Jack Nicholson: The Early Years

Jack Nicholson: First Interview

7 JaCk nICholson FIrst IntervIew The varied and highly successful film career of Jack Nicholson began in 1958 with The Cry Baby Killer. Before that, the native of Neptune, New Jersey, bounced around studios, doing odd jobs and occasional television shows, such as Divorce Court and Matinee Theatre. After doing The Cry Baby Killer, Nicholson was featured in a series of psycho-exploitation films with titles like The Little Shop of Horrors, Too Soon to Love, The Terror, and The Wild Ride. In the latter film, Nicholson first became acquainted with Monte Hellman, who was a significant influence behind Nicholson’s venture into film production. Together, in 1964, they did back-to-back films in the Philippines, Back Door to Hell and Flight to Fury, with Nicholson scripting the latter. Then in 1965 they coproduced two low-budget Westerns, The Shooting and another Nicholson screenplay titled Ride in the Whirlwind, both of which Nicholson costarred in. Although these films didn’t catapult Nicholson into stardom, they supplied him with a good store of filmmaking knowledge and added a few significant credits. In 1967 Nicholson teamed up with director Richard Rush and cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs to do a Fanfare Films biker classic, Hells Angels on Wheels, in which Nicholson played a disillusioned gas-station attendant who tries to find nirvana atop a Harley-Davidson 1000. In this film, we get our first look at the Nicholson antiheroic, soul-searching loner in quest of the real America. It is Nicholson’s schizophrenic ability to be aloof and concerned at the same time that gives his character an unapproachable level of brilliance. Then, in 1968, Rush and Kovacs again called on Nicholson to star in the Dick Clark production of Psych-Out. The team that worked so successfully in Easy Rider came together for the first time in The Trip. In this film, scripted by Nicholson and starring Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper, Nicholson’s own experiences with LSD JACK NICHOLSON: THE EARLY YEARS 8 are realized in a not-too-successful way on the screen, despite the fact that Peter Fonda called it the most beautiful script he had ever read. Nicholson’s writing efforts also took a beating in the ill-fated experimental 1968 production of Head, starring the Monkees rock group, directed by Bob Rafelson, and coproduced by Rafelson and Nicholson. In the nick of time came the chance to fill in for a fellow actor in another low-budget bike film, called Easy Rider. Needless to say, the film was an astounding success and a revolution in film and netted Nicholson his first Academy Award nomination. In an attempt to salvage an otherwise ludicrous film, a part for Jack Nicholson was written into On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, in hopes of attracting the youth market. It didn’t work, partially because of the writing and partially because of Nicholson’s uninspired performance. His powerful personage, his formula of honesty and virtuosity, are out of place in this dreary, commonplace musical. Adrien Joyce’s profound profile of a disenchanted intellectual offered Nicholson one of his best roles to date and captured for him a second Academy Award nomination for his role of Bobby Dupea in Five Easy Pieces. Nicholson’s directorial debut, Drive, He Said, which he coscripted and coproduced, is a film about alienation. It is so complex that after one viewing of the film the audience is alienated from it. This raises an interesting problem. Is the film successful because we, the audience, don’t give a damn at the end, or is it a failure because we don’t give a damn at the end? Even though the film failed at the box office, Drive, He Said was the best of the campus protest movies. Following Drive, He Said, Nicholson gave a brilliant performance in Mike Nichols’s Carnal Knowledge, in which he played a man in search of the perfect female, oftentimes measured in terms of curves here and inches there. The film deals with frustration and male ideologies, and as a result, Nicholson became a kind of symbol for male chauvinism. Despite the fact that there is little nudity in the film, the subject matter and frank language caused the film to be banned in parts of the country, but eventually even the Georgia Supreme Court ruled the film was not obscene. Nicholson also did a standout cameo in Henry Jaglom’s film A Safe Place. This sometimes uneven film had Nicholson...