Quintessential Jack

by Scott Edwards

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  A year earlier, Corman was uncredited producer on the short studio feature The Broken Land, a weird oater, because the lead is a bad and unlikable sheriff, while a gang of four bandits (one of whom is Nicholson’s boyish and principled character Will Brocious) is far from perfect yet choose to defend against the attack on a simple-minded character named Billy (Gary Sneed).

  The role was small, but Nicholson was able to show a range of emotions, from anger and sarcasm to empathetic and flirty, handling dialogue with aplomb and his horse with skill. Jack was said to have won the job over Burt Reynolds because of his riding ability. Preparation for acting paid off. B.J. Merholz, John Herman Shaner and Nicholson “decided they had better learn to ride horses … and took lessons at Sam’s Rocking Horse Stables at the edge of Griffith Park in Burbank.”22

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  The Raven and The Terror seem worlds away from a pair of Monte Hellman westerns from only a few years later. Roger Corman was uncredited producer on Ride in the Whirlwind and uncredited executive producer on The Shooting, and despite the uncredited connections both films share the Corman trademark of piggybacking productions in order to maximize product and save money.

  The Hellman movies, shot back-to-back in Utah, represent a different kind of western that are markedly distinct from one another. Whirlwind is more conventional, but deals with injustice against a black man (Nicholson friend Rupert Crosse), along with a duo of mismatched outlaws, Jack and star Cameron Mitchell, who—to put it simply—aren’t all that bad. Nicholson plays a naïf, with subtlety and grace, in his interaction with a charming and socially unaware Millie Perkins.

  In The Shooting, Perkins becomes an amoral, vengeful monster, enlisting a sociopath and killer-for-hire (as well as for pleasure) disturbingly brought to life by Nicholson. Where Whirlwind has strong and evocative moments, The Shooting serves as a delicious celebration of frontier terrorists Perkins and Nicholson, along with virtual hostage and eventual victim Warren Oates.

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  The year 1967 found Nicholson playing an uncredited role as a hit man in Corman’s major-studio debut The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre and writing a sexy, psychedelic visual stunner called The Trip that featured everyone from future Easy Rider co-stars Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper to Nicholson regulars Bruce Dern and Luana Anders.

  In the former, it’s painful to watch Jason Robards lumbering around as Al Capone, witnessing an actor so celebrated for his interpretations of Eugene O’Neill murder this murderer through overplaying, overacting and over-emoting. What should be simple gestures become broad enough to help guide a plane to a safe landing.

  Nicholson is Gino, a hood who’s perhaps the guy in Studs Lonigan a little down the line, out of prison and qualified for nothing but two-bit robberies and anonymous hits. Jack does employ an interesting vocal delivery that’s either based on Jonathan Haze’s Gustaf in The Terror or forerunner to future neighbor, co-star and original inspiration, Marlon Brando, when playing Don Corleone in The Godfather. Nicholson delivers his one line of dialogue about dipping his bullets in garlic (because you die of blood poisoning if the bullets don’t kill you) as if punched in the throat, a pushed half-whisper that instantly conveys a gangster who’s seen some bad scrapes.

  This minuscule role could now be seen as an interesting novelty, a favor done with harm undone, for Corman. Reportedly turning down a larger part, Nicholson likely foresaw the value of a small profile in this bloated melodrama, playing an uncredited role of a one-line hoodlum with a gun nine years after playing the title role of a confused kid with a gun in Corman’s The Cry Baby Killer.

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  The same year as this Massacre, Nicholson wrote his fourth script that reached the screen. The Trip sees LSD as exploration and advertising as assault. Part Fellini and part Bergman, complete with a dwarf, a witch, a blonde with a painted face and two hooded riders in black on a horse, his script is a kaleidoscope of emotional and experiential images with innovative and colorful effects.

  Salli Sachse (the distorted image on the film’s poster) abruptly went from Beach Party movies to this counterculture cult classic. “The script? Well, it was a lot of visuals,” she told me. “It was very different, a smaller cast with a lot of location shooting in Big Sur. It wasn’t the big crowds and all the older actors like Keenan Wynn and Vincent Price and Buster Keaton, Dorothy Malone, Mickey Rooney. It was not as refined as those movies.”23

  Definitely no Ski Party (on which she worked with Corman’s brother Gene) or Beach Blanket Bingo, Nicholson’s vision of The Trip stood out as a moviemaking trip for Salli. “The scenes were kind of vignettes of fantasies. There was this merry-go-round scene and it was hard to piece it all together just from the script, but then you got to the set. It was just very, very different.”24

  The movie was an avant garde commentary about drug mores, sexuality, class and militarism, beautifully and insightfully directed by Roger Corman, with fantastic editing and futuristic special effects sequences. According to Sachse, the vision was compromised, hacked and mistranslated. “Close buddies, Peter [Fonda] and Dennis [Hopper] were raving about this movie. They thought it was going to be the best thing in the world, and then they were so disappointed the way it was cut, and the way it was put together, and what was left, the deeper meaning of things. I mean, Peter thought this was going to be the movie that was going to change the world [laughs].”25

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  Instead, that film had to wait a couple of years. It was Easy Rider that changed the world, that being the world of filmmaking as well as the world of Fonda, Hopper and Nicholson. The Trip didn’t change the world, nor did it advance the careers of that trio any more than their other motorcycle movies, westerns, youth culture exploitation flicks or anything else they had done to that point.

  But all three benefitted from attending the School of Roger, or fellow alum Bruce Dern’s University of Roger Corman. Corman’s low-budget, high-margin whirlwind moviemaking and legacy of giving chances to future stars was honored in 2009 with a Lifetime Achievement Academy Award. His lifetime achievement was largely their career lifetime achievements, like a Jersey kid waving a pistol can eventually become a psychedelic screenwriter. Novocain may dull the senses, but garlic poisons the blood.

  A naïf of the west on one day can become a sadistic enigma on a horse the next day. All because of getting a big chance, an opportunity to learn the movie business by growing into new characters, inventing ways to keep a production moving, and trying many aspects of their craft, from acting to writing to directing. Look at the films and you’ll see that there’s a little bit of Wilbur Force in Garrett Breedlove, though there’s not that much in common between The Little Shop of Horrors and Terms of Endearment.

  7

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  As Cuckoo as It Gets

  The voices kept getting worse. They told him to do things. Ugly things, hurtful things. To himself … to his family … to strangers … and to all of those, those people, those people who have done him wrong.

  He washed and scrubbed and scraped, over and over again. He sings and he throws his breakfast if the eggs aren’t over easy. He kidnaps a newspaper reporter, leaves a man to die in the desert, and throws a cop off a roof. He breaks into song without warning or need; yells at dead people; relives the case over and over again. He is also someone who lives without life, pretends he’s watching the World Series, and plans on correcting his wife and child at the edge of an axe.

  The voices don’t help a bit. They don’t remind you to floss or file your taxes early. They confuse and confound, building frustration and hatred and despair with each whisper. Voices in the head push, and push, and keep on pushing.

  These are the voices of dramatized mental illness, based on some real aspects of psychological conditions, yet heightened and stylized for effect. The cuckoos, the crazies, the psychos, nutcases—those are the Hollywood characters who represent most of what stands for diseases of the mind. No matter i
f from degeneration, injury or trauma, these unbalanced characters bring a crooked smile to a studio’s balance sheet.

  Characters with mental illness have long been a staple of the movies, and these parts offer actors an explosive range, from a raging psychopath to a mumbling introvert. They also offer meaty roles and payoffs in the form of awards. Both of Nicholson’s Best Actor Oscar performances are in films with psychological and sociological conditions at their center, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and As Good as It Gets. He has played characters suffering from a mental illness or exhibiting symptoms of such in many other movies, including About Schmidt, Anger Management, Batman, The Departed, Ironweed, The King of Marvin Gardens, The Pledge, The Shining and The Shooting.

  In examining the conditions depicted and the degree of accuracy of their portrayals, I owe a tremendous degree of gratitude to Dr. Brooke Cannon, who holds a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology and serves as Professor of Psychology and Counseling at Marywood University in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Dr. Cannon also teaches a course in Psychology in Film, has published extensively on the topic, and has created a website on the subject (www.psychmovies.com).

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  In As Good as It Gets, Nicholson plays Melvin Udall, a writer of romance novels (an issue he knows nothing about), and whose life is controlled by Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD). Dr. Cannon also points out that it’s necessary to separate the OCD from Melvin’s less attractive personality traits, because of course “all people with OCD are not hostile, homophobic jerks!” His symptoms and behaviors were deemed true to the condition. “Although Melvin was still able to function as a writer, the degree of impairment from his disorder was evident in how his symptoms interfered with his social functioning (long shower, borrowed dinner jacket, etc.).”1

  Nicholson plays Melvin the jerk, overlaid with Melvin the victim.

  He does suffer. Someone with OCD feels the need to check and double-check and check again (routines and rituals called compulsions) to try to control upsetting thoughts (worries called obsessions). Udall’s obsessions include fear of contamination, so he compulsively washes, using a new bar of soap for each application, and brings his own silverware to the diner with each visit. He worries about injury, thinking bad things will happen if he steps on a crack or if things are out of order. He gives in to superstition and locks, locks, locks, locks, locks himself in his apartment and away from others.

  Melvin’s condition reflects those with multiple obsessions and compulsions and who have a family background of such. “OCD has a strong genetic component,” Dr. Cannon points out. “In the movie, he suggests that his father had some sort of disorder, that he did not leave his room for 11 years.”2

  The actor accurately portrays the disorder in a natural and unforced manner, showing his legendary research and preparation. Without much exposition, the viewer understands OCD and how it impacts a real person’s life. You believe that the character is someone going through these rituals and dealing with these fears every minute of every day rather than seeing a few parts of scenes as representative of something bigger. This is essential, as the non-stop serial nature of the condition has to control Melvin in order for the film to work. We have to believe in the truth of the condition, or the story and the arc are not possible.

  Nicholson explained that as a Studio Method actor, “I was prone to give some kind of clinical presentation of the disorder. But [director] Jim Brooks never wanted it up front, and I understood that.” He studied obsessive-compulsives and found that they are adept at hiding their disorder. “I like to kind of hide the performance, just to make it different. A lot of my performance of the disease is simply not written. I might be wriggling my fingers where the cameras can’t see, but it energizes what I’m doing.”3

  Shirley Knight played the mother of Helen Hunt’s character, and explained the importance of this “depth of character” and the difference between “really being in the moment” versus “acting the moment.”4

  “I think what Jack was saying is that he and I both are very instinctive actors, so you won’t see a scene between the two of us where we’re not really connected, and listening, and being. It’s all about being. It’s difficult to explain, but you just need to be in the moment.”5

  Nicholson exists as a man with OCD. More important, “being” this man rather than playing a part, means that Jack can seamlessly weave the condition with the exaggeration of comedy and with the warmth of romance. His obsessions and compulsions become part of the story to show why Melvin is such a jerk, and do so comically. It’s important that the audience not hate or even dislike Udall. The OCD brings some empathy, but the comedic nuance disarms the viewer with just the right balance of self-deprecation and vulnerability.

  Melvin’s bad and he can’t help himself. Okay, he can. But he knows that we know it, and that opens him up to a truth that allows the narrative to come to life.

  Udall’s comfort with this disorder of discomfort makes it possible that a little dog can come to mean so much to the man. This opens the door, both figuratively and literally, to Melvin caring about Simon (Greg Kinnear) and Carol (Hunt). He changes so meaningfully and dramatically, perfect in tone and presentation for the character and the story. When Shirley Knight’s character comes out of the apartment she shares with her daughter, into the stairway after Carol exclaims, “Why can’t I have a normal boyfriend?,” the mother is the only one in control and with sense. Melvin goes from out-of-control mental illness to out-of-control in love. After all the touching and kissing with Carol (remember that this is a germaphobe), he loses a main compulsion. “I forgot to lock the door?” What’s most curious is whether someone can “get better” as he does, with the Helen Hunt character not only changing him into a more likable man, but also reducing the effects of his condition to the point of functioning as a near-normal person.

  Dr. Cannon sees this as another example of how “love cures all” is so typical of the movies, though not so in real life. “Melvin states that his love for Carol motivated him to ‘be a better man’ and that was what pushed him to finally agree to take medications for his OCD,” she explains. However, behavior therapy is the standard approach, usually coupled with medication.6

  It is necessary to break the continued association between the compulsive behavior and the negative reinforcement that reduces the anxiety. “That is, Melvin would have to confront his feared situations and not be allowed to engage in his compulsive response.” The psychology-in-movies expert sums things up: “It is unrealistic to think that the ‘cure’ could happen so quickly … or that the symptoms would be completely gone, rather than just diminished or controlled. He could be ‘a better man,’ but not a ‘different man.’ Overall, though, I think As Good as It Gets has more right than wrong.”7

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  Randall Patrick McMurphy is a better man than many, but a different man than society desires, or demands. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest could be the quintessential role for the quintessential Jack, deftly combining the devilish with the destroyed; the gregarious with the hapless; and the street-wise with the dangerously naïve.

  “Mac” may be his most beloved and revered part. There is a complexity that belies the stereotype of a simple man, against the typical notion that someone must be educated or accomplished to be multifaceted.

  McMurphy is duped by the system. What hurts most is that McMurphy is duped by himself. He chooses the mental ward because he reasons that it’ll be easier than prison, not knowing that prisons have sentences that end and mental facilities have a beginning, but not necessarily an end (at least not a good one).

  Ken Kesey’s novel is understood as commentary on conformity, particularly as its writing so closely followed the white-bread, man-in-the-gray-flannel-suit, McCarthy era. Dr. Cannon unequivocally states that McMurphy did not have a mental illness. “He was a crafty individual looking to avoid jail. [The character] showed some signs of narcissism, but not to the level of a diagnosable personality disorder
. As he developed relationships with the other patients, it was clear that he cared about them and that he did not expect special treatment.”8

  Michael Berryman, who played inmate Ellis, confirmed my theory that McMurphy was a J.D. past his prime (recall that Jack played several troubled youths). “He was actually a grown-up juvenile delinquent taking advantage of the system. And then he realized that some of us were not committed and we stayed because we were broken.”9

  Mews Small (then billed as Marya), who played Candy, never discussed that aspect with Nicholson, but saw Mac as “just a regular old rebellious guy. You put him in a circumstance like that, you never know what’s going to happen to a person.” She felt the situation pushed his behavior to a place it never had gone before. “You know, people are complicated.”10

  McMurphy may not have had a mental illness, but he certainly exhibited sociological issues. A juvenile delinquent who never grew up, Mac had a stunted personality, as if he stopped maturing at about 15 years of age. He delights in showing Dr. Spivey pornographic playing cards during his induction interview. He displays a false chumminess with the guards who bring him to the institution. He has problems with authority and problems with women in authority (the “party girls” offer no such threats to his adolescent manhood), which makes his clashes with Nurse Ratched inevitable.

  Berryman provides some background about the difficult transition from book to screenplay that initially involved the author: “Ken Kesey could not write a screenplay. He wrote 500 pages. Michael Douglas told them finally to take control of it and make their version. And we thought Ken would visit the set, and he never did.”11

  The author’s son, Zane Kesey, corrects that assertion by declaring that the producers were looking to avoid paying Kesey for his screenplay. He sued; they settled. “Dad never saw the movie,” Zane wrote to me. “During deposition under oath, the lawyers said he was probably flattered and would be the first in line to see it. Dad got pissed and said he would never see it.” His father simply wanted his contract honored, as the family was “flat broke and in deep debt and the movie had broken records in box office.”12