| Courtney Kowalke |
Image sourced from The Criterion Collection
A New Leaf plays on glorious 35mm at the Trylon Cinema from Friday, May 9th, through Sunday, May 11th. For tickets, showtimes, and other series information, visit trylon.org.
Elaine May probably wishes I wasn’t writing this piece. While May adapted, directed, and starred in her 1971 directorial debut, A New Leaf, she was less than pleased with the finished product. Against May’s wishes, her film was edited by Academy Award-winning editors Don Guidice and Fredric Steinkamp. According to a 2019 essay by Carrie Courogen for The National Film Registry, “May sued [Paramount studios] to remove her name from the film, arguing the one they were going to release was theirs and not hers.”
It always disappoints me when an artist disowns or dismisses something that they made that I enjoyed. She isn’t my favorite singer, but it bothers me that Mandy Moore offers refunds to people who bought her 1999 album So Real because she thinks it sucked. It makes me said that recording 2012’s Electra Heart made Marina Diamandis want to quit making music. I hate press tours that invariably involve musicians saying something to the effect of, “Yeah, my last album was trash the studio made me record. This new album is the real me. This is what I wanted to do the whole time, actually.”
The same year Moore released So Real, I had a poem published in Anthology of Poetry by Young Americans. Looking at the poem today makes me full-body cringe, but I have to remind myself I can’t hold it to my current standards. I was eight when I wrote that; I didn’t have the twenty-plus years of experience I have now. I would never judge another eight-year-old as harshly as I judge myself. Besides, that poem is a brick in my foundation, a part of me that I wouldn’t dare remove lest my whole writing career come toppling down on me. It embarrasses me, but it helped get me where I am today, and I’m grateful to it for that.
May’s disapproval of A New Leaf is another example of this phenomenon because I did really enjoy the movie. I laughed out loud a lot at the antics of petulant man-child Henry Graham (Walter Matthau). I was amused by his scheming to marry shy, clumsy heiress Henrietta Lowell (May) after spending his inheritance. I loved that while the female characters seemed slightly more mature than the men, they were not spared from indignities like pratfalls, misunderstandings, and takedowns both physical and verbal. It cracked me up that the poor flower girl at Henry and Henrietta’s wedding gets harangued as much as Henrietta’s slimy lawyer, Andy McPherson (Jack Weston).
Image sourced from The Bare Minimum
It’s hard to say whether May’s version of A New Leaf would have been better than the version released because her version doesn’t exist. According to the DVD commentary, head of Paramount Repertory Michael Schlesinger had the studio’s vaults searched for additional footage from the film in the 1990s. Nothing was found, though.
We know some of what May filmed, both from interviews with the movie’s cast and crew and because A New Leaf is adapted from “The Green Heart,” a short story by American writer Jack Ritchie. In “The Green Heart,” Henry learns after their marriage that Henrietta is being blackmailed by McPherson and another character cited only as “Smith” in my research. While the role was deleted, we do know Smith was played by William Hickey, who returned to work with May on 1976’s Mikey and Nicky.
Henry does what any good gold digger would do—he kills both men. Without knowing more about the execution (pun intended), I’m into this subplot. I love A New Leaf for what it is, but I would also like to have seen this darker element. I think given May’s comedy chops, she could have integrated it well into the film.
The thing I balk at about May’s cut of A New Leaf is that it reportedly ran for three hours. Without more specific context, I’m with the editors who shortened it to roughly one hour and forty-five minutes.
I think editing is a lost art these days. Pacing is also a factor in storytelling, but my butt gets numb during movies that run two-and-a-half hours or longer. If I’m watching at home, I will pause the movie after forty-five minutes or an hour and come back to it (or, more likely, forget to come back to it until several months later). In a 2021 interview with Kyle Buchanan for The New York Times, American director Paul Thomas Anderson said, “As a writer, I think we have fantasies when you struggle with editing material down: ‘I have so much material, perhaps this is a limited series.’ When in fact, no, it’s not, you just need to edit down your story. I mean, a film should preferably be two hours. That’s when they’re at their best. I’ve missed that mark multiple times, but that’s really the goal.” This quote really spoke to me. I appreciate Anderson’s ability to take a step back and ask if everything and the kitchen sink needs to be included in his story or if some of his darlings can be killed.
In a 2019 Bright Wall/Dark Room blog post, Courogen described May, the actress and filmmaker, as “a devoted perfectionist, but she’s also so stubborn, uncompromising, and possessive that she’ll walk from projects when her vision is threatened.” On the one hand, that strikes me as being overly self-important. I don’t think anything in the real world will play out the way it does in my head. I believe you need flexibility, especially in the arts and especially in filmmaking. Making movies is essentially a group project, as evidenced by how May’s editors treated her and A New Leaf. Collaborative art requires compromise. You have to pick your battles in that arena.
On the other hand, May was the victim of sexism, plain and simple. Originally, Paramount offered May $200,000 just for her script. May’s (male) agent cut a deal that also gave May directing duties but which docked her pay by $150,000 (see Courogen’s National Film Registry essay, p1). Producer Howard W. Koch tried to replace May as the director during the filming of A New Leaf, but May was saved by a penalty clause in her contract. May’s co-star Matthau doubted her ability to juggle acting, directing, and writing duties. In a 2006 interview following a screening of Ishtar (1987), May said, “Part of the difficulty with A New Leaf was Walter [Matthau], whom, incidentally, I came to love, would call me Mrs. Hitler among other things. I didn’t want to frighten anyone, and people would leave me saying, she’s a nice girl. What is this big thing about? She’s a nice girl, and the thing is, of course, I wasn’t a nice girl. And when they found this out, they hated me all the more.” I can’t fault May for being stubborn, uncompromising, and possessive in that environment. A lot of people were undermining her work. I understand why she would refuse to be flexible when people were asking her to break instead of bend.
May’s version of A New Leaf might not have turned out good. It doesn’t sound like something I would enjoy, especially knowing already that I enjoy the way the film turned out. It could have been good, though. May’s frustration is understandable, both because her version of the film sounds completely different from the finished product and because she wasn’t allowed to realize that vision.
When interviewed by Brett Martin for GQ in 2009, American director Harold Ramis was asked about his 1980 film Caddyshack, one of Ramis’s “big four” as Martin called it. To my surprise, Ramis said, “I can barely watch it. All I see are a bunch of compromises and things that could have been better.” I imagine May feels the same way about A New Leaf. To her, the movie is competing with the version that exists in her head.
Image sourced from Mubi
I’ve been lucky as a writer. In my pieces for Perisphere, in my newswriting, and in my poetry, I have of course been asked to make edits. I can’t think of any edits, however, that made me think the integrity of my work was being compromised. They have always been suggestions I agree with or at the very least don’t mind making. I have never felt like anything of mine got overhauled to the point of me hating it.
I also have a lot of practice accepting things for what they are. You get what you get in life, and you learn to appreciate things for what they are, not what you want them or expected them to be. That’s an easy task for those of us in the audience watching A New Leaf. Besides lacking the backstage drama and the ruined initial vision, we can appreciate A New Leaf as it exists because it exists as an excellent movie. It isn’t worth writing off completely the way May has; it might not be her film, but it’s definitely a film worth watching.
Edited by Olga Tchepikova-Treon
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The “Smith” murder, which dominoes the McPherson murder, is part of the original story. Essentially, good-hearted Henrietta has taken over the blackmail payoffs for a colleague who had adopted a black-market baby. It gets more and more convoluted from there.