As an aside, I admire Mike Nichols' ability to make gorgeous _looking_ movies. Many scenes from The Graduate, the State Island Ferry opening scene in The Working Girl, and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. And even the 2003 movie Closer. That is almost a 40-year span.

Atypically, he worked with 13 different cinematographers across his 19 movies. Woody Allen, as a contrast, as prolific as he is as Mike Nichols was not, used similar quantity of cinematographers across ~50 movies. Woody Allen, only because, I find his movies visually beautiful, too.

In the New Yorker article linked above, for me this stood out:

"Hollywood had never been my endgame. As far as I was concerned, the studios kept beautiful people imprisoned in seven-year contracts."

Reminds me of high-IP people inside Frontier Labs :).