by Marc Eliot
Jack had also agreed to help out with the script of another psychedelic movie for AIP, Psych-Out, directed by Richard Rush and filmed by László Kovács, the same team that had directed and filmed Hells Angels on Wheels. The film was officially written by E. Hunter Willett and Betty Ulius, adapted from an original story, and, despite Jack’s input, they won the valuable WGA (Writers Guild of America) credit. It burned Jack that even though he had put up a fight to get his name included in the writing credits, he couldn’t get enough support from Rush and Kovács, and his name was left off.2 The cast included AIP and Corman regulars Susan Strasberg, Bruce Dern, Adam Roarke, Jack, and Henry Jaglom, a transplanted East Coast newcomer to Hollywood’s independent film scene, a wannabe writer-director learning the business via the Corman/AIP route.
Jack was immediately drawn to Jaglom; he was smart, articulate, and obviously a mover. He liked Jaglom’s knowledge of film and his ability to slice through Hollywood’s invisible wall between the outsiders and the insiders as easily as a knife through warm butter. And Henry liked everything about Jack that everybody else liked: his charm, his smile, his intellectual strength, his acting intensity, and his love of a good time.
One evening after work, Jaglom ran into Jack, who was hanging out stoned and alone at the Old World ice cream parlor on Sunset Boulevard. Jaglom was with Karen Black, an actress he’d met in New York and brought out to L.A. to find her movie parts. He introduced her to Jack. According to Black, “Our eyes met, something happened, and he wound up walking me back to my little apartment in Hollywood that I had recently moved into. I was really poor. There were a lot of kids in the complex my house was in so I put a little teeter-totter in my living room. It only got about a foot off the floor. No sooner did we get to my place than Jack went straight for the teeter-totter. He got on one side and I got on the other. I remember we stared into each other’s eyes, and he said, ‘Blackie’—he always called me ‘Blackie’—I might be interested in you.’ That was fine, except that I was interested at the time in [actor] Peter Kastner and told Jack so. Besides, I think I was too fat for Jack. He really liked those skinny blond twenty-year-old model-type actresses, like Mimi Machu, whom I thought he was going out with at the time anyway.”
One day not long after, Jack took an incoming call from Mimi, long distance. She was phoning from Florida and her message was short and sweet. They were finished. Jack heard the click in his ear as the phone went dead. Overcome with emotion, he hung up the phone as he fought back the tears. “I was with her for … in love, and when she dumped on me, I couldn’t even hear her name mentioned without breaking into a cold sweat.” He didn’t know what happened, but he was sure it had something to do with another man. Or woman. It was okay for him to proposition Karen Black, but the thought of Mimi with someone else ripped him apart.
He was inconsolable. To try to get his mind off Mimi, he spent several nights sitting alone in various screening rooms, watching advance prints of other studios’ films, or at Doug Weston’s nightclub the Troubadour, on Santa Monica and Doheny, just east of Beverly Hills and adjacent to the super-hip Dan Tana’s restaurant. The Troubadour’s front bar was the center of the L.A. social scene and the heart of the so-called California soft rock sound. It was filled at all hours with musicians: the Everly Brothers, Linda Ronstadt, Don Henley and Glenn Frey before they were Eagles, and a lot of young actors and actresses and their agents. This was a new scene for Jack, and he loved it. He easily fell in with the musicians, and they helped alleviate the pain of Mimi’s kiss-off.
PSYCH-OUT’S PLOT HAD something to do with a deaf flower child (Strasberg) looking for her lost hippie brother (Dern), who is accompanied by Jack. Music from the likes of Strawberry Alarm Clock and The Storybook dotted the soundtrack. The film was produced by a young up-and-comer, Dick Clark, a TV rock-and-roll hot-shot looking to expand into movies. Coincidentally, he was the one at the WGA hearing whose testimony, that Jack’s material was too far-out and Willett’s and Ulius’s wasn’t, had lost Jack his valuable screen credit.
The film did not do well, and Clark, who would go on to be an extremely powerful producer on television with an uncanny ability to sense what would appeal to across-the-board audiences and what wouldn’t, claimed the reason was that the hippie pot-smoking generation had already morphed into the rougher heroin-and-coke scene, that the utopia of early innocent hippiedom had collided with the real world of Vietnam, heroin, cocaine, and Hells Angels. He was right. By the time Psych-Out was released, box-office flower power was a thing of the past.
It was another bitter failure for Jack. He began seriously thinking about giving up acting altogether and concentrating solely on writing. Or maybe give up the whole business and look for a real job that paid a decent salary.
Fred Roos, meanwhile, had moved on to television and landed a position as a network sitcom-casting director. To help Jack out, he put him in a few shows, work that he abhorred but needed for rent money. Roos got him two episodes of The Andy Griffith Show. “I always sort of stunk on television,” Jack later recalled.
But even as he was kicking shit in Mayberry, a hurricane of creative change was about to rip through Hollywood. Peter Fonda had since partnered with Dennis Hopper on Fonda’s as yet unproduced biker film that, after a couple of false starts, when they finally got it made, would go on to become a cultural phenomenon that changed the way Hollywood looked at independent films and the people who made them.
Out of it would emerge a character actor in a relatively small part who wasn’t even supposed to be in the movie at all, to become Hollywood’s newest overnight star sensation.
His name was Jack Nicholson.
* * *
1 Some foreign distributors expressed interest in acquiring the film, but a legal dispute Corman had with his backers over the foreign rights prevented it from happening for several years. Playing only in Paris, the film became something of an underground sensation.
2 Screen credit is important in Hollywood for negotiating future fees.
CHAPTER
“Being stoned takes a lot of your energy away, and that’s difficult. The only thing I can really say being stoned has helped me with creatively is writing … it’s easier to entertain yourself mentally. It produces a lot of shit, too.”
—JACK NICHOLSON
THE PROJECT THAT EVENTUALLY BECAME 1969’S EASY RIDER BEGAN years earlier with two separate sets of friends who didn’t know each other but had one thing in common; they all wanted to make movies. Thirty-five-year-old Berton “Bert” Schneider and Bob Rafelson (“Curly Bob” or “Curly” in Jackspeak) were the suits, well-off film industry businessmen who longed to make art; thirty-one-year-old Dennis Hopper and twenty-eight-year-old Peter Fonda were the rebels who disliked mainstream Hollywood but longed to make mainstream money.
Bert Schneider, basketball-tall, Malibu blond, steel-blue-eyed, and movie-star good-looking, had a golden Hollywood connection. He was the son of Abraham Schneider, who, in 1958, following the death of the legendary iron-fisted Harry “King” Cohn, took over as president of Columbia Pictures. A year later the senior Schneider also assumed the presidency of Screen Gems, Columbia’s TV division, and brought in his son, Bert, to run it and serve as its treasurer. But Bert was not satisfied. He dreamed of producing movies like the Europeans did, personal films filled with power and emotion.
His good friend Bob Rafelson, the son of a successful milliner, had bouncer-broad shoulders, sinister dark hair, and unconventional good looks. He had longed to be a legitimate member of the beat generation, but family pressure mandated that he go to college and get a good-paying job, if not making hats, then doing something productive. Rafelson dutifully attended Dartmouth, majoring in philosophy. After graduation he was drafted and stationed in Japan, where in his down time he worked part-time as a disk jockey, translating Japanese films, and was an advisor to the Shochiku Film Company. In 1959, upon completion of active duty, he returned to the States, married his high school sweetheart, and foun
d a job writing for New York’s pre-PBS Channel 13, including Play of the Week, produced by David Susskind. In 1962 he moved with his wife, Toby, to Los Angeles, where he eventually landed a job at Revue Productions, the TV branch of MCA, and worked under the personal supervision of studio head Lew Wasserman. When he had a falling-out with Wasserman, Rafelson moved to Screen Gems, where he met and befriended Bert Schneider.
One time, during a mutual whining session over their creative frustrations with the corporate film business, Schneider suggested they start their own independent company. They quit their Screen Gems jobs and formed Raybert, a production house with a catchy name, no projects, and a single employee, Steve Blauner, Schneider’s best friend from childhood, a full-on bald-headed hippie with a long straggly beard and beads around his neck. He had been Bobby Darin’s road manager before joining Raybert.
One day in 1965 Rafelson had a brainstorm. A big Beatles fan, he stood up from his desk, walked into Blauner’s office, and grandly announced, “I want to make A Hard Day’s Night as a TV show!”
Television, he knew from his brief time working at Screen Gems, was sorely in need of fresh programming that spoke to a younger audience. In the sixties, years before the 1981 arrival of MTV, except for shows like Ed Sullivan’s Sunday night ritual hour of reflective pop culture, rock and roll hardly existed on the small tube. Rafelson regularly attended film screenings, and often ran into Jack Nicholson at them. Jack was on all the lists and tried to see as many films as he could. According to Rafelson, “When I liked a picture, I’d stand in the dark and applaud and whistle like mad [and] I noticed that another person was doing the same thing.” That was Jack. One time the two looked at each other, laughed, and decided to go for coffee and talk about the film they had just seen. “I’m a New Wave baby,” Jack said later on. “So I got very stimulated by foreign film. All the great moviemakers, Truffaut, Godard, Resnais, Bresson, Vigo … These filmmakers woke my generation up to the broadness of the medium …” Rafelson asked Jack what he did for a living, and Jack said he was a screenwriter who did a lot of scripts for Roger Corman, and occasionally some acting too.
Each was impressed by the other’s knowledge of film, and they soon discovered they were fellow travelers. When they finished their impromptu meeting, they exchanged numbers and agreed to stay in touch.
SCHNEIDER KNEW exactly where to get the $225,000 they needed to make the pilot for the TV show. He went directly to his father and easily persuaded him to have Screen Gems give him a development deal for something he called The Monkees. Rafelson, meanwhile, was a big fan of the Lovin’ Spoonful and had originally wanted them to star in the show as themselves, but the band, which had a string of successful singles, wanted too much money and all the royalties from any original music they contributed to the show, and refused to grant permission to use any of their hits as part of the series. He then decided it would be easier and cheaper to create a new group and simply lease pop tunes from the writing stable at the Brill Building, the famous Manhattan songwriting mecca. To handle the acquisition of songs, Raybert entered into a deal with Don Kirshner, the head of the music division of Screen Gems. Kirshner then used some of the best songwriters in the business to write tunes for the group, including Carole King and Gerry Goffin (“Pleasant Valley Sunday”), Neil Diamond (“I’m a Believer”), and Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart (“Last Train to Clarksville”).
The next step was to find four boys to play the members of the band. On September 8, 1965, Bert placed the first of three days of ads in Daily Variety and the Hollywood Reporter:
Madness!! Auditions.
Folk & Roll Musicians—Singers for acting roles in new TV Series. Running Parts for 4 insane boys, age 17–21.
Must come down for interview.
Out of the 437 hopefuls who showed up at Raybert’s offices to audition, Bert, Rafelson, and Blauner settled on an obscure folksinger named Peter Tork, starving guitarist Michael Nesmith, and British stage performer Davy Jones, who had played the Artful Dodger in the West End production of Oliver! and also had a career as a jockey. Micky Dolenz, the fourth member of the ersatz band and a professional actor, managed to skip the cattle call in favor of a private audition with Schneider and Rafelson and was quickly added to the group.
The Monkees debuted on NBC September 12, 1966, and ran for two seasons (fifty-eight episodes), until March 25, 1968. By then, the band had become a pop phenomenon, having sold 23 million albums during the show’s run, and made Schneider, Rafelson, Don Kirshner, and all the hired songwriters into millionaires several times over.1 All except for the Monkees themselves, who were salaried actors, didn’t write their own music, and were barred from the studio when their vocals were mixed in with the music tracks. Predictably, the boys felt both exploited and trapped.
By the start of the show’s second season, the four actors who played the Monkees weren’t the only ones disenchanted with the show. Schneider and Rafelson were as well. They saw it slowly taken over by Kirshner, who to their minds had destroyed their hip, satirical concept and turned it into one of the most predictable and boring TV sitcoms of all time, sticky and blown out of proportion with what came to be known as “bubble-gum music.”
Rafelson had one last desperate trick up his sleeve. He decided to make a feature film starring these same Monkees, in the style he had originally intended the show to be rather than the lame imitation it became. Micky Dolenz: “We all agreed we didn’t want to do a ninety-minute version of the Monkees TV show. We wanted to do something we couldn’t do on television, to get out there a little bit.”
TV had given Raybert money and position in Hollywood; now Schneider and Rafelson wanted to validate it by making a movie. To do so, Schneider knew he would need the coolest, hippest writer around. After going through lists of names and unable to find anyone who satisfied the both of them, Rafelson then remembered the fellow he had met at the foreign film screenings who said he was a screenwriter for Roger Corman. Bob got in touch with Jack, and after a brief meeting at Raybert’s offices, Schneider asked him if he was sure he could write this kind of material. Jack said, confidently and with a bit of an edge, “I can write any movie about anything.” Schneider and Rafelson had especially loved his script for The Trip and told Jack they were looking for that same psychedelic trippiness for their deconstruction of The Monkees. After they all agreed on a title—the smirky sex/drug double entendre Head, Jack was officially hired.
There was something else besides a love for foreign filmes that Jack and Bob had in common. They both lusted after young women. Rafelson was a notorious ladies’ man, despite the fact that he was, on the surface at least, still happily married to Toby. He preferred young, willing, and beautiful blondes, of which there was no shortage in Hollywood. Jack was less selective as long as they were young and hot. They began foraging into the seamy side of the Hollywood night hunting for women.
During the writing of the script, Jack, Bob, and Bert regularly got stoned and dropped acid together. From the beginning, the screenplay was a drugged-up mess, much of it cobbled together during a weekend visit to a resort in Ojai, California, where the Monkees, Rafelson, and Nicholson brainstormed into a tape recorder while stoned on marijuana. Jack then took the tapes to his room and used them as the basis for his screenplay. He wrote the first draft under the influence of LSD. Between sessions, the team took long walks to discuss the script, and, to further bond (as if any more were needed), they attended several Lakers home games together at the Fabulous Forum in Inglewood. Raybert had six season courtside seats.
As Rafelson later recalled, during the writing of the script, “Jack used to act out all the parts. He’d hold me captive with his performance of whatever the scene was. And I kept staring at him and then said, ‘You know what? The next movie I do I’m going to do with you as the star.’ ”
Not just Rafelson but everyone involved with the project was drawn to Jack, for his talent, his likability, his energy, and his creativity. Micky Dolenz remembers that durin
g production, “He just started hanging out all the time, on the set and at my house all the time, getting to know my family. Obviously, he was doing his homework, getting to know the boys and what the whole Monkees thing had been about. I thought Jack did a wonderful job scripting the movie. And, despite what people think from the look of it, the whole thing was scripted. Also, by that time, the band was grumbling about not being treated as a real band—which it wasn’t—and some of that dissatisfaction made it into the movie.”
In the finished film, Dennis Hopper is wandering around in the background in one or two scenes. Helena Kallianiotes, Jack’s friend, performs a belly dance. Frank Zappa appears with a cow. Victor Mature shows up as the Jolly Green Giant. Even Annette Funicello makes it into a couple of scenes. In his script Jack also made fun of the Beatles’ guru phase (which may also have been a jab at Sandra’s spiritual conversion).
Hundreds of extras were brought in for a big birthday scene. To do the choreography, Rafelson hired Toni Basil. “Bob knew me socially, from my work as a choreographer and also as a filmmaker. He was great to work with because he was so collaborative. I was mostly involved with the songs and the dancing. I choreographed two numbers, including Davy Jones’s ‘Daddy’s Song.’ ”
According to Micky Dolenz: “They were looking to deconstruct not just the Monkees, but all of Hollywood, using the Monkees as a metaphor. They wanted to shake things up, to start an independent film movement, and Head was intended as their big step. Victor Mature represented the fake, old Hollywood, and the Monkees were supposed to represent the new. As the film came together, we all got glimmers of the Jack Nicholson personality audiences would soon come to know.
“I remember we were in the Bahamas for a few days, and Jack was doing the second-unit directing, a lot of underwater stuff. One night we got dressed up in very hip, sixties-style Nehru jackets, to go gambling at a big, formal casino. We were stopped at the door by a big, tough bouncer, who told us we couldn’t get in without a shirt and tie. Jack didn’t get excited, he didn’t go off on him or anything. Instead, he stood there and debated with the guy, explaining in a very intellectual way that three quarters of the rest of the world considered these clothes fashionable, so why couldn’t this casino? I think our long hair, we were all wearing our hair very long, had something to do with it too.
