nichols book. I'm not asking for any personal secrets about Elaine. I literally just wanna ask about experiences making a movie. Like, what was the vibe on set, do you have any fun memories? Surface level, paint me a picture of this production, nothing deeply intimate.

It's hard to get these books made because I think a lot of writers would value a good story over asking the ethical question of how much is appropriate to share and how much gossip to include. But for instance, there were things about her stepdaughters—they're not in this story. I mean, they're in the story, but also, they're private citizens and I don't have to expose things about them. They are entitled to their privacy.

CC: I think a lot of people think Oh, well, they didn't get this person to talk to them. Well, then it's probably missing something. And maybe, maybe it is. But also, think about what could be missing if they had talked to that person, or if they were embedded with them, or a close friend.

CC: Absolutely. Access does matter, and there were certain times where I really wished that I had access. There are things that I know that I will never know because I didn't have access. But it's really dependent on the subject. I think a lot about Warren Zanes, who wrote the Tom Petty biography. He he had known Petty, early in his life. He was in a band as a teenager, and they opened for the Heartbreakers sometime in the eighties. And then he became an academic and Petty read a book that he wrote for 33 ⅓  and was like, Hey, would you be interested in like writing my biography? And he had full access to him. He had full access to anybody he worked with, or knew, and Petty would make the connections. And his stipulation wasn’t approving or disapproving of anything. He's like, I'm going to give you full access, but I am not going to authorize this because I think that makes something dishonest. And I'm not going to tell you, this is your book. I'm not going to tell you what to write. The only thing I ask is if somebody says something about me, I'd like a chance to respond. Like if there was something a little damning,he was fully open, he didn’t say don’t write it, don’t print it, he just wanted a chance to respond. 

That's the ideal. And it's so rare that you find an artist, especially today, who is so willing to say, My life and reputation are in your hands and I trust you. Everyone wants to mythologize themselves now. Everyone wants to spin a narrative about themselves. In terms of celebrities, artists, public figures. It's very rare that you find somebody who is actually not interested in spinning, who’s interested in knowing and conveying, warts and all here, humanness. Who thinks: I will connect through my humanness.

CC: Absolutely. It's one of the things that I think is making it harder to write about people. It's the death of entertainment journalism, the death of profile writing. Every interview now is one celebrity friend interviewing their other celebrity friend because they don't trust the journalists and they don't trust their fans. Because if anything is less than overzealously praiseful…I mean good luck to the writer. Because if they're on social media, the stan armies will come for them. We have such a black and white view, somebody is either canceled or they are deified and there's no room in between. And I love the mess. I feel like the messiness helps us.

I mean, I get it. It's hard to be vulnerable in that way. It's really scary, as somebody who has a book coming out with the largest scale of eyes on me that I've ever had. If an article that I've written goes viral, great, awesome, but it's going to be forgotten about pretty quickly. Like, that's okay. Okay, I'll just turn off the internet for if it gets bad, like, I'm just gonna step away. I think when you've worked on something for so long, and it's deeply personal, there is a feeling of  wanting to control what people think of it. There’s a little bit of hoping that people think of it in a certain way. And yes, it is the work that’s perceived, not me, like that whole thing that you have to go through therapy for, admitting you don't have control over a situation, being okay with that. And other people are going to think what they want to think. So I can easily see artists and celebrities who are insulated in a way, surrounded by hype people, feeling that they can't do anything that isn't incredibly well-received. That they can't take a risk or that they can feel comfortable with the possibility of mess or failure. And Elaine did that.

And you’re back to thinking, how do you do this without thinking, Oh, I'm Elaine again. Elaine wanted to control what other people thought. Elaine is a huge fucking control freak. She controls everyone around her. She's manipulative. She's a manipulative artist, I think. But I don't know, you have to be, a little bit. To decide how you’re going to make an audience feel. Not like, How do I want an audience to perceive this? but, How do I want an audience to feel?

CC: Her notes on the Tootsie script are so telling. There are a bunch that are incredibly insightful and her own brand of like, This isn't truthful. Oh my god, the way she whiffs out the slightest bit of artifice in dialogue. But then there are other times where she adds a joke. There's a scene where he's scrambling to get back to the apartment and meet, he was late for his date with Teri Garr, with her character, because he was just with Julie as Dorothy. And so he scrambles back and she comes up and she says “I stopped by your apartment when you were so late. I waited outside and I saw that fat woman go into your place.” And Michael says that it was Jeff's friend, and then there’s that beat: “...You really think she was fat?”

And like, that's a joke Elaine added, and she wrote in the margins. “There are very few surefire laughs in this world. A fat girl joke is one of them, consider this.” Like, problematic from today's standpoint, but also very funny and very true. And that scientific way she could look at something and know it was something that worked with an audience. It’s something that came up from a few sources—they’d say Elaine thought of her own work in terms of what an audience should want, not what they do want. That ability to switch with material when she had no personal connection, to say, This is what an audience does want instead of, I'm going to write something that they should want is very interesting to me.

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Miss May Does Not Exist is now available at bookstores and libraries. Carrie Courogen will be in conversation with Rachel Syme on Wednesday June 5th at McNally Jackson Seaport at 6:30 PM. She will also be signing at The Midtown Scholar Bookstore on Friday July 19th, at 7:00 PM