Word: forman
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Fletcher's acceptance was the third stage of a five-way sweep for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Before her award, the movie had already won statuettes for best-adapted screenplay and for Milos Forman's direction. Cuckoo would proceed to win Jack Nicholson his long-deferred Best Actor Oscar and, finally, take the Best Picture prize. Not since It Happened One Night in 1934 had one film copped the five principal Oscars and, lest this point be overlooked, Cuckoo Co-Producer Michael Douglas hastened to remind everyone...
Michael, bored with his Streets of San Francisco TV series, got in touch with Fantasy Records Chairman Saul Zaentz, who had grown similarly restive in the music business. Zaentz pulled the financing together, and the two fledgling producers hired Czechoslovakian Director Milos Forman and persuaded Nicholson to play McMurphy. Nicholson was enthusiastic about the part, but, lest idealism crowd out commerce, the actor demanded a salary of $1 million and something like 10% of the profits. The casting of Louise Fletcher as Nurse Ratched, however, represented quite another kind of risk...
...Altman's Thieves Like Us) and, indeed, had dropped out of acting almost entirely after making a bright start in television in the late 1950s. Married to Jerry Bick, an agent turned producer, she had devoted most of her time to raising two sons, who are now teenagers. Forman cast her, he says, "on instinct." He liked her "peculiar detachment, her removal...
Once the movie got under way, however, it was Forman who seemed detached. He worried about not having his Mercedes on hand near the Salem, Ore., mental hospital where the movie was shot (the car was eventually driven out from New York), and kept communication with cast and crew to a minimum. Nicholson went for several weeks hardly speaking to Forman, largely by his own choice. Cinematographer Haskell Wexler, himself an Oscar winner (Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?), groused about the way things were going and was replaced halfway through the filming. Fletcher fought with Forman through...
...campaign often seems to command all waking hours. Forman swears--with a wink--that he has to squeeze all possible work out of his "slaves," and he himself hardly takes any time off. Cooking takes too much time, according to Riper. "There's a Red Barn next door; we ate there for three weeks until we got sick of it." Campaign work becomes a monomania, and time spent on expendables such as entertainment, relaxation, eating and sleep takes on overtones of guilt; there is always something more to be done, and every missed opportunity could conceivably lead to defeat. Downing...