Miss May Does Not Exist

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.