Jack Nicholson Interview - Part 4

by Peter Bogdanovich

from Suddeutsche Zeitung Magazin

Desperate?  
Oh, yeah. You know, Roger wanted me to write the first bike picture, Wild Angels. [1966]. Because by now he knew I also could write.  
 
When was that?  
I guess we must have already done the Westerns for him. Which is another Roger story. You know how Roger was: “Just give me two sentences...” We went in and sold him two regular B-Westerns. The one I wrote we called Ride in the Whirlwind. [1965], we kind of sold as an Attack at Apache Junction. or something, with a lot of stagecoaches and Indians. And the picture Carole Eastman wrote, The Shooting . [1967] we sold as an African Queen. in the desert. Now we go off, we write two art movies. All that underground movement is going on then. They had movie revivals up at the Lido, they had Greta Garbo. I’d never seen a Greta Garbo picture. I’d never seen a W.C. Fields picture. We started a film society Monte B & The Guys down at the Unicorn coffee house. We’d show Sasha Guitry and Zero for Conduct. [1933]. Monty was a film student at Stanford and knew about this stuff. But you didn’t ordinarily see these pictures. And then right after we did this film society, the greatest period for a movie-goer in history hits America. Do you realize that from 1960-something into the ‘70s, we expected to see a masterpiece every week and we did?  
 
All those films from Europe.  
Toho [Japan’s biggest production co.] had its own theater. We don’t get the European movie, or any of that anymore. It’s a big loss, I think. Sure, they may even figure out a way to make money on it, but not enough to penetrate what’s now a conglomerated situation.  
 
No, all that’s gone.  
But what a great break. Imagine, I’d seen none of it. Nobody’d seen the foreign films, really. So what with all that going on, we now bring Roger these two very classy Westerns. They’re not like everybody’s shooting people every two seconds.  
 
They were art-house Westerns.  
Yeah. I took them to Cannes - that’s the first time I went there. They didn’t know me, but Godard befriended me the first night - he came to the first screening and after that I was a “member of the delegation” of Cahiers du Cinema. - I went to film festivals with them. I got on really well with Jean-Luc, who doesn’t get on with many people. I was probably this American infant terrible, you know, I don’t think he was fascinated with my intellect, but whatever it was we did get along. He made me laugh. So I was sort of a local star almost. I never had any of that around here - and it didn’t add up to anything here. What - am I going to work in Paris? I don’t think so - I got enough problems in L.A. We brought them in to Roger - he reads the scripts with that look on his face. “Well, you guys, you ran a number on me.” We said, “What do you mean?” “You know what I mean.” I said, “Yeah, okay.” He said, “But you gotta go ahead and make the pictures.” Oh, good. “Why?” I said. “I’ll tell you why. Because with the deal I got, you make them for the price we’ve agreed to, I can’t lose as much as I’ve already paid you to write the scripts. So I may hate them, but I don’t want to lose money.” We wrote them, produced them, starred in them, directed them, edited them - all that. Monty and I made two color westerns on location with pretty good casts, for $85,000 apiece, which was what he gave us - we had to make ‘em for that. Well, we went a little bit over so that Monty and I - , for all that work - made $l400 apiece for the job. Because he enforced the penalties - we knew he would. I think we probably went 5 or 6 thousand over the 85,000 and he took it out of us.  
 
But he gave you the chance.  
Oh, yeah. That’s all we cared about. What difference did it make? So, after all this, he gets me down there - because by then I guess he knew I could write - and he says, “I want you to write this - this is going to be a big fad - the motorcycle picture.” And I said, “I totally agree with you about that, Roger.” And he says, “And here’s what you’ll get paid.” I said, “Roger, you know we’re very good friends by now and we love one another and I may hate the pictures you make but I’m in them, and if I wasn’t in them I couldn’t collect unemployment. I owe you this. But, Roger, I’ve worked for scale for you all these years and I’m not going to start as a writer that way. You have to give me a few hundred bucks above scale to write this picture for you.” He said, “I’m not doing it.” I couldn’t believe it. I said, “You’re not doing it. Well, then I’m not writing it.” And I didn’t write the picture. Now along comes The trip..  
 
Roger was one of those odd people like me who experienced LSD, in a clinical situation. He wants to make a serious picture. He calls me in and he says, “Look, this is a subject that I want to do right, and I want you to write a good movie on this subject. And I’ll give you $200 over scale.” “All right.” Now I wrote this picture and in the middle of it I got my divorce. ‘Cause I was out changing the brake drums on my lawn with John Hackett, which was a savings of about $35. I give you these numbers so you know the scale I’m living on, with a family inside. It’s a tough job. You gotta go downtown to get a tool, and I couldn’t do anything. While we were doing that brake-drum job on the lawn, I got this job writing The Trip.. And I got a job acting in a picture with Cameron Mitchell which Bruce Dern’s business manager did on his credit card - I can’t think of the name of it right now. So, from an unemployed actor on my lawn, I got two jobs, which is why in The Shining. [1980] I’m in there with a wife and a child - and you know, I’m writing... And The Trip. is about a guy getting a divorce.

Did he shoot your script of The Trip.?  
Well, about half of it. Of course, he likes [Bruce] Dern so I didn’t get the part I wrote for myself in the picture. But I wrote a really good script.  
And Roger goes ahead and shoots it. The first guy who read my script of The Trip. was a painter I knew up in Laurel Canyon. I said, “Here, read this for me, Tom, and see what you think.” I had just finished it. He read the script - kind of a phlegmatic guy. He got such a strong contact high off the script that he fell off the back porch into the bushes. I thought, “Well, it’s got a little something.” I’ll never forget it. So now they shoot the picture and, you know, I had a very open ending on it. And crazy [James H.] Nicholson and [Samuel Z.] Arkoff, in the company that Roger created - American International Pictures.  
AIP - he created them. They put this wild optical on the end - where the last image shatters like a mirror - cidn’t even tell Roger (to give it a negative spin). I loved dealing with the nuts and bolts - pure, down to the bone. There was something about having to solve a problem, right or wrong, immediately. You didn’t think - “maybe I should think about” - you came up with it.  
 
Seat-of-the-pants picture making.  
Totally. That’s why Marty [Scorsese] and I worked so well together. “Let’s do it.” He’s not that stripped to the bone, obviously, but if you got the syntax, you know, you don’t have to talk too much.  
 
How did Head. [1968] happen?  
Well, Head. comes from [Bob] Rafelson and I meeting, talking.  
 
It was after The Monkees. were a hit.  
Monkees are a hit. Like everybody, I think, “What’s with The Monkees? It’s bullshit I don’t care about.” And I knew Rafelson, didn’t know Bert [Schneider]. We talked at the beach - about all that stuff serious cinephiles talked about. And we noticed we had a kind of similar outlook, ‘cause I always said, “Look, I don’t care about all this bullshit. I can write any movie that you want on any subject and I can do it in three weeks or less, I don’t care what you say.” This was like a bullshit coffeehouse boast. So I’m having this discussion with Rafelson one day out on the beach in Malibu and he says, words to the effect: “Well, look, do you really think you’re that red hot?” “Well, yeah.” You know, that kind of discussion - I’d be embarrassed to do it today. He says, “Really? Well, we’ve got a deal to write a movie for The Monkees. Why don’t you write a movie for The Monkees?” I said, “For The Monkees? I’m into Stan Brakhage and these people. We’re out there. (In fact, I was working on something very theoretical myself: I lost the script, but it was called Suggestions for the Knoxville Bear..)  
 
So when he says this to me, I said, “Monkees? I’ll be honest with you, I like them, they’re nice, but I’m a serious person.” He says, “Well, you claimed this and that...“ Now Don Devlin and I used to get jobs where we had to make up a story overnight. We’d say, “Here’s what we’re gonna do for you,” and then we’d go home and try and remember what we said. Don and I wrote one of the first assassination pictures for Lippert and God, I almost killed myself. I crawled out of the dailies the first day and never went back, I was so offended. Devlin thought it was hysterical I wouldn’t go back to dailies.  
 
What picture was that?  
Thunder Island .- something like that. Why I walked out was I wrote this very complicated, 25-page parallel action sequence at the end with the assassination. People think about low-budget films today, it’s different. These movies, people didn’t even try to make them good. It wasn’t the point. But I wasn’t prepared for this. Somebody up in the church steeple and somebody in the confessional and the dictator out riding on the beach - I had a lot going on in this sequence. First day’s dailies, I’m sitting there, you know, I’m not looking for great movie-making here. And Gene Nelson’s in the picture and they reduce this entire action-sequence down to: he tripped over a branch. Not even a particularly good shot of a guy tripping over a branch. I sink to the bottom of my chair, roll to the ground and crawl out of dailies and never returned. So now, overnight - I think, “Okay, this’ll be a perfect movie, this movie for The Monkees.”  
 
I sort of had the idea. And I go in to Bert, whom I didn’t know yet. This is another one of my favorite interviews. Bert says, “Well, what’s the idea, Jack?” I said, “Well, I got two ideas. One of them is what I’m actually working on as Serious Jack-the-Writer, which I can guarantee you almost unequivocally, no matter how hot The Monkees are, this will not make a nickel.” It’s like a joke interview. And I said, “And, I got another picture that I guarantee, though it’ll be a hard trick to pull, this will do the same thing A Hard Day’s Night. [1964] did for the Beatles cause it’ll be a really good exploitation movie.” And I’m sitting there ready to tell it to him and Bert looks at me and says, “I want the picture that can’t make a nickel.” Now, I’m just like you, I’m blinking. I’m thinking - I don’t even know what the fuck to say. I’m thinking, “Is he kidding?” And I’m looking at him and he says, “No, I want that, what is it?” And I now tell him. You know, in the underground, there are a lot of things about film loops, which is what Head. is.  
 
I said, “Well, I’m trying to write a picture which doesn’t have a story linearly, but has a story by image and configuration. Like classic imagery and classic configuration. I could do that. I could do that easily for The Monkees... I’m so astounded by the interview. I heard the Monkees already want to break up. And Bert, he don’t think anybody can write a movie that won’t be successful - The Monkees are too hot. I said, “It’ll be good, too.” So Bob and I wrote a film-loop story about the suicide of a group; and I got a lot of material from them. I said, “It’ll be good, too.” I just gave the idea - Bob didn’t even know what Bert picked or whatever. And in between times, Bert says, “Come on down on this, because it’s your idea and you’ll be the co-producer.” Things went well..  
 
Right around that time. I didn’t know Bert well enough not to be succinct. “Look, here’s what Easy Rider is: I know this like the back of my hand. When a genre is taken up a notch - this, because of the level of its content - will be like what Stagecoach. [1939] was to the original western. Just by the fact it is better. Whatever else it is, you’re buying a motorcycle picture.” Fonda had been in Wild Angels.. Made 8 million. Dennis [Hopper] had been in one. I’d even been in one - Hells Angels on Wheels. [1967]. And that had done 4 or 5 million. And these movies were made for 100, 200 thousand dollars. The guy who put up the money kept every nickel, so this guy made a huge amount of money. So I said to Bert, “Look, there’s no way you can lose at these figures. Plus, I think it’ll be big.” And that’s all I gave him. Now, later on; “They’re crazy, go down, play the part.” That’s how that happened. And after that, I knew exactly what to do - because I had those twelve years to think about it - exactly what to do.