Acting Social: The Cinema of Mike Nichols

This dissertation argues for the study of director Mike Nichols by elucidating his aesthetic, historical, social, and political importance. He ushered in the turn from "Classical" to "New" Hollywood, and studying his work illuminates unacknowledged similarities and differences in both periods. Furthermore, looking at the cultural significance of his oeuvre deepens our understanding of the cultural revolution of the 1960s, as well as key events in the ensuing five decades of American social history. By analyzing the methods for crafting scenarios that Nichols carried forward to the cinema from his seminal work in radio and theater, I generate new insight into the representation of the interpersonal on-screen, particularly through the lenses of gender and sexuality. There is no scholarship devoted to Nichols's study, and I look what his exclusion from debates in Cinema Studies tells us both about his films and about the dominant approaches and theoretical paradigms used to interpret the cinema, particularly regarding concepts such as character, performance, dialogue, the psychological, the human, and the social