Word: nicholson
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...PEOPLE who never saw my (early) movies are better off in life than I am, man, but like all actors, I needed the work," Nicholson has admitted. And a perusal of Nicholson's career makes it seem remarkable that he ever got out of the B-movie drive-ins at all. The list is impressive: Jack has not only acted in bombs, but written, produced, and directed them as well. Just what drugs were involved is a bit hazy, but his violently energetic quest for personal morality, both on-screen and off, has no doubt been aided by some hallucinogens...
...these were schlock-horror flicks; in fact, many were attempts (however confused) at esoterica, disdained in commercial Hollywood. Nicholson's off-beat personality and unemployment drew him to a group known as "fringe-Hollywood"--the equivalent of semi-pro in baseball--dedicated to the less and less prevalent credo, "Get an idea, Get a camera, Get it done today." Not since Bogart has there been a career checkered by such massive hits and misses. But unlike Bogart, Nicholson also wrote scripts, sometimes to create suitable roles for himself...
...movie), he and director Monte Hellman took the B-unit to the Phillipines and made Back Door to Hell and Flight to Fury. The low-budget films had strictly limited aspirations, and still failed to fulfill them. So the dynamic duo turned to the latest craze, The Western; Nicholson wrote Ride the Whirlwind and Adrien Joyce penned The Shooting; filmed simultaneously on the Utah desert, neither was ever released...
...hard not to view this as a setback. But movies were too ingrained in Nicholson's blood to be discarded after a few dozen failures; he turned to personal experience to improve his literary output. He wrote about drugs. The Trip (1967), directed by Corman and starring Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper and Bruce Dern, detailed, in an obscure way, an L.S.D. experience. Not coincidentally, wife Sandra had experienced a bad trip; understandably, she implored Jack not to work on such a screenplay; not surprisingly, he doggedly persevered, and she packed up and left with daughter Jennifer before The Trip...
Undaunted, Nicholson dug further into drug experience and scraped up Head (1968), starring the Monkees, and directed by one of their creators, Bob Rafelson. One memorable scene placed the unfab-four in the hair of a giant Victor Mature, as dandruff. Renata Adler of The New York Times summarized the Hollywood-establishment view of Nicholson's type of movie in a sentence...