by Marc Eliot
Kirk eventually came to accept Forman as the director, even believing his (true) story that he had never received the book. But as for not playing McMurphy, it put a fresh distance between him and Michael. It was, according to Kirk, “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 years of telling everybody what a great role it is … now I’m too old.… I could still play that part.”
Forty years later, the pain was still there. “I bought the book from Ken Kesey, I paid Dale Wasserman to write the stage play.… I thought I would get to play it in the movies … it was not to be. It was the low point for me … [Michael] was the producer, he should have insisted that I play the part.”
Michael always put all the blame on Forman for the decision: “The director makes the casting calls. Whenever there’s a good part and you don’t get it, it’s a disappointment because there are so few out there. That was what was so hard about it.”
THE FIRST TWO obvious choices that Michael and Zaentz approached to play McMurphy, Marlon Brando and Gene Hackman, both immediately said no. So did James Caan, an early favorite of the producers. Miloš Forman, for some reason, was “also fascinated with Burt Reynolds,” Michael recalls, and wanted him for McMurphy because he thought he had cheap charisma. “Before Miloš Forman got involved, I was talking to Hal Ashby about directing the film and Hal was pushing Jack [Nicholson]…. Jack had done passive characters in Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces, but when I saw him [at an advance screening] as the flamboyant yet sensitive shore patrolman in The Last Detail [1973], I was sure he could play the part.”
Michael knew Jack casually through his girlfriend, Anjelica Huston, daughter of famed film director John Huston, yet another director Michael had considered for the film. “Michael Douglas talked to me early on about One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” Anjelica Huston recalled. “I don’t know if I was the instrumental factor in that, but I mentioned to Jack that Michael wanted to see him about it.”
When Michael finally did meet with Nicholson, he said he was interested, especially when he learned that McMurphy was going to be less of a cowboy type (as in the novel) than a more realistic street person. However, Michael and Zaentz had to wait in line, as Nicholson’s recent run of hits had made him the hottest star in Hollywood. Ashby wanted to use him again right away (even before the release of The Last Detail) to play Woody Guthrie in the biopic Bound for Glory, but Nicholson turned it down.4 Bernardo Bertolucci also wanted Jack to play Dashiell Hammett’s Continental Op in Red Harvest. Nicholson turned that down as well. Tony Richardson then offered Jack the lead in The Bodyguard, based on a script Richardson had co-written with Sam Shepard. That project initially appealed to Nicholson, who gave it a potential yes—until he’d read Bo Goldman’s adaptation of Kesey’s novel and said yes to that instead (so powerful was Nicholson at the time that without him attached, neither Red Harvest nor The Bodyguard were able to keep their original deals alive at their respective studios).5
As it happened, Jack, like Kirk, had read Kesey’s novel before it came out, and had tried himself to option it for the movies in 1963. However, Nicholson had not been able to match the $47,000 put up at the time—by Kirk Douglas.
While Nicholson was ready to sign on, Zaentz and Michael were nowhere near going into production. Then Polanski’s Chinatown came Nicholson’s way, and he was busy filming that for the rest of 1973. After it opened in June 1974, he maintained he was still interested in Cuckoo’s Nest, but the film still wasn’t ready to go, so Jack went instead into Mike Nichols’s production of The Fortune, co-starring Nicholson’s buddy Warren Beatty, with a script by Carole Eastman, who had also done the screenplay for Five Easy Pieces.6
Once The Fortune was completed, Jack promised Michael that if it was ready, Cuckoo’s Nest would be his next project, despite the fact that Jack now had some real doubts about his own ability to play McMurphy. He had told a friend, Helen Dudar, just before he officially signed on that “the starting problem with Cuckoo was that everybody thought I was born to play the part, and in my mind it was going to be difficult for me. I felt, ‘They already think I’m supposed to be great in this, and I’m not sure.’ ” As he explained further, the real reason he took the role was to prove to himself he could pull it off. (To do so he agreed to a small salary and a percentage of the profits to help get it made, a deal that eventually earned him millions.)
THE NEXT IMPORTANT piece of the puzzle was casting the role of Nurse Ratched. All the top actresses of the day—Anne Bancroft, Jane Fonda, Faye Dunaway—said no. The next two on Michael and Zaentz’s list were Geraldine Page, best known for her stage work, who turned them down, and Angela Lansbury, not yet the major American star she was to become a decade later thanks to the long-running TV series Murder, She Wrote.
It was Forman who suggested a relatively unknown actress by the name of Louise Fletcher, whose first major credited film was Robert Altman’s just-released Thieves Like Us, which anticipated Ridley Scott’s 1991 Thelma and Louise. Forman called her in to read, and he, Michael, and Zaentz all agreed she was the actress they were looking for. They signed her on the spot.
Michael then sat beside Forman for every one of the nine hundred auditions held to cast the all-important ensemble. They discovered their Bromden on a tip that took them to Mount Rainier National Park, where Will Sampson was working as an assistant warden. They offered him the part. He quit his job at the park, packed his bag, and left for location.
At Michael’s insistence. Danny DeVito was quickly added to the group as Martini. Early on, while both were still total unknowns, DeVito and Michael had made a pact that whoever “made it” first would bring the other along for the ride.7
Most of the other actors chosen for the ensemble were relatively unknown, although some would go on to a certain measure of stardom after the film: William Redfield as Dale Harding, Brad Dourif as Bill Bibbit, Sydney Lassick as Charlie Cheswick, Christopher Lloyd as Max Taber, Dean R. Brooks as Dr. John Spivey, William Duell as Jim Sefelt, Vincent Schiavelli as Frederickson, Delos V. Smith Jr. as Scanlon, Michael Berryman as Ellis, Nathan George as Attendant Washington, Mews Small as Candy, Scatman Crothers as Orderly Turkle, and Louisa Moritz as Rose.
By the spring of 1973, Michael and Zaentz were ready to begin production on the film. They made their official announcement in the May 12, 1973, edition of the Hollywood Reporter: “Michael Douglas will spend his summer hiatus from Streets of San Francisco producing [the] One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest movie with Saul Zaentz, head of Berkeley-based Fantasy Records. Michael’s father, Kirk, starred in the play on Broadway in 1964 but neither Kirk or Michael will appear in the movie.”
They were on the record now, there was no turning back. At this point, Michael wanted to drop out of The Streets of San Francisco to devote all of his time to making the film. But not only would Quinn Martin not release Michael from his contractual obligation to play Steve Keller, a character very popular with audiences, he “promoted” Keller to full inspector. With an aging Malden unable to keep up the show’s snap-snap pace, Martin shifted most of the action to Michael, in effect switching their roles so that Michael’s was the main character and Malden’s the supporting one. Not that Michael couldn’t have gotten out of his contract if he had pushed hard enough, but it wasn’t his nature. He was too passive to break his contract with Quinn and too attached to Malden to hurt him by leaving the series and endangering its continuing run. This was, Michael knew, likely Malden’s swan song as an actor.
Nor was he able to leave Brenda despite the fact that their relationship was over. By now, with Michael’s schedule loaded with the series and the movie, he couldn’t have spent very much time with her even if he had wanted to. As Brenda recalls, there was a passivity on both their parts that had kept them together: “I think the warning signs had been around for some time. We should have split long before we did, but there was a reluctance by both of us to ca
ll an end to it. We had been through a lot together, at a particular time in our lives when the support and encouragement of a partner really mattered.” True enough, except that now Michael had a new partner of sorts, Saul Zaentz, and a child he was raising with him called One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
Brenda recalls, “We were a beautiful couple. People loved us. Mike was charming, brilliant: women fell over him, men admired him. And I am, naturally, a good complement to such a man. But when you’re done with a man, you are done. I just began to find it boring with Mike. I realized he wasn’t the man I was going to marry, and my relationship changed at that point … and I don’t think he really wanted to marry me. Everybody but us seemed to think that marriage was a good idea.”
Michael completed the second season of episodes for The Streets of San Francisco—twenty-three mini-movies, two less than the first season (not counting the pilot)—just as United Artists agreed to distribute Cuckoo’s Nest for Bigstick, the final crucial piece of the puzzle. Michael would go on to do another two seasons of the show, plus the first two episodes of the series’s fifth (and final) season. During the making of Cuckoo’s Nest, Michael was allowed to film his scenes in batches. But when it became clear that Michael’s future was in movies, Quinn did let him out of his contract, replacing the character of Steve Keller with a new one played by Richard Hatch.8 After the series ended, Malden was reduced to hawking American Express cards in a series of commercials in which he closely approximated the character of Mike Stone and admonished audiences not to leave their homes without it.
By then, Michael had become the most successful feature film producer in Hollywood, perhaps of all time.
1 A year earlier Zaentz had invested heavily in Daryl Duke’s Payday, a modern-day Western starring Rip Torn. According to Dennis McDougal, Zaentz’s Fantasy Films brought Payday in at $746,000—$62,000 under budget. The film made no money, but Zaentz benefited financially from the tax shelter it provided. Part of his reason for wanting to put up the entire budget for Cuckoo’s Nest was the fact that it allowed him to renew his film-based tax shelter.
2 The film lost both nominations to Claude Lelouch’s A Man and a Woman (France).
3 The film lost to Sergei Bondarchuk’s War and Peace (Russia).
4 Ashby then offered the part to Bob Dylan, who also passed. The role eventually went to David Carradine.
5 Red Harvest did not get made. The Bodyguard was reconceived for Steve McQueen and Diana Ross. The deal fell apart because McQueen would not accept second-position billing after Diana Ross. The film was finally made in 1992 with Kevin Costner and Whitney Houston.
6 She wrote both The Fortune and Five Easy Pieces under the pseudonym Adrien Joyce.
7 DeVito had previously played the role of Martini in an Off-Broadway revival of the play.
8 Michael appeared in 98 of the series’s 120 episodes.
CHAPTER 8
It was magical. It was pure. Because we did it outside of the system, and we didn’t know what we were doing, there was an innocence on the part of all of us.
—MICHAEL DOUGLAS
FILMING ON CUCKOO’S NEST BEGAN IN JANUARY 1975, on location at Oregon State Hospital in Salem, where the events that had formed the nucleus of Kesey’s novel actually took place. To obtain the location, Michael had personally prevailed upon the hospital’s current superintendent, Dean R. Brooks, who happened to have loved the book, felt the system that had produced it was so much more enlightened now, and thought that the film would be a historical look back at how far they’d come. (It didn’t hurt that as part of the deal Brooks was given a small part as the superintendent.) Brooks even allowed Forman to spend six weeks working on the final script while living in the institution and let two cast members sit in on actual therapy sessions.1
Because of that exposure, Forman discovered something that would help his ensemble cast avoid the easy clichés of “playing crazy”: “We think of drooling and people going booga-booga and climbing the wall. These are exceptional cases. It’s like playing alcoholics. Only naive actors play drunkenness with—blah—big sloppy gestures. Real alcoholics are desperately trying to act sober. It is the same with mentally disturbed people. They are basically normal except for one thing which may not show up for weeks or may be so subtle you can hardly notice it.… In Czechoslovakia, we consider Kafka a very funny man. A humorist. I first realized that Americans think differently when I saw Orson Well[e]s’ The Trial [1962]. I think one of the reasons it didn’t come across is because he made it a deadly serious film. And if you read the book, it is very very funny.” Apparently Forman thought he was making a comedy—admittedly, a dark one, but in classic European fashion a comedy nonetheless.
To film Cuckoo’s Nest, Zaentz and Michael hired cinematographer Haskell Wexler, whose previous credits included such blue-chip productions as Mike Nichols’s 1966 Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, for which Wexler won an Oscar for his cinematography; Norman Jewison’s 1967 In the Heat of the Night (which garnered Wexler another Best Picture Oscar); Jewison’s 1968 Thomas Crown Affair with Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway; and two edgier films that probably got him Cuckoo’s Nest—1969’s controversial, counterculture Medium Cool, which Wexler filmed, wrote, and directed, and George Lucas’s 1974 smash hit American Graffiti, which, like Cuckoo’s Nest, was essentially an ensemble production.
However, early in, stylistic differences developed between Forman and Wexler. Whereas Wexler was familiar with how to shoot group setups and shoots—he had learned a lot from George Lucas’s precision lining up of shots—Forman was more freewheeling with his directorial eye and heavily improvisational in his mise-en-scène. Looking for spontaneity, Forman had relatively little worked out before he ordered the camera to roll, and he was always seeking out the comic bits that developed among the inmates themselves and between them and McMurphy.
Wexler thought the film required a moodier and more precise look, but Forman continually rejected his suggestions. Push eventually came to shove, and Forman insisted it was either him or Wexler—they could not continue working together. Reluctantly, Zaentz and Michael let Haskell go. Zaentz rather easily assumed the role of “bad cop” and fired the cinematographer; Michael was the “good cop” who expressed deep sadness and genuine regret. Wexler was replaced by Bill Butler (who, as it happened, had replaced Wexler once before, when he was fired from Frances Ford Coppola’s 1974 The Conversation).2
Cuckoo’s Nest was proving extremely difficult to make. There were problems with lighting, problems with sound—it’s always more difficult to shoot on location than it is on a sound stage, and there were problems with Jack Nicholson’s growing empathy with the real inmates. It was said that Jack was so moved by what he saw that he personally used the finished film to try to convince then-Governor Ronald Reagan to institute reforms to California’s housing and treatment for the mentally disturbed. Jack was not alone in his sympathetic feelings for the inmates; many were given minor technical jobs by Forman during production and paid for their work.
The acting-school tenet of staying in character that the film lent itself to led to a peculiar camaraderie among the actors playing inmates. They never broke character, even at meals. To make it easier for them (but more difficult on the technicians), except for one boating scene, the film was shot in sequence.
Nicholson, ever the basketball junkie, rented an apartment near the hospital so he could spend evenings and weekends watching college basketball at Corvallis or Eugene or even an occasional Blazers game in Portland. But as he told Newsday, during much of the shooting he felt more like a prisoner than an actor. “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.”
He had showed up at Oregon State Hospital two weeks early, managed to convince Brooks to let him mingle with the most disturbed patients, ate with them in the mess hall, and was even allowed to watch the administration of shock treatments to some of them. During production, as he continued to get close to several of the real patients, he began to wonder, just as Kesey had, who the real inmates were: who was crazy and who was sane. “Usually, I don’t have much trouble slipping out of a film role,” Jack said. “But here, I don’t go home from a movie studio. I go home from a mental institution. And it becomes harder to create a separation between reality and make-believe.” It was even harder for Anjelica Huston, who had come to Oregon to stay with him during filming but couldn’t take Jack’s total immersion in his character and soon packed her bags and returned to L.A.
By the middle of the eleven-week shoot, Zaentz and Michael, struggling mightily to keep the film on schedule, began to feel the pressure and started to take it out on each other. They disagreed on what seemed like every detail, often out loud in front of the cast and crew, and more than once nearly came to blows. Zaentz was forever guarding the budget and complaining Michael was spending too much money, while Michael was looking for perfection from his actors, director, and cinematographer and was willing to give them all the time they needed to find it. And there were real-life tragedies that nobody could have foreseen: actor Billy Redfield was diagnosed with leukemia during filming. He died ten months after the release of the film.