Special Events Gala Tribute YFF Special Events Other Special Events An Evening with Elaine May

Film Comment Presents: An Evening with Elaine May Sunday February 26, 7pm An intimate conversation between Mike Nichols and Elaine May about May's directorial career followed by a screening of Ishtar. Ticket prices: $75 FSLC members, $85 non- members. Please Note: There is a limit of two [2] tickets per customer to this special event. She was one half of a legendary 60s comedy team. She's a brilliant comic actress (California Suite, Small Time Crooks). She's a playwright and a screenwriter (Heaven Can Wait, The Birdcage). Most mysteriously, she's a member of that exclusive secret society of script doctors (Tootsie, Reds). But the multitalented Elaine May is above all the director of four masterpieces: A New Leaf, in which she also starred opposite Walter Matthau; the devastatingly funny Neil Simon adaptation The Heartbreak Kid; the legendary Mikey and Nicky, starring John Cassavetes and Peter Falk; and the wondrous and unfairly maligned Ishtar, co-starring Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman. Join us to meet a genius of modern American comedy, here in person to talk about her career. This special event is part of Focus On Elaine May, the retrospective sidebar of May’s films that concludes the Film Comment Selects series. Celebrating its 6th year, Film Comment Selects is a series dedicated to presenting cutting-edge, rarely seen movies from around the world. Film Comment magazine has been in operation since 1962. Ishtar 1987; 107m Judged a debacle of world-historical dimensions and called "a lifeless, massive, lumbering exercise in failed comedy" by Roger Ebert, Elaine May's satire was so rarefied that it went all but unnoticed. Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty are Rogers and Clarke, a transcendentally awful musical comedy team who find inspiration in the unlikeliest sources. Their stalwart manager (Jack Weston) secures them a hotel gig in the fictional nation of Ishtar, where they are quickly embroiled in the local revolution when they fall for a local revolutionary (Isabelle Adjani). Every comic moment, from the musical numbers to the blind camel to the vultures arriving "on spec," is perfectly realized. With Charles Grodin as the CIA agent who enlists one of the boys, and rationalizes the low salary with this upbeat qualification: "You can't really put a price on democracy, can you?"