CHAPTER 7 CHAPTER 7Vintery, mintery, cutery, corn,
Apple seed and apple thorn,
Wire, briar, limber lock
Three geese in a flock
One flew east
One flew west
And one flew over the cuckoo’s nest.
—OLD-TIME CHILDREN’S NURSERY RHYME
MICHAEL BELIEVED HE COULD SUCCEED WHERE his father had failed and get Saul Zaentz to put some money in Cuckoo’s Nest. Zaentz, although several years older than Michael, was nonetheless a product of the same California sixties hippie scene of sex, drugs, and especially rock and roll. He was also an extremely wealthy and canny businessman.
To Michael, Zaentz represented the best of both worlds: he was one of “them” and one of “us,” a hippie honcho who was equally at home listening to Jefferson Airplane and reading the Wall Street Journal (often at the same time). Michael contacted Zaentz and discovered that he had already tried many times to secure the rights to Cuckoo’s Nest from Kirk, which was why his name was in the files, but he had never been able to strike a deal, because Kirk always insisted that he had to play McMurphy and Zaentz thought he wasn’t right for the part. As Michael discovered, Zaentz was still interested, even more so after he had seen the long-running San Francisco version of the play, which for six years had attracted a steady stream of sympathetic liberal Berkeley students and others to the theater in Jackson Square.
When Michael first got in touch with Zaentz, he was in the midst of his takeover of the small, independent Berkeley-based Fantasy Records, founded by Sol and Max Weiss, who had operated a record-pressing plant before deciding to get into the talent and retail side of the business. Fantasy hit it big in the late 1940s and 1950s, mostly with recordings by jazz greats Dave Brubeck, Cal Tjader, and Vince Guaraldi, and several live albums by the late, legendary comedian Lenny Bruce, whose recordings made the tiny label not just cool but edgy and ultra-hip.
By the mid-fifties, Fantasy had prestige to burn but not a lot of money. In 1955 the Weisses hired thirty-four-year-old Saul Zaentz to help increase the label’s revenues. Zaentz had a solid background in booking tours for such jazz greats as Duke Ellington and Stan Getz, and was in charge of distribution for several small jazz labels. The Weisses’ goal was a major expansion of Fantasy, and they believed that Zaentz was the person to get it done.
They were right. By 1967, he had turned Fantasy into the largest independent jazz label in the world, and then, along with a couple of newly acquired partners, with Zaentz maintaining a controlling interest, they bought out the Weisses, and together they took ownership of the company. Almost immediately Zaentz added rock and roll to the label and signed several acts, one of which, San Francisco–based Creedence Clearwater Revival, fronted by John Fogerty, became Fantasy’s all-time biggest-selling act. Zaentz, balancing his cultural awareness with his business acumen, also signed Creedence to a management contract and assigned Fantasy the publishing rights to Creedence’s songs, thereby effectively partnering himself with every one of the group’s income streams. (This would eventually lead to a highly acrimonious split between Fogerty and Zaentz.)
Zaentz continued to diversify his company, buying several small jazz and R&B labels as he built Fantasy into a giant money machine, complete with a new, modern office headquarters in San Francisco. By the early 1970s, Zaentz wanted to expand Fantasy into film; when he saw the local revival of Cuckoo’s Nest, he tracked down the rights and tried to buy them from Kirk. After Kirk said no, Zaentz went on to make another movie that made no money but turned him into a legitimate player in the film business
Everything Kirk had disliked about Zaentz, Michael loved—his hippie veneer, his pushiness, his know-it-all attitude, and his always needing to be in charge. Michael was content to let Zaentz be the up-front man and offered him a full partnership between Fantasy Films and Bigstick to make Cuckoo’s Nest. Zaentz agreed and, to seal the deal, put up the film’s entire $2 million budget.1
What followed was eighteen months of preproduction, all done while Michael was still starring in The Streets of San Francisco. One of the first things Zaentz suggested was that they go directly to Kesey and commission him to adapt his own novel into a screenplay. Michael hesitated. While he loved Cuckoo’s Nest, he sensed that Kesey might be something of a one-trick pony. He hadn’t written anything after Cuckoo’s Nest that was comparable to it, and besides, he had no experience as a screenwriter. Nonetheless, Zaentz insisted they should at least meet with Kesey, and Michael agreed.
Their new production company opened an office in Los Angeles, where the meeting took place. They offered Kesey a percentage of the film’s earnings to write the screenplay. Michael remembers, “Ken came in not believing in agents and contracts and all that, so we shook hands. He went ahead and we paid him more than members of the Writers Guild get, plus a percentage.”
Four months later, Kesey delivered a script that both Michael and Zaentz hated. “It was too surreal,” Michael said. “There was one scene that had a nurse, wearing a Vularian helmet, and she reached her arms out between two walls and scraped her hands, and blood ran down the walls.”
The original viewpoint of the novel and the play is that of the silent Indian chief Bromden, a kind of sacred totem come to life. In the novel, characters change shapes and forms, time stands still, the walls sprout arms that try to grab inmates as they walk by, and there are other surrealistic touches that seemed, if not impossible, at least not in synch with what Zaentz and Michael wanted, an accessible, commercial mainstream film. They eliminated the chief’s unseen narration. And they wanted to alter the war-of-the-sexes theme of the battle between McMurphy and Nurse Ratched and elevate it to what they felt was a much stronger and more dramatic power struggle between the empowered nurse and her prisoner/patient—a war for justice and humanity.
They not only wanted to deemphasize the psychedelia, they wanted McMurphy to be a less cynical symbol of freedom and creative individuality, while portraying Nurse Ratched as one of institutional (corporate) repression. All of these changes Michael discussed by phone with Kesey, whose reaction worried Michael. He told Zaentz Kesey wouldn’t go for any of it, but Zaentz told him not to worry. They would fly up to Oregon, where Kesey lived, go over their changes, and get him to agree to them. However, when they arrived at Kesey’s home, he refused to even talk to them directly. He had since hired someone to represent him, and the script talks quickly devolved into a four-way shouting match.
Michael and Zaentz flew back to L.A. with the same version of the script they had brought with them, and with Kesey now threatening to sue. They then hired a relatively unknown screenwriter, Bo Goldman, to write an entirely new script. Goldman’s only previous screenwriting credits were for a TV remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1947 courtroom melodrama The Paradine Case, a 1956 episode of the TV series Playhouse 90, and a 1964 episode of TV’s The Defenders. Zaentz liked his style, and the price was right. They also brought in Larry Hauben to help with the rewrite.
When Kesey heard about what was being done to his script, he threatened to publicly discredit the movie when it came out and call for a general boycott of it. Zaentz and Michael decided to pay Kesey $10,000 plus expenses and 2½ percent of the net to go away. As Zaentz knew he would, Kesey took the money and faded from the scene.
Next, Zaentz and Michael began to look for a director, another step that proved more difficult than either had anticipated. Michael returned once more to his father’s files to see who had previously been up for the job and noticed the name Miloš Forman underlined and with cross-outs and exclamation marks. As it turned out, in 1966 Kirk had taken Anne with him on a trip to the Soviet Union and Prague, Czechoslovakia, as a goodwill ambassador for the U.S. State Department. Kirk loved the still-Soviet-dominated burgeoning film industry in Czechoslovakia. There was one director he especially wanted to meet, a young man by the name of Miloš Forman, who had made a name for himself in 1965 with Loves of a Blonde and was considered a leading proponent of the Czech New Wave. A year later Forman’s reputation grew international when Loves was nominated for a 1967 Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film and an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language film.2
Kirk, still actively looking for a director to helm Cuckoo’s Nest, asked Forman if he would be willing to read Kesey’s book and consider making a movie out of it. Forman agreed. When he returned to the States, Kirk promptly sent Forman the book, but he never heard from the director again. Offended by what he thought was the director’s rudeness, Kirk angrily crossed him off his list.
In 1967 Forman made The Firemen’s Ball, a Czech and Italian co-production, and that film, too, was nominated by the Academy for Best Foreign Language Film.3
Forman’s first post-Czech-liberation American film was 1971’s Taking Off, a comedy directed and co-written by Forman, John Guare, Jean-Claude Carrière, and John Klein about a group of parents whose children have run away, setting off a series of self-evaluations by the befuddled parents, who eventually turn into adult versions of their rebellious children. The film was a little late in dealing with the contentious nature of the children and parents of the sixties and did not find an audience at the box office. It wasn’t a total disaster, as it helped to further establish Forman as a director with international reach and universal appeal.
By the time Michael approached him about directing Cuckoo’s Nest, Forman had become a bankable Hollywood director. “I met with three or four directors who held their cards very close to their chest. Miloš Forman came and sat down, opened the script on the first page and told us page by page what his vision was for the movie. You could just close your eyes and picture that movie in your head,” Michael remembers. “We wanted Forman because he is a realistic and a funny director. We knew we needed someone to handle the comedy. He has a very delicate eye: a great ability to go from humor to pathos, sometimes in the same frame. He’s been living in the States long enough to understand the peculiarly American aspects of the book but he still has that profound Central European sensibility.” That he was a foreigner brought him closer to the sensibilities of both Zaentz and Michael, each of whom had immigrant backgrounds. As Michael remembers, he and Zaentz were so happy to have found Forman, “we turned to each other and started crying.”
Forman added another layer to the film: that of the outsider. McMurphy is an outsider, an immigrant if you will, in the world of the prison hospital to which he is confined, a world he can never really be a part of because he is not truly insane. The notion of the outsider, or the immigrant—the foreigner—played right into Forman’s hands. Michael and Zaentz believed he could make McMurphy come alive in a way no other director could. As far as Forman was concerned, the script also evoked the political repression he had lived through: “This was a Czech movie … about a society I lived in … everything I knew.”
All they needed now was the right actor to play McMurphy. And as far as Forman was concerned, like Zaentz, he insisted it wasn’t going to be Kirk Douglas. Michael put up a valiant fight for his father, but in the end he was outvoted by Forman and the ever-practical Zaentz. In his heart, Michael knew they were right—at fifty-seven, his father was far too old to play McMurphy.
Michael insisted he be the one to break the bad news, knowing all too well what his father’s reaction was going to be. Sure enough, Kirk angrily blamed Michael for betraying him. Others were surprised that Michael didn’t step into the role himself. He always insisted he wasn’t a big enough star, but it is hard to turn away from the obvious conclusion that Michael didn’t want to directly compete with his father or be compared to him (or show him up). He didn’t want to read in the reviews that his McMurphy was so much better (or so much worse) than his father’s. It was bad enough that Michael had to take the role away from him; he didn’t need to be told for the rest of his father’s life how awful he was in it. He’d been through that before. He would produce and let someone else play McMurphy.
Kirk eventually came to accept Forman as the director, even believing his (true) story that he had never received the book. But as for not playing McMurphy, it put a fresh distance between him and Michael. It was, according to Kirk, “almost incomprehensible. They wanted someone else for McMurphy. Why? That was my part. I’d found him. I could create him, make him breathe. But after ten years of telling everybody what a great role it is … now I’m too old.… I could still play that part.”
Forty years later, the pain was still there. “I bought the book from Ken Kesey, I paid Dale Wasserman to write the stage play.… I thought I would get to play it in the movies … it was not to be. It was the low point for me … [Michael] was the producer, he should have insisted that I play the part.”
Michael always put all the blame on Forman for the decision: “The director makes the casting calls. Whenever there’s a good part and you don’t get it, it’s a disappointment because there are so few out there. That was what was so hard about it.”
THE FIRST TWO obvious choices that Michael and Zaentz approached to play McMurphy, Marlon Brando and Gene Hackman, both immediately said no. So did James Caan, an early favorite of the producers. Miloš Forman, for some reason, was “also fascinated with Burt Reynolds,” Michael recalls, and wanted him for McMurphy because he thought he had cheap charisma. “Before Miloš Forman got involved, I was talking to Hal Ashby about directing the film and Hal was pushing Jack [Nicholson]…. Jack had done passive characters in Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces, but when I saw him [at an advance screening] as the flamboyant yet sensitive shore patrolman in The Last Detail [1973], I was sure he could play the part.”
Michael knew Jack casually through his girlfriend, Anjelica Huston, daughter of famed film director John Huston, yet another director Michael had considered for the film. “Michael Douglas talked to me early on about One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” Anjelica Huston recalled. “I don’t know if I was the instrumental factor in that, but I mentioned to Jack that Michael wanted to see him about it.”
When Michael finally did meet with Nicholson, he said he was interested, especially when he learned that McMurphy was going to be less of a cowboy type (as in the novel) than a more realistic street person. However, Michael and Zaentz had to wait in line, as Nicholson’s recent run of hits had made him the hottest star in Hollywood. Ashby wanted to use him again right away (even before the release of The Last Detail) to play Woody Guthrie in the biopic Bound for Glory, but Nicholson turned it down.4 Bernardo Bertolucci also wanted Jack to play Dashiell Hammett’s Continental Op in Red Harvest. Nicholson turned that down as well. Tony Richardson then offered Jack the lead in The Bodyguard, based on a script Richardson had co-written with Sam Shepard. That project initially appealed to Nicholson, who gave it a potential yes—until he’d read Bo Goldman’s adaptation of Kesey’s novel and said yes to that instead (so powerful was Nicholson at the time that without him attached, neither Red Harvest nor The Bodyguard were able to keep their original deals alive at their respective studios).5
As it happened, Jack, like Kirk, had read Kesey’s novel before it came out, and had tried himself to option it for the movies in 1963. However, Nicholson had not been able to match the $47,000 put up at the time—by Kirk Douglas.
While Nicholson was ready to sign on, Zaentz and Michael were nowhere near going into production. Then Polanski’s Chinatown came Nicholson’s way, and he was busy filming that for the rest of 1973. After it opened in June 1974, he maintained he was still interested in Cuckoo’s Nest, but the film still wasn’t ready to go, so Jack went instead into Mike Nichols’s production of The Fortune, co-starring Nicholson’s buddy Warren Beatty, with a script by Carole Eastman, who had also done the screenplay for Five Easy Pieces.6
Once The Fortune was completed, Jack promised Michael that if it was ready, Cuckoo’s Nest would be his next project, despite the fact that Jack now had some real doubts about his own ability to play McMurphy. He had told a friend, Helen Dudar, just before he officially signed on that “the starting problem with Cuckoo was that everybody thought I was born to play the part, and in my mind it was going to be difficult for me. I felt, ‘They already think I’m supposed to be great in this, and I’m not sure.’ ” As he explained further, the real reason he took the role was to prove to himself he could pull it off. (To do so he agreed to a small salary and a percentage of the profits to help get it made, a deal that eventually earned him millions.)
THE NEXT IMPORTANT piece of the puzzle was casting the role of Nurse Ratched. All the top actresses of the day—Anne Bancroft, Jane Fonda, Faye Dunaway—said no. The next two on Michael and Zaentz’s list were Geraldine Page, best known for her stage work, who turned them down, and Angela Lansbury, not yet the major American star she was to become a decade later thanks to the long-running TV series Murder, She Wrote.
It was Forman who suggested a relatively unknown actress by the name of Louise Fletcher, whose first major credited film was Robert Altman’s just-released Thieves Like Us, which anticipated Ridley Scott’s 1991 Thelma and Louise. Forman called her in to read, and he, Michael, and Zaentz all agreed she was the actress they were looking for. They signed her on the spot.
Michael then sat beside Forman for every one of the nine hundred auditions held to cast the all-important ensemble. They discovered their Bromden on a tip that took them to Mount Rainier National Park, where Will Sampson was working as an assistant warden. They offered him the part. He quit his job at the park, packed his bag, and left for location.
At Michael’s insistence. Danny DeVito was quickly added to the group as Martini. Early on, while both were still total unknowns, DeVito and Michael had made a pact that whoever “made it” first would bring the other along for the ride.7
Most of the other actors chosen for the ensemble were relatively unknown, although some would go on to a certain measure of stardom after the film: William Redfield as Dale Harding, Brad Dourif as Bill Bibbit, Sydney Lassick as Charlie Cheswick, Christopher Lloyd as Max Taber, Dean R. Brooks as Dr. John Spivey, William Duell as Jim Sefelt, Vincent Schiavelli as Frederickson, Delos V. Smith Jr. as Scanlon, Michael Berryman as Ellis, Nathan George as Attendant Washington, Mews Small as Candy, Scatman Crothers as Orderly Turkle, and Louisa Moritz as Rose.
By the spring of 1973, Michael and Zaentz were ready to begin production on the film. They made their official announcement in the May 12, 1973, edition of the Hollywood Reporter: “Michael Douglas will spend his summer hiatus from Streets of San Francisco producing [the] One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest movie with Saul Zaentz, head of Berkeley-based Fantasy Records. Michael’s father, Kirk, starred in the play on Broadway in 1964 but neither Kirk or Michael will appear in the movie.”
They were on the record now, there was no turning back. At this point, Michael wanted to drop out of The Streets of San Francisco to devote all of his time to making the film. But not only would Quinn Martin not release Michael from his contractual obligation to play Steve Keller, a character very popular with audiences, he “promoted” Keller to full inspector. With an aging Malden unable to keep up the show’s snap-snap pace, Martin shifted most of the action to Michael, in effect switching their roles so that Michael’s was the main character and Malden’s the supporting one. Not that Michael couldn’t have gotten out of his contract if he had pushed hard enough, but it wasn’t his nature. He was too passive to break his contract with Quinn and too attached to Malden to hurt him by leaving the series and endangering its continuing run. This was, Michael knew, likely Malden’s swan song as an actor.
Nor was he able to leave Brenda despite the fact that their relationship was over. By now, with Michael’s schedule loaded with the series and the movie, he couldn’t have spent very much time with her even if he had wanted to. As Brenda recalls, there was a passivity on both their parts that had kept them together: “I think the warning signs had been around for some time. We should have split long before we did, but there was a reluctance by both of us to call an end to it. We had been through a lot together, at a particular time in our lives when the support and encouragement of a partner really mattered.” True enough, except that now Michael had a new partner of sorts, Saul Zaentz, and a child he was raising with him called One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
Brenda recalls, “We were a beautiful couple. People loved us. Mike was charming, brilliant: women fell over him, men admired him. And I am, naturally, a good complement to such a man. But when you’re done with a man, you are done. I just began to find it boring with Mike. I realized he wasn’t the man I was going to marry, and my relationship changed at that point … and I don’t think he really wanted to marry me. Everybody but us seemed to think that marriage was a good idea.”
Michael completed the second season of episodes for The Streets of San Francisco—twenty-three mini-movies, two less than the first season (not counting the pilot)—just as United Artists agreed to distribute Cuckoo’s Nest for Bigstick, the final crucial piece of the puzzle. Michael would go on to do another two seasons of the show, plus the first two episodes of the series’s fifth (and final) season. During the making of Cuckoo’s Nest, Michael was allowed to film his scenes in batches. But when it became clear that Michael’s future was in movies, Quinn did let him out of his contract, replacing the character of Steve Keller with a new one played by Richard Hatch.8 After the series ended, Malden was reduced to hawking American Express cards in a series of commercials in which he closely approximated the character of Mike Stone and admonished audiences not to leave their homes without it.
By then, Michael had become the most successful feature film producer in Hollywood, perhaps of all time.
1 A year earlier Zaentz had invested heavily in Daryl Duke’s Payday, a modern-day Western starring Rip Torn. According to Dennis McDougal, Zaentz’s Fantasy Films brought Payday in at $746,000—$62,000 under budget. The film made no money, but Zaentz benefited financially from the tax shelter it provided. Part of his reason for wanting to put up the entire budget for Cuckoo’s Nest was the fact that it allowed him to renew his film-based tax shelter.
2 The film lost both nominations to Claude Lelouch’s A Man and a Woman (France).
3 The film lost to Sergei Bondarchuk’s War and Peace (Russia).
4 Ashby then offered the part to Bob Dylan, who also passed. The role eventually went to David Carradine.
5 Red Harvest did not get made. The Bodyguard was reconceived for Steve McQueen and Diana Ross. The deal fell apart because McQueen would not accept second-position billing after Diana Ross. The film was finally made in 1992 with Kevin Costner and Whitney Houston.
6 She wrote both The Fortune and Five Easy Pieces under the pseudonym Adrien Joyce.
7 DeVito had previously played the role of Martini in an Off-Broadway revival of the play.
8 Michael appeared in 98 of the series’s 120 episodes.