Miss May Does Not Exist

The Life and Work of Elaine May, Hollywood's Hidden Genius

By: Carrie Courogen

Narrated by: Erin Bennett

Length: 13 hrs and 55 mins

Publisher's summary

As part of the legendary comedy team known as Nichols and May, May revolutionized sketch comedy before striking out on her own to make history as the third woman to be admitted into the Directors Guild of America when she wrote, directed, and starred in 1971’s A New Leaf.

Throughout the 1970s and ‘80s, May was one of Hollywood’s top screenwriters and script doctors and one of the only women directing within the studio system. After a box-office bomb, May never directed a feature again, though she continued to write films.

In 2018, she returned to Broadway, where she won the Tony Award for Best Leading Actress in a Play for The Waverly Gallery. Besides her considerable talent, May is well known for her reclusiveness, often working behind the scenes without credit. In the liner notes for her first comedy LP with Mike Nichols in 1958, her bio is a single terse sentence: “Miss May does not exist.” Until now.

Carrie Courogen has uncovered the Elaine May who does exist. Conducting countless interviews, she has filled in the blanks May has forcibly kept blank for years, creating a fascinating portrait of a creative powerhouse, a lost era of Hollywood, and the way women were mistreated and held back within it.

Miss May Does Not Exist is a remarkable love story about a prickly genius who was never easy to work with, not always easy to love, and frequently punished for those things, despite revolutionizing the way we think about comedy, acting, and what a film or play can be.

©2024 Carrie Courogen (P)2024 Dreamscape Media

A Rose-Colored Apologia for Elaine May

There is no question Elaine May is a gifted, briliiant writer born with a sense of story denied to other mere mortals. Equally, she is a talented performer and actress. Her contribution to improvisation is seminal. She was, at times, a great theater director. She can't direct movies worth a lick.

And therein lies the problem with this book. It takes no critical eye. Worse, the author cannot get the stars out of her eyes. Everything Elaine May does is great. If it isn't great--Ishtar, for example--the author raises a rousing defense that the cost of a movie and/or its commercial success should not be barometer of a film's value or success. That precious few of the movies--if any--that Elaine May directed enjoyed either needs to be looked at objectively, not pollyanna-ish as the author does here. By failing any semblence of objectivity (apparently May can do no wrong), she undercuts the creative force May was in so many other areas.

Even May's well-known and maybe well deserved reputation as a script doctor needs more scrutiny. Many of her script-doctored scripts were movies directed by Mike Nichols. It does May no disservice that she worked better as a team with Nichols than she did independently (which is blatently obvious to even the most casual observer), but the author doesn't touch that. If she had, it would mean conceding that May wasn't flawlessly brilliant constantly.

In retrospect, the influence Elaine May had on entertainment, television, the theater, and Hollywood is unquestionable. Maybe another book will be written with a more cooler assessment--which will give Elaine May the true credit she richly deserves.

It would sure make this book better.

Fascinating woman, but genius?

I hate to ask the question because by all accounts Elaine May was truly fascinating, intelligent and supremely complicated. I do think genius is thrown around way too often. Even with the most difficult of geniuses we can still point to a work that is their own, not only their own but some consistent output. The screenplay that she appears to have written almost entirely herself would be The Birdcage and that was an adaptation already. I love the film but I would definitely never call it a work of genius. There's of course the many projects she kept her name off of but those were her coming in and changing what was already there. In the instances where she created her own plays those relied heavily on improv and the plays seem to have gone nowhere or referred to as sketches. With this book i get a sense that Elaine May is a genius missing in action....more of a spectre of it than the embodiment. Either way great listen.

THE DEFINITIVE!

I just finished reading an incredible bio on the brilliant #ElaineMay. I was so excited when I discovered this book was being published because there really hasn’t been any biography written on her - if any! @carriecourogen holds nothing back here. She dives deeper than deep in bringing out the creative and comedic psychosis of Elaine May in all her idiosyncrasies which ultimately culminates into her “hidden genius”. Miss May is one of the true greats of comedy and film. She’s intensely private so I’m not surprised she didn’t/wouldn’t meet with Carrie and since we probably will never ever get a personal memoir from Elaine May, I am throwing this book into the ring to be classified as the DEFINITIVE Elaine May biography!

Since I like to listen to the audiobook as I read along, I was even more excited when @erinbennettnarrates’s voice came across my laptop/phone again. She’s my favorite narrator and her voice feels like a dear old friend. It felt good to sip some tea and catch up!!🥰 THANK YOU, Carrie & Erin for this marvelous work… and Thank you to Elaine May, Hollywood’s hidden genius and one of my Sheroes! ✨🎬✍🏼

P.S: This book NEEDS to be adapted into a documentary film! HBO better be calling you soon, Carrie!!! (I’m serious) let’s get this made! 🫶🏼

Great Talent With Author's Agenda Interfering Some

I highly recommend this biography to learn about the life of one of the greatest talents, Elaine May. Unfortunately, the author's feminist agenda interferes when she attempts to make that May's story. No doubt, May suffered many of the prejudices many or all women suffer. But that's the author's spin. While the book is well-worth reading, the author should have stuck with May's life rather than muddying matters with her agenda.