Word: nicholsons
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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...
...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 17 takes of her first...
Some hate King of Marvin Gardens Go suck an egg. It is a great find if you haven't found it yet. Nicholson, Bruce Dern, Ellen Burstyn and a smashingly beautiful girl (whose name we can't come up with but who does the sexiest tap-dance ever) make up the small society in this Rafelson risk...
...unnecessary a casting error. There are plenty of handsome actors around, and almost any of them could have been less of a gobbler in this part. While everyone else is speaking in Irish brogue or the King's English, O'Neal sounds like a smooth-voiced Jack Nicholson out of Doonesbury. "How could you do this to me, Nora?" he asks in a deadpan American voice that could have come straight out of Gidget Goes Loco. O'Neal's Barry has no charm and is the film's decisive failure; you can forgive a rogue anything so long...