Mike Nichols's Heartburn

The celebrated director was at the top of his game when friend Nora Ephron trusted him to direct the movie based on his her messy breakup with Carl Bernstein. His own breakup—and breakdown—turned out to be right around the corner.

- By Mark Harris

Nora Ephron first got to know Mike Nichols in 1969 when she was assigned by The New York Times Magazine to visit the set of Catch-22. Nichols, shooting in Mexico, had been given carte blanche to burn through money on what turned out to be an immensely complex and vexed production. Ephron, a decade younger, was not yet a famous screenwriter but, according to her Times bio, “a freelance writer specializing in popular culture.” She wrote:

“Whether Catch-22 will be a masterpiece, merely a very funny film, or the first failure for Mike Nichols after two smash hit movies (The Graduate and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) and seven hit plays (among them The Odd Couple, Luv, and Plaza Suite) is at this point almost an irrelevant question for the actors in it. What matters is that the film is a chance to work with Nichols, who, at 37, is the most successful director in America and probably the most popular actors’ director in the world. Says Orson Welles: ‘Nobody’s in his league with actors.’ What’s more, he is the first American director since Welles made Citizen Kane in 1941 to have complete creative control over his final product— including the contractual right of final cut and the option of not showing his rushes to studio executives.”

Excerpt adapted from Mike Nichols: A Life, by Mark Harris. Copyright © 2021 by Mark Harris. To be published by Penguin Press. Reproduced by permission of the Wylie Agency.