From KCRW Santa Monica and KCRW.com, it's The Treatment.

Welcome to the treatment, the home edition.

One of the pleasures of doing this show for as long as I have, and it's 25 years now,

is that we get revisited with certain guests who have become among my favorites.

One of them was written in the book, Pictures at a Revolution, five movies in the birth of the new Hollywood in 2008.

In 2014, he followed that with Five Came Back, a story of Hollywood in the Second World War.

This time, he's added another year to the Interregnum. It's seven years since he was last here. And his new book is

Mike Nichols of Life. And of course, talking to the author and cultural commentator and columnist

Mark Harris. It's always a pleasure to have you on, Mark. Thank you so much. Thank you so much

for having me, Elvis. The previous two books gave you a chance to sort of write about all the events that

conflated into a moment, be it the documentaries, the film makes made about World War II,

or that year, a 1967 that changed to Hollywood.

In this case, you're actually writing a history. It's about a man

who became a moment. Yeah, it was a very strange experience for me. I don't think I anticipated

quite how different working on this book would be from my first two. On the first two,

I really felt a little bit like an orchestra conductor in a way. I mean,

I had six or eight major characters to play with in each book and a bunch of different

plot lines to interweave so that when one kind of petered out for the moment, another could come in.

You know, that was a structural challenge, but it was also really a luxury. And with a biography,

I felt more like, I don't know, I guess a medium in a way, you know, like the events of Mike

Nichols' life for the 83 years it lasted were going to be what determined the shape of this book. And the rhythm of it

would be mine to create. And obviously, I had my choice about what to emphasize, but there was

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