UMass Magazine Online

Spring 2005

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Mister Un-Hollywood
Longtime moviemaker Mike Haley prefers to stay out of the spotlight

—Ben Barnhart




	Mike Haley (photo by Ben Barnhart)

MIKE HALEY ’65 HAS WORKED in the film industry for 35 years, but he is as far from Hollywood—physically and figuratively—as one can be. In the beautifully quaint 18th-century farmhouse that he shares with his wife, Joan, in the quiet Conway village, Haley talks about his life and career making movies, about his passion for the people. He also shares his disdain for the glitzy, cutthroat Hollywood lifestyle.

His latest film, Mike Nichols’ 2004 drama, Closer, in which Haley was coproducer and first assistant director (he also had a small acting part), won two Golden Globe awards and two Oscar nominations. Haley didn’t attend the glamour-packed Academy Awards in Los Angeles—he winces and shakes his head emphatically at the question. But he did sport a spiffy tuxedo closer to home: He accepted the UMass Amherst Fine Arts Center’s 2005 Artist of the Year Award at its 16th annual gala in February.

Haley stumbled onto his first movie set when he was just a few years out of UMass Amherst with a degree in speech therapy. He had aborted graduate school plans “out of the blue,” he says, opting instead to chase his love for Spanish literature to Granada. By 1970 he was back in Montague, living with friends in a communal house and piecing together part-time work as a speech therapist in a nursing home and teaching at Berkshire Community College. He was also a VISTA volunteer and performing with The Buffalo Meat Company, an experimental avant-garde theater troupe that Haley founded with his housemates. When a film crew arrived in the Berkshires to make The Honeymoon Killers, which Haley calls “a very forgettable B movie,” they came to the community college looking for warm bodies. Mostly on a lark, he signed up. He was promoted to production manager and even took an acting role, faring much better than the director, a youngster named Martin Scorcese (also working on his first movie) who was fired less than halfway through the filming.

“There was something that was being tapped in me at that time and that age,” Haley says of his first movie-making experience. “It was just a real adrenaline rush.”

Having caught the bug, Haley went to New York and took whatever film and television work he could find, including stints at William F. Buckley’s “The Firing Line” and NET, forerunner of Public Television. His break came in 1972 when he was one of 10 people out of 2,000 applicants accepted into the assistant directors training program of the Directors Guild of America.

“From there it took off,” Haley says. “I went from film to film to film and never really came up for air until now.”

While many of his New York friends went to California in the mid 1970s, Haley resisted joining the “gold rush” of filmmakers who have moved west. “Unless you’re willing to step on a few bodies, you’re going out there to be very nicely mediocre,” Haley says. “That life was never part of my drive or ambition.” Instead, the Pittsfield native has remained rooted in the east even though he says his career may have suffered as a result. “But,” he adds, “I’ve always taken left turns when everyone else is going right.”

In 1973 Haley first met the director Mike Nichols during the filming of The Day of the Dolphin. The two forged a close friendship and have since worked together on nearly a dozen films.

“I call him my father, my brother, my son,” Haley says of Nichols. And it’s indicative of Haley’s talent as a first assistant director, a role he likens to shop foreman, that he is a regular on Nichols’ sets.

Now, with more than 60 feature films and 18 movies for television to his credit, Haley is taking time between Nichols’ projects to retool and “do another Renaissancy kind of thing,” he says. “I want to see if I’m good at other things.”

Haley is turning his 35 years of journals into a memoir and developing film scripts. Having appeared in nearly 20 films, mostly in smaller roles, he wants to “continue to play with acting.” He also took time this past semester to talk about his work on the HBO mini-series Angels in America with UMass Amherst theater students. The department staged Tony Kushner’s Pulitzer Prize–winning play in the Rand Theater in April. Haley was first assistant director and co-executive producer for the immensely popular Angels series, which he calls “the apex of everything. I’ve always said, ‘there’s no top or bottom to the movie business. If you think you’ve had your best or worst experience just wait a while.’ But Angels was very, very special.”

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