Quintessential Jack

by Scott Edwards

  By coincidence, they’re assumed to be part of the gang by posse members who surround the cabin and start a fire to smoke them out. The posse now shoots to kill, and plans to clean up the remainders later, in a typically unrestrained example of frontier justice. Luck (of a sort) make Vern and Wes the only men who escape the attack, though they are now a duo and are forced to take their chances over the forbidding terrain on foot.

  It was no coincidence that the outlaw Indian Joe, played by African American actor Rupert Crosse, was shown with a rope around his neck as part of that “justice” in action. This was written and filmed in 1965, during the height of the Civil Rights struggles. Nicholson commented upon the times by reflecting the horrid act of lynching. Yet, in the film, Crosse wasn’t lynched because of his race.

  Vern and Wes escape the fire. They escape the shootout. They escape the lynching of the leftovers. But just as coincidence after coincidence saves them, coincidence after coincidence brings them closer to their fate. It may even be crueler that they are allowed false hope and the illusion of escape.

  Hellman called this “the consequences of not speaking out,” explaining that the two “ride into an outlaw camp and they don’t protest, they accept the responsibility of the outlaws.” When they spend the night in the cabin with the gang, the pair thereafter suffers the penalties in “[a] kind of you-make-your-bed-you-lie-in-it kind of thing.”8

  Their story is a tough romantic ballad, a frontier poem of trapped men in unforgiving and hostile surroundings. Illustrated by stark imagery, the film takes on the appearance of a photo essay, a study of small men lost in a large landscape that is dotted by the rare sight of deserted cabins. In this small story in a large setting, mindless men watch a lynching as if staged for a sick postcard.

  Their story is a narrative that teaches us the lesson of fatalism, a lesson that tastes like dust and leaves the marks of steep rocky struggles.

  The pair’s next coincidence brings them into view of a ramshackle farm in the middle of nowhere. On foot in an impossible land, Vern and Wes climb a rocky climb with a rocky partnership that strengthens by necessity with each difficult move up and along the punishing red-rock bluffs.

  But why is this farmhouse here? Is it actually where it appears, or is it an elaborate desert mirage playing a perverse joke? Nicholson later wrote such an ambiguous possible hallucination for Micky Dolenz, who discovers a solitary Coca-Cola vending machine on a desert dune in Head.

  More than mere isolation, the choice of location seems masochistic, as stubborn as the farmer who swings and strikes … swings and strikes … swings and strikes over and over again while getting nowhere slowly in his attempt to remove a tree stump.

  This family farm of three—father, mother and daughter—is stuck there just as the stump is stuck there. And now Vern and Wes are stuck there. So much land, endless Utah miles of bluffs and canyons and skies, yet the two interior locations shown in the film are claustrophobic. The sequences in which the original trio stays with outlaws in the abandoned cabin, and when Vern and Wes stay with this family, feel both uncomfortable and stifling. Despite the great space outside, the atmosphere inside is oppressive.

  Millie Perkins plays Abigail, the daughter who is trapped here away from any other part of civilization. She described her view of the character as someone who had no way of knowing how she was supposed to look or act: “She just was.” She walks like she is one of her chickens, because that is what she knows best. Her downward look, her gait and movement mirror their motion. “I loved it that the chickens were her best friends. She spent more time around them than anything beside her parents.”9

  Every action is as small and contained as possible, with no room for sentiment or daydreams. A pair of strangers appear without notice and seemingly without any means to do so (remember that they no longer have horses), yet there is no panic.

  Wes puts his hand over Abigail’s mouth to stifle any scream, but she probably would not have needed the hand or the warning: “She just was.” And it simply happened. The pervading impression is one of inevitability.

  Vern and Wes seem likable enough and not particularly threatening. So they are fed, with Abigail spooning out the food with great attention to function over appearance. When she walks, she does so with her feet straight in the direction of travel, while those feet hardly leave the ground, with each action economical and without adornment or waste. Even when alone with Wes outside, in what’s as close to courting as she’s likely ever experienced, nothing approaches showiness or affectation.

  Perkins describes her reaction to this rare interaction of the opposite sexes, particularly near her own age, as instinctual about “a feeling she never had before, but she didn’t know what to do with it. [Abigail was] not vulnerable on purpose, but it made her have a vulnerability, but she didn’t understand it.”10

  The script carefully considers the time and place. Dialogue is simple and straightforward, as minimal as the settings and the range of their lives. Though a young and relatively inexperienced scenarist, Nicholson resists the urge to overwrite or use his character creations to pontificate or fill every moment with sparkling and inappropriately theatrical lines.

  Once settled into the family’s cabin, the main characters are allowed to relax, temporarily moving outside of their total concentration on survival. Vern and Wes are almost like father and son or older brother looking after a younger sibling. Nicholson plays boyish and for-the-moment against Cameron Mitchell’s delusional longing and nostalgia for his homestead.

  We get a glimpse of their real relationship in an extended scene in which the two play checkers while the father pointlessly works on the tree stump. Both acts, the board game inside the shack and the axe game outside it, appear to be more about amusement or passing the time than for any purpose. The checkers game serves as another example of Nicholson’s feel for the unusual in his scriptwriting.

  It was important that Nicholson use some screen time to humanize the pair, making the older man’s ultimate sacrifice, made to allow his younger colleague to escape, that much more meaningful and poignant.

  In the final coincidence, a posse member decides to give the tiny farm one more look despite having already checked the place and finding no signs of trouble. This time, escape cannot be possible for both. One partner was lost during the smoke-out and shoot-out at the outlaw’s cabin. Now, a second partner must pay for a wrong never committed, while Abigail’s father must also lose his life, to make her life even harder.

  Kent felt that these realities made the story more authentic and honest. “I didn’t know that Monte had an existential outlook on life or did he think that life was bleak,” he reflected. “All I knew was … that it was pretty bleak and hard during these times.” Kent believed the fatalistic turn of the story was also a product of Nicholson’s devotion to studying the era and to its truth over an idealized version of it.11

  Wes does escape on horseback, with an ambiguous getaway ending the film, but we doubt that he makes it. It’s more of the game, and it’s likely that Wes realizes this at the same time as does the audience.

  Ride in the Whirlwind may not be a classic, but it works as a departure from the standard western. “I was amazed when I read the script,” says Kent. “I thought, ‘This is wonderful,’ because it wasn’t the usual John Wayne shoot-em-up, where a guy takes ten guys down at once. There actually was some feeling amongst the characters and I was shocked they got it going.”12

  Perkins also viewed the project as part of the Nicholson career plan. “I think it was just him doing everything he could do to be in the movie business…. I don’t know if he had fantasies of doing one thing over the other. I think it was to be an actor, but he was certainly planning to write and direct, too.”13

  Hellman, who had experience with Nicholson twice as a writer, “thought he gave me good material for the job at hand, and I was able to shoot both scripts with very little modification on my part.”14 The director summed up Nicholson the
screenwriter by saying, “I would characterize him as a good craftsman.”15

  * * *

  Writing good roles for himself, as Jack did on Flight to Fury and Whirlwind, was certainly part of that process. The plan didn’t always work out, as he learned when director Roger Corman cast Bruce Dern instead of Nicholson as the LSD guide in Nicholson’s next produced script.

  The Trip was a journey inside the mind, which as it turns out is a more accommodating space than the entirety of Utah. Largely an experimental script that’s experiential in nature, Nicholson’s journey takes us along with lead character Paul (Peter Fonda) and his self-exploring first LSD trip.

  More subjective travelogue than objective narrative, the film was the first overground or mainstream movie directly dealing with the drug. Said to be substantially biographical (relating to the end of his crumbling marriage, as well as his own LSD and free love experiences), The Trip shows foreign film ambition within an exploitation ambiance.

  I asked star Peter Fonda what he thought of the script the first time he saw it, and Fonda clarified that he was “with Jack a lot of times as we talked” about the work in progress. He then revealed what he felt was the real import of Nicholson’s work: “When I first read it straight through as a full script, I thought, ‘I’m gonna be in the first true American art film.’ But of course Roger Corman was directing, so he didn’t really do Jack’s script. Which was a shame, I thought.”16

  Nicholson told Corman, who had also “tripped” under clinical conditions, that he did not want to treat the subject as exploitation. “He had higher aspirations this time,” Nicholson observed. “He knew he couldn’t get a writer as good as me through regular ways. I was happy to write it and make a more demanding picture out of it.”17

  Salli Sachse, a contract player for AIP, graduated from Beach Party and Dr. Goldfoot to the more adult biker and drug culture features. She portrayed Glenn, the girlfriend of drug dealer Max (Dennis Hopper), and a recurring lure for Fonda to leave the straight life to live with more feeling. Salli confirmed to me the gap between vision and outcome that Fonda mentioned. “I remember Peter and Dennis were so excited because they said, ‘Oh wow, this is such a bitchin’ movie, this is gonna be far-out.’ Then, as filming continued, scenes were changed and I understand they became a little disillusioned that the original ideas that they thought had been lost.”18

  Roger Corman meets acid. The Trip (1967) was Nicholson’s fourth produced screenplay out of six during his career. Salli Sachse, shown here with star Peter Fonda, recounted how Fonda and Dennis Hopper began the production excited about its prospects, but became disillusioned at the watered-down results.

  Paul is a director of television commercials, with TV and advertising again serving as Nicholson targets of vacuous pandering and the ugly style of capitalism. It makes sense then that Paul suffers disillusionment of his own, seeking enlightenment in the form of a psychedelic ride. He needs a world away from our sponsors as well as a break from his failing marriage.

  In The Films of Jack Nicholson, Douglas Brode references a similarity to Jean Cocteau’s Orpheus (1949), “which likewise studied a frustrated, despairing would-be artist who fears he is a charlatan, his successful career merely satisfying the masses without saying anything of lasting significance.” Paul and Orpheus are both obsessed with death; they both seek truth through a trip of an expressionistic nature; both are torn between two women, one representing safety and the other a more mysterious risk. “The external artist’s tragedy is that he wants it both ways,” Brode observed, “wanting to possess both the straight life and the dark side … a double existence, as do so many Nicholson characters.”19

  Straight as he is, the ad man won’t be dropping acid at some wild party, but under the controlled guidance of a possible psychologist or self-proclaimed LSD guru, Bruce Dern, as Paul’s friend John.

  Jack starts Paul’s journey with John at (where else?) Dennis Hopper’s pad. On the way into that first trip, a flirty blonde (Salli) wants to go along, but he declines. She then whispers something in his ear to which he reacts before pausing and saying, “Okay.” What Salli said to Fonda was meant to elicit an embarrassed response, even to make him blush, but when I asked her to reveal that secret, she heartily laughed, “I can’t say! I can’t tell you.”20 It had to be good. It also reminds viewers of a scene in Nicholson’s next screenplay, Head, in which Monkee Michael Nesmith whispers conspiratorially to Nicholson’s real-life girlfriend I.J. Jefferson (aka Mimi Machu). Nesmith can be heard asking her to come back when the other guys aren’t around. She responds, “Are you kidding?” before giving her trademark two-note lilting laugh.

  In The Trip, Nicholson uses a sly pop culture reference to prepare Paul for his acid inauguration. Fonda had repeatedly informed John Lennon that he knew what it’s like to be dead, inspiring the Beatles’ Revolver track “She Said, She Said.” Here, Dern (John!) quotes Lennon’s album closer “Tomorrow Never Knows” to advise Fonda (Paul!) to turn off his mind, to relax and to float downstream.

  Imagery and experience take over Nicholson’s work at this point with editing and special effects playing as substantial a part as character or dialogue. Time and place become elastic and illusory. Sachse recalled that Nicholson’s script “was a lot of visuals” and that “psychedelia was upon us, but I wasn’t part of that because I hadn’t been exposed to that yet.”21

  Nicholson described it as “very McLuhanesque. It was about the juxtapositions of reality … to show how quickly things move. It was so dense with material you could see a one-frame cut.”22

  A flash-cut puts Paul on the rocky surf (which looks like the one in The Terror) in a white puffy shirt. Back with John, Paul studies an orange, proclaiming it “alive,” foreshadowing William Tepper’s similar exploration of himself in an orange as seen in Nicholson’s Drive, He Said. Fonda caresses the fruit in wonderment and declares that he holds the “sun in my hands” as he displays it in front of himself as the foreground to his view of the ocean. Nicholson explained that the “idea of the whole script was seeing the objective camera-eye experience of the guy actually on the trip when he’s got the orange. He can’t believe it.”23

  There’s a fantastic, psychedelic light projection lovemaking scene that switches back and forth, noticeably yet subtlety, between Fonda with Susan Strasberg (as Paul’s wife Sally) and Fonda with Sachse, in an editing ménage à trois. Salli explained the transition, “rolling over and it’s me … and rolling back and it’s Susan Strasberg. I remember Peter saying something about, ‘Can you imagine Roger Corman editing a love scene?’ Because he was such a cerebral person, Roger. He seemed very left-brained and analytical and not a real emotional person, so that was kind of a little joke between us all.”

  Yet it worked. The footage was sensual and artful. Flesh and special effects met for several groundbreaking moments of movie intimacy. “We had a set in the studio, where it was a bedroom made on the set,” Sachse said. “It’s something I certainly hadn’t done before, and you know, you’re on a movie set with the camera and the grips and I think I had little pasties on. There was some excitement there, but you can’t get too intimate with 20 people watching.”24

  It’s a very sexy film, with the lovemaking scenes close and personal, as the camera shares much stroking and multiple views of hands running down backs and much caressing of someone else’s skin.

  Things start to get intense for Paul, what with hooded riders on horses, a witch, a desert (à la Micky Dolenz in Head), and a haunted house (perhaps from Corman’s House of Usher). Amongst all this, one disturbing image—aside from a crucifixion—shows Fonda and Strasberg, both with blood on their faces and Fonda’s coming out of his eyes, while he holds a baby’s severed hand.

  Nicholson’s highly visual script brings Seventh Seal references together with a dwarf on a less-than-merry merry-go-round. The dwarf joins Paul’s tour guide of his dreams, Dennis Hopper, to tell the advertising producer that he hasn’t “done anything” with h
is life, in conjunction with a non sequitur mention of the Bay of Pigs.

  The screenwriter’s disdain for advertising is underscored when Paul is challenged about the first word that comes to his mind about TV commercials, with the strong suggestion of “lies.” Fonda’s character defends with a weak, “What? It works.” and “It’s a living” in response to this Spanish Inquisition on acid.

  It almost seems as if the worst part of Paul’s trip occurs when he’s assaulted with advertising, punished with his own creation through a rapid machine-gunning of billboards and signs promoting hotels and gas stations.

  When Paul starts to have a bad trip, John pulls the fully nude Fonda out of a pool and drops him inside. Clearly, this is part of the intent, as Nicholson has shown that he likes to shock and break through with male nudity, most evidently on his direction of Drive, He Said.

  Nicholson shows another example of his view of the ordinary as absurdity in a lengthy scene with Paul, who has escaped from John’s guiding protection, inside a laundromat with Corman regular Barboura Morris. The sequence highlights a drug naiveté while the characters reflect a perfect combination of commercialism vs. hipsterism; a class chasm between the big-time TV ad director vs. the lower class woman left to do her laundry on a weekend evening; along with male vs. female politics. Fonda and Morris do not understand one another, and he lives up to her fears when he takes out her laundry and tosses it as if he is as suspicious of it as she is of him.

  In contrast, a charming scenario between Fonda and a little girl (Caren Bernsen, daughter of soap opera star Jeanne Cooper and brother of Corbin) illustrates how even in the height of hippiedom there was still an openness and sensitivity, when everything wasn’t seen as risk or a frontal attack. In Paul’s altered state, he’s been mentally reborn, so he can relate to a small child.