Cinema: Some are More Yossarian than Others

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won it all: money, the Oscar, and freedom for his third film, Catch-22.

By then, his manipulation of actors had become a patented amalgam of ad lib and calculation. "He makes you feel kind of like a kite," says Hoffman. "He lets you go ahead, and you do your thing. And then when you've finished he pulls you in by the string. But at least you've had the enjoyment of the wind." To Richard Burton, "He conspires with you to get the best from you." Buck Henry's appraisal is shrewder: "He tries to make you think that what he's telling you is your own idea."

Mike's idea for Catch-22 began at Heller's beginning, in Italy. Production Designer Richard Sylbert and Producer John Galley began hunting for Heller's old base on the coast of Corsica. "We asked in our failing Italian, 'Where is World War II?' " Sylbert says. Answer: nowhere. The base had been wiped out by highways and refineries. It was not until they flew over a mountain range dubbed "Goat's Teats" near Guaymas, Mexico, that they found a place with what Sylbert called that "how-do-I-get-outta-here feeling." Nichols took one look and flipped.

Do You Think Natalie Wood?

He had decided that the main design of the film should be as circular as the dialogue: holes in walls, arches, bombs. There were other circles involved. Catch-22 was a convergence of innumerable wheels. Jon Voight came to prominence playing opposite Dustin Hoffman in Midnight Cowboy, a job Hoffman would not have landed had he not been in Nichols' The Graduate, an assignment Hoffman won because of his excellence in the play Eh? directed by Arkin. After playing Yossarian, Arkin was to direct Little Murders, by Jules Feiffer, who has written Nichols' next project, Carnal Knowledge.

To onlookers, journalists and occasional tourists, the interrelationships on the set seemed to be a piece-by-piece reassemblage of a New York cocktail party in the Mexican boondocks. Nichols played chess, anagrams and his famous-name games: "What did Gary Grant? Do you think Natalie Wood?" There were sexual boffs: When Nichols wanted to record a special sound from Nurse Duckett, he had Arkin grab Paula Prentiss' thigh. Nichols, unnoticed, stood behind her and lunged for her breasts. "Mike was very happy with my hoot," says Prentiss. "Then I was so overcome I had to go into a corner and be let alone. Whenever someone touches me I'm in love with him for about eight hours."

John Wayne came down, got snubbed and drunk. Nichols danced down an airplane runway with Candice Bergen, who had come to take pictures and write an article. Bob Newhart, the paranoid Major Major, replayed his stand-up routines. Perkins restaged his staircase scene from Psycho. And underneath, it was one of the tensest, most grueling areas since Anzio beach.

"Mike has a funny blind eye when he works," says Buck Henry. "He thinks everybody is always having a grand time. Everything may look rosy with a group of actors playing dirty-word games in the shade, but inside the command post the subtext is going on: an actor is on the verge of being fired; the lighting director isn't speaking to the director; someone's trying to negotiate with Orson Welles in Spain from the only phone on the base, which went through