Quintessential Jack

by Scott Edwards

  Gittes claims he doesn’t want to live in the past, but he does not know how to live in the present. Nicholson’s characterization only comes to life when that life reflects the one behind him.

  * * *

  For the private dicks, their own pasts keep piling up, together with those from their cases. Some could not be solved. Others might better have remained unsolved. Each broken and lost life adds another past that can never go away.

  For the hoods, they cannot escape their past. Perhaps they are paying for it in the pen. Maybe their own fellow gangsters will make them pay, so the constant vigilance and suspicion of everyone and everything makes their past everpresent. Then, that past can only truly go away if they fall victim to a hit. Otherwise, they flail around in a murky pool of memories they do not want to remember, treading in a fetid wave of those memories, sinking into the past … because their future is all used up, as Marlene Dietrich told corrupt cop Orson Welles at the conclusion of Touch of Evil.

  15

  * * *

  Head Trips

  Everybody’s a writer. Scribbling that novel everyone has inside. Pushing out that blog to a dedicated few. Tapping out posts and tweets and who knows what else. Oh yes, and writing that screenplay.

  They all gather, informally and without being aware of their shared experience, at the local coffeehouse to grab the free Wi-Fi and stay caffeine-fortified. Perhaps it’s the modern version of Schwab’s Pharmacy, where actor wannabes wanted to be seen in order to be discovered. In a world where people seem more and more illiterate, there are (in seeming contradiction) more and more who believe they can write.

  Writing a screenplay can be an artistic expression, or it can be a way to pay the bills, or it can be a means to advance a career toward directing. For Jack Nicholson, at one point or another, all three were true.

  Nicholson drew upon this double life and captured the melancholy of creative weariness suffered by blocked writers more than a dozen years later on The Shining. “That’s the one scene in the movie I wrote myself,” said Nicholson. “That scene at the typewriter—that’s what I was like when I got my divorce.” A new wife, a new daughter, acting in the daytime, and writing a screenplay at night turned the frustrated and disillusioned actor into a proto–Jack Torrance. As he recounts the incident, one can hear the character emerge from the man: “I’m back in my little corner and my beloved wife Sandra walked in on what was, unbeknownst to her, this maniac.” Nicholson confided, “I remember being at the desk and telling her, ‘Even if you don’t hear me typing, it doesn’t mean I’m not writing. This is writing…’”1

  It’s natural for an actor to think they can deliver better lines if they wrote them. The Rebel Rousers actor Robert Dix mentioned how Nicholson and Bruce Dern “kind of rewrote the script because it wasn’t much of a script in the first place.” It also makes sense that, once in the movie business, one might hope to bring more serious, deeper, more introspective themes to the screen. Particularly if one can act in (or direct) them.

  Actress Hazel Court, who worked with Nicholson in The Raven, related to me how he would go home after shooting every night to do scriptwriting. “He would write when he was on the film, and he kept saying ‘I want to go to write.’”2

  Nicholson has written or co-written six screenplays that have been produced as films, beginning with Thunder Island in 1963 and followed over the next couple of years with Flight to Fury and Ride in the Whirlwind. Two psychedelic, counterculture movies, The Trip and Head, preceded his collaborative adaptation of Jeremy Larner’s novel Drive, He Said. That’s six official credits in eight years, but none since 1971.

  His writing reflects a dedication to message and theme, enlivened by an artistic style that reaches beyond the banal Hollywood toward the more ambitious foreign film sensibility admired by the actor.

  His first screenplay was co-written with a Jeff Corey associate, actor-turned-producer Don Devlin. The title, Thunder Island, may or may not be a nod to then-wife Sandra Knight’s film debut with Robert Mitchum in Thunder Road.

  Like Flight to Fury from the following year, this story takes place in a foreign land (the Philippines in that case and the Caribbean here). This is one of only two directorial credits for Jack Leewood, otherwise used only in a production capacity. It was filmed in San Miguel, Puerto Rico. A strong Hispanic presence takes this beyond the typical location shoot where the locals are nothing more than props in the background.

  Billy Poole (played by Gene Nelson) is a menacing figure who meets a contact woman named Anita (Miriam Colon), from whom he is given the assignment to assassinate former dictator Antonio Perez, a job to be “completed in six days.” She hires a hit man from the U.S., and the plot is foiled by another American, who does so mainly to save the lives of his wife and daughter.

  Poole is matter-of-fact, detached and flip—a typically cold, all-business gringo. She explains the reasoning for this political act and he lets her pontificate with no particular interest.

  Anita makes a committed justification (“Do you have any idea what it’s like to live under a terrible dictatorship?”) and he blows it off sarcastically: “You should have known my old man.” He minimizes her country’s plight by declaring, “People get killed all the time. One pig is as good as another,” and finally gets down to business by dismissively poking, “Let’s skip the speeches, huh?”

  In retrospect, Anita’s quest to kill the dictator takes on greater interest upon learning the story of Marita Lorenz, who had an affair with Cuban President Fidel Castro and later attempted to help the CIA assassinate that dictator by delivering poison pills said to have been supplied by Bay of Pigs veteran Frank Sturgis.

  Nicholson and Devlin’s political thriller features a subplot about an ad man named Vince (Brian Kelly from Flipper), who brings his estranged wife (Fay Spain) and their daughter from the U.S. for a possible reconciliation.

  Vince left Madison Avenue and “the gray flannel suit,” he declares disparagingly, to become a commercial fisherman. Reflecting Peter Fonda’s character of Paul Groves in Nicholson’s script for The Trip, Vince needed to escape “the rat race” and “that whole New York advertising scene” because he hated “peddling soap and cigarettes.”

  Here, the screenwriters create a very effective and appealing plot device that combines two little girls, a friendship and zoo animals to make a father and her daughter potential accessories to an assassination.

  Vince’s daughter meets the ex-dictator’s daughter and they become fast friends. This puts in motion a chain of events that intertwines the unwitting characters, the fisherman and his family, with the deadly plot. The concept that Vince’s daughter becomes susceptible to luring her father into the plan due to her desire to see the island’s zoo animals—collected, of course, by Perez—adds another offbeat twist.

  Bad guy Poole’s machinations to kidnap the girl were meant to serve as his way to get onto the island and be in position to make the hit. When the plan is undermined by Anita, Poole must have Vince’s wife taken instead. In a light touch, Helen’s kidnapping takes the form of a pleasant day of sightseeing and dining.

  When Poole comes ashore and assembles his rifle, another interesting tactic takes advantage of the setting and its inclusion of the zoo animals as part of the earlier plot device. As the hit man prepares to make the kill, he is unaware that an increasingly agitated puma paces above him. This enriches the visual action with an additional dimension and multiplies the possibilities for the climax. Will non-human intervention save Perez, ascribing greater morals to the beast than to the man?

  Instead, all elements come into play, ultimately allowing the movie’s protagonist to become the hero. Kids get in the way; the puma gets more distressed; and Vince comes from out of nowhere to drive in front of the assassin to block his shot. Violence erupts and a chase ensues.

  The final part of the chase inevitably reduces the conflict to Vince against Poole, similar to Nicholson’s next screenwriting credit, Flight to Fury.
As we might expect, Vince is somehow able to outshoot a professional hit man and kill the villain. In another precursor to Flight, the dying man’s hand dangles into the water—in this instance continuing to hold his gun (thereby connecting him to his life’s work even after his life is over) and in that case using a close-up that follows Nicholson’s last defiant act when he drops stolen jewels into the current for a final “Fuck you” to society.

  An abrupt happy ending between Vince and Helen belies a more serious, cynical message. After the initial stage of gunfire, Anita’s cohorts force Helen into their car. But Helen belittles Anita’s idealism, saying she is no different than the dictator she targets. When Anita counters that “sometimes an act of violence is needed to bring peace,” Helen sums up the lie behind it all when she challenges Anita’s notion that an act of violence can bring peace by countering: “There’ll just be another Perez.”

  A bleak cynicism also becomes an unseen character in Nicholson’s next screenplay, 1964’s Flight to Fury, based on a story by director Monte Hellman and producer Fred Roos. Like the previous film, it takes place in an exotic locale, adding to the intrigue and atmosphere.

  Flight to Fury is an homage to John Huston’s Beat the Devil, a 1954 movie, featuring Humphrey Bogart and Nicholson’s on-screen father (in the prior year’s The Raven) Peter Lorre. It “satirized those kinds of genre movies,” according to director and co-writer Hellman. “It’s not a comedy but it has comic overtones.”3

  One significant advance since Nicholson’s prior script was in its characterizations. Aside from the assassin’s eating obsessions and repeated business with raisins, Thunder Island was thin in the development of the roles. Here, there are several interesting characters, the best of which Nicholson wrote for himself. Jay Wickham is a fun and frightening psychopath whose main joy derives from killing, with the threat of murder or painful physical harm coming a close second. Nicholson told Robert Crane and Christopher Fryer that it was “one of the best characters that I’ve gotten to play, and certainly one of the best ones that I’ve written.”4

  Hellman reminisced that he and Nicholson took a ship to the Philippines “and he wrote the script for Flight to Fury on the ship … getting feedback and information from whatever passengers were kibitzing at the time [laughs].”5

  Other worthwhile parts are played by Fay Spain as the progressive and aggressive (for the time) Destiny Cooper; Vic Diaz in the juicy role of the odd and inhumane diamond smuggler Lorgren; and Nicholson pal John Hackett as the rough and heroic pilot Al Ross. Unfortunately, the lead character Joe Gaines (Dewey Martin) does not match the eccentric flavor and depth of the other characters, with Martin giving a stiff portrayal in this generic role.

  Things begin strangely, when lounge lizard Wickham sets up Gaines, more for the pleasure of it than any real benefit to himself. Nicholson, well-known for being very particular about his wardrobe, sports a white suit and narrow black tie and wears a mustache for the first time on-screen (he had a goatee in his recurring Dr. Kildare role). His appearance and manner should have been clues for Gaines, but free booze breaks down a lot of barriers.

  Jay gets Joe involved with a local lady, hides in Joe’s closet and kills her (thus leaving Gaines in a bit of a predicament). The highlight of this sequence is Nicholson’s maniacal grin as he displays the ligature toward his victim. Nicholson here has twice the fun. He provides meat to the character, establishing the fact that Jay Wickham will do anything, making it possible for any number of scenarios and establishing a credible foundation for all acts and behaviors. This supplies incredible freedom to a screenwriter, putting the viewer on notice to expect the most unexpected and allowing himself the flexibility to break beyond narrative norms. In short, crazy is as crazy does.

  Gaines lets himself be manipulated by Wickham again, to organize a flight out of Manila on which Wickham appears without warning.

  In addition to the stronger characterization, Flight to Fury represents a progression in the young writer’s dialogue. He treats a fellow passenger (Hellman’s then-wife Jacqueline) to an odd sort of in-flight patter with an existential discourse about death that’s highlighted by an idea about setting the age of 50 as the point to make a go/no-go decision (a concept relatively easy to float when in his mid-twenties).

  He makes Destiny unpredictable and flirtatious, telling Joe he “has a nice mouth” and kissing him out of the blue before walking away because he “asks too many questions.”

  A plane crash in the jungle reveals the true plot motivation. Jay Wickham is after smuggled jewels and he will do whatever is necessary—even beyond what is necessary—to get them. This sets the conflict and the tone for the remainder of the film.

  The crash landing provides well-directed tension, with the mortally wounded pilot giving Gaines the contraband. Hackett goes out with a laugh, encouraging Joe to “win one for the Gipper.”

  Naturally, many of the plane’s passengers are fellow diamond smugglers. The Peter Lorre–esque Vic Diaz takes the jewels back at gunpoint, after which the group attempts to move en masse when locals show up out of nowhere to shoot an elderly Japanese man and take them all as prisoners.

  When they try to escape, a gunfight breaks out. One nice notion was having a young Japanese man avenge his father’s death by killing several with a Samurai sword, even after being mortally wounded himself. He then sacrifices himself to bring the leader out into the open to be shot.

  Wickham subsequently shows just how coldblooded he could become, shooting partners Lorgren and Destiny before getting shot himself. As in Thunder Island, the good guy and the killer leave the scene of battle for a chase scene to conclude the movie. Just as in the previous film, the more experienced gunman is outgunned by the hero. Joe traps Wickham, but Wickham won’t give him the satisfaction of winning. In another twist that shows Nicholson’s potential as scenarist, Wickham throws away the jewels he has worked so hard to gain rather than let Gaines or anyone else get them. Now, the water owns them. And then, Wickham finishes himself off after taunting his rival—whom he has already set up in the hotel with the dead hostess and by involving him with the ill-fated flight—one last time by correctly predicting, “You can’t shoot me, Joe!” Jay Wickham meets death his own way, with Nicholson’s final line of dialogue serving as the character’s own defiant “Made it, Ma. Top of the world!” and done well before his fiftieth birthday.

  Flight to Fury is a tight, well-balanced and textured script with good action and interesting characters, rich beyond the small budget of this programmer. There’s fiery interplay, noirish atmosphere and narrative tension.

  Another quality delivered by Nicholson’s second script is a similar sense of futility found in the first. Thunder Island represents a political futility, how blindly following a cause and justifying violence to end a larger violence becomes meaningless. In Flight, crime ultimately does not pay, yet justice is not possible. The hero is denied any reward by the final sick act of the twisted criminal mind who outwitted him time after time. The closest thing the movie had to a heroine, Fay Spain’s Destiny, was killed by Wickham to thereby deny her to Joe. The film ends with Joe alone, as all of the other main characters are dead, leaving him stuck in a jungle and facing a future of having to stay ahead of any of the remaining locals who had imprisoned him with the gang of smugglers. A similar fate met Nicholson’s Wes in his next script, Ride in the Whirlwind.

  No jewels, no lover, no chance. And so the final shot fittingly focuses on the dirty shoes of the strange man in the white suit, ending Nicholson’s second written work with a close-up of a wardrobe item of a dead man.

  * * *

  Nicholson’s next script was another collaboration with Monte Hellman as part of a back-to-back, economical on-location shoot in Kanab and Paria, Utah, with The Shooting.

  Nicholson and Hellman wrote Ride in the Whirlwind in a building called the Writer’s Building, next door to Fred Astaire’s office. Monte recalled, “We’d go there every day and I would pace an
d [Jack] would sit down and write the script out longhand.”6

  Whirlwind continued the bleak undertone of the prior two works, a pervasive sense that would inhabit his later projects with director Bob Rafelson, most notably Five Easy Pieces and The King of Marvin Gardens, but also reappear in Head and Blood and Wine. The Hellman-Nicholson and Rafelson-Nicholson collaborations share an overriding futility against existences outside the understanding or control of its characters. It’s as if the people in these films can almost feel as if something is not quite right, nearly uncovering that they are in fact characters created by a dramatist who fully controls what they cannot.

  A whirlwind is a small, spinning windstorm as well as a confused rush of events and feelings. Nicholson’s script uses both meanings, with the two main characters Vern (Cameron Mitchell) and Wes (Nicholson) caught in a metaphorical cycle that whirls them around, effectively removing their free will and leaving them befuddled about what is happening to them or why. Perhaps Jack’s line for himself, when Wes notes, “Lost my spurs,” is meant to sum up their situation. And their fate. Having a western character lose his spurs removes the character from the genre orthodoxy. Writing and delivering the line, “lost my spurs” also shows Nicholson’s taste for the unusual.

  Hellman said, “If I had to say the theme in one phrase, I would say, ‘Guilt by association.’”7 They have no hope. It is not clear whether they understand this; whether they somehow sense it; or whether their “ride in the whirlwind” leaves them oblivious to their chances of escape or survival.

  They begin their ride as a trio and soon become the victims of coincidences. They luck upon a cabin by coincidence and seek refuge for the night, but it’s with a gang of outlaws led by Harry Dean Stanton as eye patch–wearing Blind Dick, who earlier held up a stagecoach.