Here's to You, Mike Nichols

	Mike Nichols at MoMA's Party in the Garden in June 2008.

Mike Nichols’ mandatory moment of introspection during the retrospective of his work at the Museum of Modern Art came at the end of a 90-minute “Conversation” Saturday night, which was not only sold-out, but had prompted more than 100 people to line up early in the morning to secure the last batch of tickets.

“When I watch films that I’ve made,” he said, ‘I think, ‘Well, I wasn’t a total schmuck' -- which is nice.”

It was the perfect cap to an evening of banter with Meryl Streep, Nora Ephron, Buck Henry, and Elaine May. (Star power in the audience included Mr. Nichols’ wife Diane Sawyer, Natalie Portman, and Christine Baranski).

Topics covered: a dismissal of the Auteur theory of cinema (“the cigarette ashes are gone,” Mr. Nichols said); making films about mores; the famous people’s houses in Hollywood in which he has lived: Blake Edwards’, Cole Porter’s, David Geffen’s… (“You’re house dropping,” interjected Ms. Ephron, who wrote the screenplays for “Heartburn” and “Silkwood”), and why Robert Redford did not get the part of Benjamin in “The Graduate.”

“I told him I didn’t think he could play a loser,” Mr. Nichols said. “He said he could. So I asked him, “Have you ever struck out with a woman? And he said, ‘What do you mean?’”

Ms. May had the audience roaring every time she spoke into the small black box attached to her microphone, pretending, it seemed, not to understand how the device worked. MoMA paid tribute to the Nichols/May improvisational comedy team that launched their careers out of the University of Chicago by interrupting the panel to screen a short film set to one of their sketches, “Back to Bach,” on their 1962 album “In Retrospect.”

Mr. Nichols also paid tribute to his editor on 11 films, Sam O’Steen, discussing their work on “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?"—O’Steen’s first movie as editor and Mr. Nichols’ first film as director. Studio protocol at the time kept Mr. Nichols out of the editing room after shooting. “Sam would call me at night and play the mix, and I’d give my input, until I figured out a way to put pressure on Jack Warner and get back in there. We learned together. We had the same birthday. We learned for each other,” Mr. Nichols said.

For the aspiring filmmakers in the room (which Mr. Nichols had once been: he came to MoMA's film screenings often when he was a boy), Mr. Nichols offered some advice. “Rehearsals are so you know where the dark fish is lurking underneath you,” he said. “I’m not speaking literally because I didn’t direct ‘Jaws.’”

On humor: “An actor’s job is to make a case for the character. In making the case for the character, funny is incredibly useful.”

And funny isn’t just for the actors, it’s for the entire crew. The director recalled one of his first assistant’s duties: mooning. “He mooned in more and more elaborate ways,” Mr. Nichols said. “One time he was dropped, mooning, by parachute, and landed his ass on our set.”

“So it’s not all script conferences,” Mr. Henry, who wrote “The Graduate” and “Catch-22” screenplays, said.

"The last week of filming Mike has tears in his eyes, he loves the film so much," Ms. Streep, a star of Nichols films including "Silkwood" and "Angels in America," said.

Mr. Nichols kept coming back to the idea of filmmaking as collaboration.

“I don’t like when people start trying to take credit for this or that, it demeans the process,” he said. Later he added, “I’ve always thought it takes the eyes of two guys to see three dimensions. The joy of the movie is 100 people making it together.”

Watching movies together matters too. “What we forget with all our DVDs is the essential experience of watching with an audience,” Mr. Nichols said. “We forget that these events can’t take place while you’re lying on the bed eating pizza and checking your BlackBerry.”

That’s a good reason to go see some Mike Nichols films in MoMA’s theaters. The retrospective runs through May 1.