Quintessential Jack

by Scott Edwards

  Nicholson’s skills at storytelling and imagery advanced markedly with each work. The extant first draft written script for Head shows a facility for guiding the director; strong descriptive skills to establish setting, character and action; a balance of substantive and stylish dialogue; and particularly a feeling for the cinematic side of the cinema, creating many innovative and striking visual sequences.

  When Hollywood gained a movie star, it lost a promising scenarist. Every scribbler in coffee shops here, there and elsewhere may not truly qualify as “writers,” but six films remain that show that Nicholson certainly qualified as one.

  16

  * * *

  The Occasional Filmmaker

  The whir of the motor, the controlled click of the workprint reel, slowed down and stopped. Groans and a squashed “wup-wup-wup” from the soundtrack, advanced forward and stepped back. Then the slap and cut, like a stapler hit twice, followed by the crisp sound of plastic pulled off the sprockets.

  We travel down the hall, again and again hearing the whirs and clicks, wups and slaps … more whirs and clicks, more wups and slaps. These are the sounds of a filmmaker, unusual to us and unnoticed by them, as they concentrate on the images and sounds.

  What we hear are Moviolas as we pass editing rooms. In the first is a young man working and reworking, obsessively perfecting an artistic statement; in the second, the director wants to bring out the laughs and accentuate the humanity; the third contains a more weary, middle-aged artist who’s trying to salvage a seemingly ill-fated project.

  It could be the BBS office on LaBrea, Columbia Pictures in Culver City, or Paramount Studios in Burbank. The filmmaker in each is the same man, but in different stages and under different conditions with different purposes, the director Jack Nicholson.

  Because he is so strongly associated with acting and being a Hollywood movie star, most may not think of Nicholson as a director. Of course, he only has three official credits (as he’s uncredited for some second unit work on The Terror—though Monte Hellman rejects any notion of Nicholson’s directorial involvement as Corman mythmaking).

  In 1971, Nicholson fulfilled a longtime ambition of filming Drive, He Said, a political, sociological, and artistic statement that went largely ignored. Seven years later, he helmed the western romantic comedy Goin’ South. It was another 12 years before he had to step in to help save the Chinatown sequel The Two Jakes.

  With sixty years in cinema, this serious and important actor directed but three films. He did not act in the first, but starred in the other two. The first was an independent production distributed by Columbia, while the latter were both commercial productions for Paramount. First 1971 … 1978 … 1990 … then over 25 with no signs of ever going back. This is interesting, because the developing artist acted, wrote and directed, appearing to be open to any of those eventualities. Had Easy Rider not been the success that it was, Nicholson may have taken a path similar to colleague and collaborator Henry Jaglom.

  Stuntman-actor Gary Kent described a long drive during which a young Nicholson exposed his frustrations with his career. “I thought he wanted to go strictly acting and that he was producing [Ride in the Whirlwind and The Shooting], because he had to get it done. It was later, on Hells Angels on Wheels, that we drove together from Bakersfield back to L.A. And he told me that he wanted to direct…. I asked what he wanted to do with his life, and that’s when he said, ‘I want to do what Dick was doing [Richard Rush was directing the film].’”

  Nicholson elaborated about “what a hard business film was and what a difficult thing it was.” Kent felt the sentiment was important: “I’ll never forget that drive because he really opened up. And I had the feeling that he really wanted to direct and that was going to be his goal.”1

  * * *

  Drive, He Said was his official directorial debut. He was producer and he co-wrote the screenplay. This was a personal project, Nicholson having earmarked the book years before. And it had basketball as a central subject!

  Thanks to Michael Margotta, who played campus revolutionary Gabriel in the film, this book may very well possess the most comprehensive study available on this work. He is also eminently qualified, both as participant and exponent of the acting craft, to offer his insights. He is Artistic Director of the Actor’s Center–ROMA and former teacher at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute and the Academy of Music and Dramatic Art in New York City. He acted in the youth unrest classics Wild in the Streets and The Strawberry Statement, as well as in 9½ Weeks and Jaglom’s Can She Bake a Cherry Pie? with Drive co-star Karen Black.

  From Rome, Margotta traveled back 40 years to a production as political as artistic. Even the pre-production work was more about issues than art: “We didn’t have rehearsals or meetings regarding the script, except while we were shooting. We went up early—Jack, myself, maybe one or two others—to a demonstration in Oregon against the train shipment of nerve gas that the federal government was storing in the mountains.”2

  Back then, movies could be about something, something that examined current events and war and what matters vs. what doesn’t. A basketball player has doubts about dedicating himself to what is only a game. His roommate has no doubts about dedicating everything he has to avoiding the draft. A professor’s wife has doubts about her marriage and more doubts about her affair with his student, the basketball player with doubts about playing a game and taking it seriously.

  The project was in no way a comfortable shoot on a Hollywood back lot. Margotta related that shooting at the University of Oregon (the school stood in for an unnamed institute of higher learning) “was a pretty radical situation. Just before we arrived in Eugene, students had already burned down the ROTC building on campus so there was this climate of tension in the place. The Feds were investigating…. [T]hen you had someone driving around supposedly in a green pickup truck shooting ‘anyone with long hair for sport’”3 (similar to the events depicted in Easy Rider).

  Drive, He Said features a great opening shot that superbly frames lead actor William Tepper as basketball star Hector, taking a jump shot in slow motion straight on, his vertical jump in the frame as the camera remains static. We don’t see teams, or the court, or a crowd, as expected to set the scene for a sporting event. Instead, this is a close-up, zoomed in enough to add heavy grain (thus enhancing its immediacy), before it pulls back slowly in order to work in other players vaguely, prior to very slowly going to black. As this sequence develops, we also see much-smaller-than-usual opening credits.

  Margotta: “He had some first-timers on Drive. Bill Tepper was working for the first time and Michael Warren (later of Hill Street Blues) also.” Nicholson, too, was a first-timer. “Jack’s style was that he trusted his actors to get results. It was a very free process,” with Margotta then expanding on what this sort of freedom meant:

  Ad lib, yes. And it gave me a chance to explore dimensions of working that I had not experienced before that. In one scene, for instance, I got up on an impulse and walked out of the shot and kept talking, off-camera, and then walked back in again and sat down. I had never done anything like this before…. Anywhere else, had I done something like that, you would have heard, “Cut.” It was very freeing to know we could work this way. Hell, it was a revelation. Also, we invented a number of situations on the spot.4

  The film intersects the worlds of college basketball with campus unrest; affairs of convenience with destruction of the mind; and the battle between order (represented by the basketball team and the military) and disorder (draft protests and a hapless attempt to beat the draft). Top-billed Tepper is a droopy-eyed Elliott Gould with a hook shot. Bruce Dern as his coach is perfectly cast due to his competitive intensity and personal background as a jock, having been a high school track star and runner at the University of Pennsylvania. Karen Black plays the wife of a professor portrayed by Robert Towne, the screenwriter of Nicholson’s The Last Detail, Chinatown, The Missouri Breaks and The Two Jakes.

  A personal
letter from director Jack Nicholson thanking actress Karen Black for her work on his debut Drive, He Said.

  Nicholson chose Black in part because of his comfort with the co-star of his own breakout feature Five Easy Pieces, as well as due to her command and versatility. The director thanked the actor in a note to “Blackee” after the production wrap, writing: “You are the greatness that is Black and the true wonder of it is the beauty of it. All this in addition to your great art and person.”5

  Michael Margotta portrays Hector’s roommate Gabriel, who looks astonishingly like Dean Stockwell in Nicholson’s Psych-Out, from hair to headscarf. It’s almost as if Nicholson designed Margotta’s appearance for this film as a younger version of Dave in the earlier hippie exploiter. Margotta considered the process organic, allowing for exploration. “Jack gave the feeling in general of being supportive and open and having a collaborative spirit.”6

  Though a film of import and message, the coverage of the games and scrimmages was deft, which could only be accomplished by someone who knew both the visual medium of cinema and the physical medium of the sport. It looks real, with energy that moves and propels, using angles, cuts and slow-motion effects to follow the action in smart, knowing ways. The game environment, complete with crowd, band, cheerleaders, concessions stand, National Anthem and even a pickpocket, makes the games feel real, as only a true fan of the game could.

  The contrast between those serious about playing a game with those revolutionary students who turn a game into performance art as part of their deadly serious war against the war, is clear and sensible. These protestors, these guerrilla agitators create “happenings” that may have appeared dated by the time of the film’s release. Hector’s conflict with Dern, as his coach, and Coach Bullion’s straight-laced reaction is interesting in light of Dern’s later role as a returning Vietnam Marine captain who commits suicide in Coming Home.

  Karen Black’s ballet class is the third environment in which we travel. She seeks expression and the need to establish her own identity, entering into what she likely sees as a silly affair with campus darling, basketball star Hector, as a way to dance around the restrictive academic bureaucracy and try to wake up her clueless professor husband.

  Could this teacher seem any more wimpy and insubstantial? If he were self-absorbed, that would have been understandable, but Richard is more wrapped up in Hector and his in-class and on-court performance than about his own wife. Towne is first seen at a car where Tepper and Black are clearly getting it on, yet he actually asks the younger man to take her home as a favor.

  In the BBS America Lost and Found documentary, Nicholson points out that this scene, shot in enough dark to obscure any visual sexuality, broke through with Olive’s “I’m coming!” and what he called “contra-nudity,” as they appear fully dressed, almost resembling two bears.

  To cement his emasculated impression, Richard is shown spending a good deal of time and effort blow-drying his hair. He’s inarticulate when Hector visits his and Olive’s home, actually sending his wife to her suitor. Finally, in a nice and fluffy bathrobe, Towne becomes this film’s Jim Backus, the pathetic dad symbolically dressed in an apron like James Dean’s dad in Rebel Without a Cause.

  Drive, He Said has been a lost film, unseen and unappreciated, an oddity to many or a bit of trivia used to stump those unaware that Nicholson had ever directed a film. Included in the Criterion Collection’s BBS Story Blu-ray box set, this obscurity can now be appreciated for its lyrical beauty and offbeat, suitably flawed storyline.

  The editing is masterful, with Nicholson and a team of four editors creating a flow that doesn’t rely on any need for completion in action, sentences or scenes. The structure instead is based around providing just enough material, with what’s sufficient becoming more effective than what everything would have been, so viewers travel through the narrative rather than being weighed down by it.

  Jack Nicholson in control on his feature film debut, an adaptation of the Jeremy Larner novel Drive, He Said (1971) shown with UCLA champion Bill Sweek. Though much of the film involves a swirl of relationships amidst campus unrest about the Vietnam war, the director may have been drawn by the opportunity depict the energy and majesty of his beloved sport of basketball.

  Nicholson directs with assurance and style. One transitional scene, which depicts the psychological warfare that Hector is experiencing, shows the player yelling on top of a concrete wall (complete with the requisite “HD Stanton” graffiti) as he holds a basketball, in a composition that is Antonioniesque in scope.

  With director of photography Bill Butler, Nicholson shoots the first big game, focusing on a midair collision shot that’s undercranked and grainy and has a striking verité effectiveness. Later, the beginning of another game is shown in poetic slow motion, with the game sequence carrying over a set-up that captures the crowd during “The Star Spangled Banner.” Slow motion then segues into standard speed and its actual synched sound to depict a fight scene and Hector’s ejection.

  A curious post-production touch occurs when Dern, off-screen, tells his players, “Don’t want to see any bush behavior,” to which Bucky responds, “We shoulda brought a cannon.” Except that this most clearly is director Nicholson himself, via voiceover dub, an audio cameo à la Orson Welles (who looped many parts in his foreign productions).

  The contrast between the world of the basketball team and that of the antiwar students, in particular Hector vs. Gabriel, supplies a recurring theme to the movie. Hector becomes so dissociated from playing a game as an honest pursuit that he cannot take a meeting with professional team officials seriously. As he interviews with David Ogden Stiers and B.J. Merholz, the team’s star negotiates for better quality hot dogs at the games.

  The protestor theater “class” seemed fittingly dazed out and incoherent, but they certainly took themselves seriously. Yes, their cause was important, but these students came off as self-important and humorless.

  Gabriel will go to any length to avoid going to war, so he prepares for his military physical by chain-popping pills and depriving himself of any sleep. Margotta’s draft test scene might seem somewhat over-the-top today, but it works both in terms of truth and in providing some comic relief to balance the bodily dramatics that the actor described as “taking the character to an inexcusable limit.”

  His induction sequence stands as a highlight of the film, pushing the boundary between commentary on the process shown and the comedic, immense reaction of the character in a way that would “create a lot of pressure and give the final snap.” Margotta further related,

  There was a story behind the psychiatrist scene. In the middle of the scene, Jack sent in a guy from the crew to ask if he could install a phone. And he stays in the scene. I recognized him as a guy from the crew, and the phone routine harkened back to the day I auditioned for the film. The casting director picked up a phone during the audition, and there were a lot of people in the room, and I stopped immediately even though I wasn’t hearing the conversation and I was pissed that anyone would do such a thing. I think Jack remembered that, because that was the same scene I was doing.7

  The adventurous nature of the shoot extended to the breakthrough depiction of male nudity, a message important to Nicholson. His full-frontal views are in no way fleeting. An early shower scene breaks the barrier, while Gabriel’s full-on breakdown follows the character as he streaks across campus to break into a science lab and release test animals and reptiles.

  According to Margotta, “We talked a great deal about that nudity sequence. Jack had a way of putting the contradictions into the ratings system: ‘It’s okay to shoot or stab a woman in the breast, but it’s not okay to show male genitalia.’”8

  Four years earlier, Nicholson wrote the screenplay for The Trip. Star Peter Fonda caresses and studies an orange. He extends it in front of himself and proclaims that he’s holding the sun in his hands. He says it is “alive” and he believes it. In Drive, He Said, the co-screenwriter and director
shows this film’s protagonist, Hector, fondling an orange in evident connection to that earlier scene.

  Hector visits Olive (Karen Black) and Richard (Robert Towne) in an effectively emotional scene with the participants in their love triangle that is nothing about their love triangle. Olive wears an olive green wool hat and Hector covers his view from the camera with an orange for a remarkable visual image that is spotlighted on the film’s one-sheet poster graphic. In fact, the movie’s trailer presents this shot as especially significant, cropping in on the image artificially through an optical effect at its conclusion.

  At one time, the orange is like Hector’s head, as he rolls the fruit back and forth in front of his face; it’s like seeing a navel on a pregnant belly, perhaps giving birth to a more mature man beyond the limitations of a hoops star; and it’s like a basketball itself, the tool by which Hector has gained identity and significance. He moves it to and fro as if pondering his future—with the ball as its center or as if exposing the real person behind it—continuing to play the game or to become manifest in a new and independent way.

  This striking visual may reflect a similar impression as surrealist painter René Magritte’s The Son of Man, which shows a self-portrait of the artist’s face largely obscured by a green apple. Magritte explained, “Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see,” creating an interest in what we cannot see.9

  Oddly, certain conventions of the horror genre surfaced upon my subsequent re-watching of this film. After Gabriel flips out and escapes his home (but not until destroying Nicholson-nemesis, the television), he’s shown as if frozen in place in a sand dune with his arms outstretched toward the sky (“a Christ-like image” as Margotta put it) in a way that’s an eerily similar premonition to Nicholson’s death in The Shining.