by Marc Eliot
Forman’s international reputation continued to grow, and after the 1968 Prague Spring, he came to America in 1971 to make his first American film, Taking Off, which he co-wrote with John Guare, Jean-Claude Carrière, and John Klein—a late-to-the-table sixties generation-gap film. Forman was right at home with the notion of an anti-hero. Everyone in his country who was involved in helping to gain its freedom was an anti-hero fighting against the system. In America he was an outsider of a different sort, new to the ways and mores of the country. In every way, then, he saw some of himself in the rebel McMurphy and knew what he wanted to do with the film. After Forman left a meeting with Michael and Zaentz agreeing to direct, they were so happy they turned to each other and started crying.
With Forman aboard and Jack’s schedule cleared, the film was finally ready to go into production.
It fell to Michael to do the job no one else had wanted. Kirk was still laboring under the fantasy that if the film got made he was going to play McMurphy, that he was still the wild young man he had been eleven years earlier on Broadway. When Michael told him that Jack was playing McMurphy, Kirk’s response was “almost incomprehensible. They wanted someone else for McMurphy? Why? That was my part. I’d found him. I could create him, make him breathe. But after ten [sic] years of telling everybody what a great role it is … now I’m too old?… I could still play that part.”
Michael listened, empathized, and comforted. But Kirk was out and Jack was in, and that was the way it was going to be.
In Miloš Forman’s 1975 One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Jack’s macho man McMurphy takes on Nurse Ratched, an older martinet of a woman who hides behind and uses the authority of her position to destroy his sense of rebellion. McMurphy fights against an authority he believes is sicker and more corrupt than the prisoners over whom Ratched rules. She is in charge, their Mother Superior, and also, perhaps, the mother they never had. She represents to the inmates the moment in their lives when everything first started to go wrong.
Douglas and Zaentz were still looking to cast this crucial role. After several well-known actresses had already turned the role down, including Anne Bancroft, Faye Dunaway, Jane Fonda, and Ellen Burstyn, because of the original novel’s lingering sexist reputation, they signed the relatively unknown Louise Fletcher. Forman had seen her in Robert Altman’s just-released Thieves Like Us and thought she would make a great Ratched. Douglas, Zaentz, and Forman called her in to read, and agreed she was perfect for the part. What followed next was a week of nine hundred auditions for the ensemble cast (some no more than a pass-by). Douglas insisted that his good friend Danny DeVito play Martini, one of the inmates. Most of the rest who were chosen were relative unknowns. Many would go on to successful careers in the theater, movies, or TV, including William Redfield, Brad Dourif, Sydney Lassick, Christopher Lloyd, Dean R. Brooks, William Duell, Vincent Schiavelli, Delos V. Smith Jr., Michael Berryman, Nathan George, Mews Small, Scatman Crothers, and Louisa Moritz.
TO GET PERMISSION to film inside the institution, Michael had personally prevailed upon the hospital’s current superintendent, Dean R. Brooks, who happened to have loved the book; he felt the system was so much more enlightened now, and believed the film could provide a historical look back at how far mental treatment had come (it didn’t hurt that Michael gave Brooks a small part in the film as the superintendent, in effect allowing him to play himself). In return, Brooks allowed Forman to spend six weeks working on the final script while actually living in the institution and let two cast members, DeVito and Lloyd (who would both later work together on the sitcom Taxi) sit in on actual therapy sessions.
Because of Chinatown promotion commitments and some postproduction on The Fortune, Jack actually arrived a week after filming began in January 1975, on location at Oregon State Hospital in Salem, where the events that had formed the nucleus of Kesey’s novel had actually taken place. When he finally did show, Jack persuaded Brooks to let him mingle with the most disturbed patients, eat with them in the mess hall, and be allowed to watch the administration of shock treatments, in those years a regular practice at Oregon State Hospital. He gained relatively free rein among the 582 patients: arsonists, mass murderers, a rapist, and a stone-cold killer. He went up to one patient and asked him what he was in for, and as casually as telling the time, he said he had blown someone away. When Jack asked why, the patient said he didn’t know; the guy was one of his closest friends. “He told me just the way I’m telling you. No emotion, nothing. Just ‘Jeeze, I can see they can’t let me out of here ’cause I don’t know why I did it … I guess I’m here forever.’ ”
“They tell me I’m getting crazier every day,” Jack said, alluding to his Method approach to McMurphy, a part that was more challenging than any he had done so far. “Crazier than usual that is. But it is difficult to hold on to reality when you’re playing a psychopath every day. Usually I don’t have trouble slipping out of a film role, but here I don’t go home from a movie studio. I go home from a mental institution. And there’s nothing in between. I haven’t even been out to the town of Salem yet.”
Anjelica, who had come along with Jack and originally intended to spend the entire shoot with him, couldn’t take the level of his intensity and concentration and, despite having been given a small nonspeaking role, packed her bags and returned to wait it out in L.A. Jack was so immersed in McMurphy, he had no time to pay any attention to Anjelica. And once again, she felt she received no encouragement from Jack about her wanting to act.
And there were problems of a different sort, including Jack’s Method acting, staying in character even when not in front of the camera, caught on with the other cast members, and all the actors began to do it, leading to a peculiar doubling between the real inmates and the actor-inmates. The actors never broke character, even at meals. Adding to this was that, except for one boating sequence, Forman had chosen to shoot the film in sequence.
Jack, ever the basketball junkie, a game he called “the classical music of sports,” rented an apartment near the hospital so he could spend evenings and weekends watching college basketball at Corvallis or Eugene or go to a Blazers game in Portland if he could get up and back in time, and even managed to work basketball into a sequence in the film, where he tries to teach one of the key characters, the mute giant (Will Sampson), how to play.
That February, Jack won his BAFTA award for Chinatown. Because he was still filming Cuckoo’s Nest, he couldn’t fly to London to be there in person, so he filmed his acceptance speech in the mental hospital in Salem. As the cameras rolled he stood behind a glass wall, then smashed his fist through fake, breakaway glass, smiled, and said, “It is really smashing of you to give me this award.” Jack loved a good joke.
But as the production crawled on, his and everybody’s sense of humor began to fade; it became more difficult to tell whether they were playing inmates or were inmates. He told Newsday that during much of the filming he felt more like a prisoner than an actor: Except for his few escapes to watch basketball games, “for more than four months, I spent the days there and would come out only at night, walking down this little path in which my footprints were indelibly marked by the almost constant rain, to the place where I was living. I’d have dinner in bed and go to sleep and then get up the next morning—still in the dark—and go back to the maximum security ward. It was basically being an inmate, with dinner privileges out.” To another reporter, he said, jokingly, that the mental institute was “a nice place just to visit,” and added, referring to the long shoot, “What saved the day for me was to see how much good it did for the patients to work in the film. One of our extras improved so much he was discharged when the shooting ended.”
And to still another, he was even more personal and revelatory, bringing sex into the mix, offering how women played into his version of the Method: “The secret to Cuckoo’s Nest—and it’s not in the book—was that this guy’s a scamp who knows he’s irresistible to women and in reality he expects Nurse Ratched to be
seduced by him. This is his tragic flaw. This is why he ultimately fails. I discussed this with Louise, and only with her. That’s what I felt was actually happening with that character—it was one long unsuccessful seduction which the guy was pathologically sure of.”
ONLY A FEW weeks passed between the ending of production on Cuckoo’s Nest and Jack’s arrival in Montana to begin work on Arthur Penn’s The Missouri Breaks. Breaks was Penn’s third western, following 1958’s Method oater The Left Handed Gun starring Paul Newman at his Actors Studio level of intensity, and 1970s Little Big Man, a post-Graduate showcase for a young Dustin Hoffman.
One of the reasons Jack wanted to be in the film, besides working with Marlon Brando, was the chance to act with some good friends, including Harry Dean Stanton, who had landed a role, and Randy Quaid, from The Last Detail. Another was how much the script appealed to him. A quick read showed that his character, Tom Logan, is a rustler who falls on hard times and into a feud with local land baron and neighbor John McLiam (David Braxton), who in turn hires professional “enforcer” Robert E. Lee Clayton (Marlon Brando) to deal with Logan. The fact that for him the character was a roll off a log after the intensity of making Cuckoo’s Nest was another thing that appealed to Jack, as was the relatively short shooting schedule and the fact that Sandra had once again agreed to let eleven-year-old Jennifer stay with him on location the entire shoot (where he would have to constantly keep Jennifer away from the crew’s ongoing poker games she kept wanting to join). But the real deal-maker, of course, was the chance to play opposite Brando.
He still considered Brando the greatest movie actor of all time. They had never gotten close, despite the fact that they were neighbors. Brando never came over to schmooze or hang out, and he had let himself go to an alarming degree. About the only thing they had in common was a housekeeper, Angela Borlaza. Still, it was Brando.
By the time Jack arrived on set, he was told that the acting legend had forced Penn to expand Jack’s role. There was nothing generous about this. Brando had become lazy after his 1972 double dip of The Godfather and Last Tango and didn’t want to work that hard (and wouldn’t ever again). He wanted all the weight of the film put on Jack’s shoulders. According to Brando, “Poor Nicholson was stuck in the center of it all, cranking the damned thing out, while I whipped in and out of scenes like greased lightning.” Jack: “I was very hurt. The picture was terribly out of balance, and I said so … Arthur Penn doesn’t talk to me anymore because I told him I didn’t like his picture. The movie could’ve been saved in the cutting room, but nobody listened.”
It was a depressing reality check for Jack. His idol from The Wild One and On the Waterfront showed up to film this horse opera weighing in at 250 pounds; walked around the set in a yellow bathrobe; threw temper tantrums regularly, one at the unions because a young Chinese girl whom he had invited to the set was not allowed to watch the day’s shoot; played his role reading off cue cards; and used an earpiece to have his lines fed to him as he said them. Inexplicably, Marlon spoke his lines in an Irish accent. And one time Brando argued with Penn for five hours without a break over the validity of a single scene. The estimated cost of those five hours was $10,000. Brando didn’t even phone in his performance; it was more like he used two soup cans and a string, causing Jack to wonder, “Marlon’s still the greatest actor in the world, so why does he need those goddamn cue cards?” It didn’t help that Brando was acutely aware that Nicholson was routinely referred to as the Marlon Brando of his generation.
To do the film, Jack received a $1.25 million salary up front for his 47½ days’ work, plus 10 percent of the gross. Brando took less of a salary, an even million, but 11 percent of the gross. Each earned about $15 million.6
Brando did it only for the money. He believed he was finished as a serious actor and didn’t give a damn. He had bought an island near Tahiti and it was costing him multiple millions to develop it as a potential resort.
For Jack, however, Brando’s on set over-the-hill quirkiness was less bewildering than it was foreboding, a wake-up call to Jack of what happens to actors who get eaten alive by the voraciousness of the monster fame.
ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST premiered on November 19, 1975, to overwhelming box office. Even as audiences packed into movie theaters to see it, critics were, for the most part, up and down about the film. Roger Ebert, writing for the Chicago Sun-Times, called it “a film so good in so many of its parts that there’s a temptation to forgive it when it goes wrong. But it does go wrong, insisting on making larger points than its story can really carry, so that at the end, the human qualities of the characters get lost in the significance of it all. And yet there are moments of brilliance.” Ebert would eventually revise his opinion upward.
Vincent Canby, in the New York Times, liked it less: “Even granting the artist his license, America is much too big and various to be satisfactorily reduced to the dimensions of one mental ward in a movie like this.”
In the New Yorker Pauline Kael called Cuckoo’s Nest “a powerful, smashing, effective movie—one that will probably stir audiences’ emotions and join the ranks of such pop-mythology films as The Wild One, Rebel without a Cause and Easy Rider, the three most iconic, culture-shifting films of the ’50s and ’60s.” One might differ with Kael, but to Jack her comparisons couldn’t have been better, putting him in the company of both Brando and Dean.
Cuckoo’s Nest went on to gross an astonishing $108,981,275, the bulk of that in 1975 dollars (before additional sources of revenue became available, including video, cable, Netflix, and streaming). It ranks eighty-fourth on the list of highest-grossing movies of all time.7 It played to packed houses all over the world; in Sweden it reportedly played in one theater continuously for eleven years, and it is ranked thirty-three in the American Film Institute’s listing One Hundred Years … One Hundred Movies.
JUST BEFORE THE heavy promotion for the film kicked in, Jack was asked by Sam Spiegel to join a number of other major stars and do a cameo in Elia Kazan’s filmed version of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon, with a script by Harold Pinter, loosely (very loosely) based on the life of MGM boy-genius producer Irving Thalberg, who died at the age of thirty-seven. Jack could not say no to the chance to work for one of his idols, Elia Kazan, the only director to have worked with both Brando and James Dean (and who was widely reviled throughout the industry as having given testimony and named names to the House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1950s, a move that all but ruined the rest of his career). Jack had no problems working with Kazan because of politics. “I’m the first friendly Communist in the history of American movies,” Jack jokingly told Andy Warhol.
Joining him in the roster of cameos were Tony Curtis, Robert Mitchum, Donald Pleasence, Ray Milland, Dana Andrews, John Carradine, Jack’s once-blacklisted acting teacher Jeff Corey, and Anjelica. Robert De Niro was cast in the lead as Monroe Stahr, the character Fitzgerald had based on Thalberg, but it soon became apparent during production that Kazan’s heart wasn’t in it. He later confessed that he had done the film (which would be the last he directed) for the money. He was broke, his mother was sick, and his career was moribund. His direction seemed stagy and slow, and despite the stellar roster of performers, the film, which opened in November 1976, bombed at the box office.
JACK KNEW IT was time to pay some real attention to Anjelica, whom he had rarely seen since she left the filming of Cuckoo’s Nest. He sensed that she was upset about his not being around. Because of conflicting schedules their paths hadn’t crossed even once during the filming of Tycoon. To celebrate her birthday, he took a rare detour from his standard daily fare of larded Mexican food—he loved the local L.A. establishments that served the real thing over any of the chains or fast-food joints, and the Mexican sidewalk carts along the streets of Western Avenue.
For the occasion, Jack arranged a special dinner for the two of them at Chasen’s restaurant, the storied white building with green trim on Doheny just south of Santa Monic
a Boulevard, the preferred dining establishment of the Alfred Hitchcocks, the Ronald Reagans, the Jimmy Stewarts, the Dale Wassermans. It was a place Jack rarely frequented, but he knew that Anjelica had been there many times with her father and liked the atmosphere, so he thought it would be a good place to have her party. To join in the celebration, Jack invited Warren Beatty, Bob Evans, David Geffen, Marlo Thomas, Dustin Hoffman, and superagent Sue Mengers, the cream of new Hollywood.
After dinner, Jack took Anjelica for one more course—a fistful of street chimichangas.
THREE MONTHS AFTER Cuckoo’s Nest’s huge U.S. opening, United Artists decided to send Michael Douglas and Jack out on a worldwide publicity tour, during which time the two became even closer than they had been during production. They shared a lot of the same tastes in food, drink (Michael liked alcohol more than Jack), drugs, cigarettes, cigars, and, of course, beautiful young women. They stripped and devoured them like peeling shrimp as they romped through England, Sweden, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and Australia. According to Jack, tongue firmly planted in cheek (and elsewhere), the tour was all about politics, social behavior, and religion. “The Italian interviews were the most lively. I’m a genius at encountering the Marxist dialectic.”