“One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” is rightfully considered a modern classic.
Adapted from Ken Kesey’s 1962 novel of the same name, which had also been performed on stage, “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” followed Randle “Mac” McMurphy (Jack Nicholson), a ne’er-do-well convicted of statutory rape who fakes a mental illness to avoid hard labor. He’s sent to a mental institution, where he befriends fellow inmates and runs afoul of the villainous Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher). It was the second English-language film from Czech-American director Miloš Forman and wound up winning all five of the top Academy Awards (Best Picture, Best Actor for Nicholson, Best Actress for Fletcher, Best Director for Forman and Best Adapted screenplay for Lawrence Hauben and Bo Goldman).
And producer Michael Douglas always knew that it was bound for greatness.
“We thought it was pretty special,” Douglas said. We’re speaking because the movie, celebrating its 50th anniversary, has just been reissued as a deluxe 4K Blu-ray by Warner Bros. Home Entertainment, with new special features (including some wonderful conversations-over-Zoom emceed by Douglas).
Douglas does note that it was not always smooth sailing.
“We had a little bit of a of an issue about halfway through the picture, because Milos was not showing any of the dailies to the cast. He’s one of those directors who doesn’t want his cast to see and because we had had rumblings with our cameraman, Haskell Wexler, who was also a director himself, had certain visions and ideas, and there was some feedback,” Douglas recalled. “The natives were getting restless and I finally pleaded with Milos and said, ‘We have to show Jack something.’ These are the days of film, when a reel was 10 minutes. And we had reels and reels of reaction scenes – of him just in group therapy sessions, not saying a word, just watching. And they were the best acting lessons in the world.”
After Nicholson saw what Forman was doing, Douglas said, he “calmed down.”
The post-production for the movie was done in Berkeley, California, at Fantasy Records. And afterwards, the film was brought down to Hollywood to get distribution. “That was exactly the movie that was nominated for nine Academy Awards and won five. The exact one. And all the studios turned it down. That’s the lesson that stayed with me for 50 years now. Everything you saw was tied up in a bow, but the studios did not want to go for it,” Douglas said.
Finally, they struck a deal with United Artists. “It came down to having to go with the worst possible choice. And they got the best possible situation,” Douglas said.
Douglas admits that the movie would probably never be able to be made like they did 50 years ago, since they shot inside an actual facility in Oregon. “[Producer] Saul Zaentz and myself felt that their verisimilitude was so important that the closeness with the actual mental hospital, the cooperation of the actors being able to sit in on group therapy sessions with actual patients at the hospital, to have Dr. Dean Brooks, who plays the doctor, identify the psychiatric issues for each of our actors, so they could hone in,” Douglas explained. “All of that paid off, as the difference of being on a studio lot downtown and when the day was over, each of us going our own ways, to our own families or private life, and coming back to work, being up there, and staying up there created an environment where we had a lot of the actors who used to sleep at night on their bunks on the set, and for the movie, they were into it.”
Originally, Douglas said, the Oregon State Mental Hospital had refused the production’s request for cooperation. He remembers calling them and saying, “The book is very famous, they talk about the Oregon State Hospital. And sure, we can go shoot this picture in California, but we’re going to call it the Oregon State Hospital and you’re not going to get any benefit at all from it.”
He added: “I think that’s what won them over on a statewide level. And of course they’re very proud that the picture was there.”
In one of the special features on the disc, Douglas remarks that Hal Ashby had recommended Nicholson for the movie. At one point, Douglas said, Ashby had wanted to direct “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” but he and Zaentz “rubbed each other the wrong way.” But Ashby’s recommendation went a long way.
“Jack before ‘Five Easy Pieces’ and ‘Easy Rider’ was known as a quasi-intellectual,” he said. “He didn’t have that RP McMurphy gravitas. And then Hal showed us this picture called ‘The Last Detail,’ which he’d been doing with Jack, where he played this career officer, and we saw it. That was how it helped.”
As for how they landed on Forman, Douglas said they auditioned many directors, “predominantly in the Bay Area,” but were frustrated because they all “held their cards so close to their chest.” “We couldn’t really get a feeling about what the picture was. They were too cautious,” Douglas said. Screenwriter Hauben, an old friend of Douglas’, reminded him of “The Fireman’s Ball,” an earlier Czech movie of Forman’s. It was a comedy but it wasn’t laughing at any of the characters. “It’s just the vulnerability of people. And it had a lot of the aspects that we needed, plus he had a sense of humor, which was the important part of this piece, not just the drama.”
At the time, Forman was, in Douglas’ words, “having a bit of a nervous breakdown.” Forman was living at the Chelsea Hotel in New York, “pretty much staying in bed.” Through another filmmaker friend of Douglas’, Ivan Passer (who made 1981’s incredible “Cutter’s Way”), Forman was slipped the script. “Lo and behold, Miloš got out of bed. He flew to California and came up to my house in Los Angeles. We sat down and started on page one of the script and he took us through, methodically, what he would do,” Douglas remembered. “Saul and I, we looked at each other and we were like, ‘We’ve found our guy.”’
After all the other directors they had auditioned had played it so cool, Forman “embraced us and shared with us and it turned out to be a wonderful experience, because he knew how much we loved this project and would share his thoughts with us.”
Of course, one of the biggest pieces of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” lore was that Kirk Douglas, Michael’s father, had wanted to make the movie and star in the role eventually essayed by Nicholson. Douglas said that he thinks that his dad liked the movie, although admitted that “he was numb.” “They were trying to get it done, and they couldn’t, so they were selling it. He did the play on Broadway. I knew the book in my freshman American Classics English class. When I had this opportunity, I think he was a little stunned, because he thought he was giving the kid a little time to run, the fact that I put it all together,” Douglas said.
He and his dad “went through a period of anger and resentment that he was not playing the part,” something that he’s come to appreciate over the years. “I realized how seldom you get a great part and that was a great part,” Douglas said. But by the time they had started production, Kirk was in his 60s and “times had changed.” “When I brought him up to up to Berkeley, California, to see the first cut, he was really happy,” Douglas said. Plus, he had part of the producing backend and he “made more money than he did off of any film that he’d ever done.”
“One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” started Douglas’ journey as a producer. “I had never anticipated, never even thought of being a producer, but I realized how much I had learned from the 104 hours I’d done on ‘The Streets of San Francisco’ over four years, working six days a week because we’re on location. It was quite a job, I was surprised how much I learned about between casting and scripts and actual production,” Douglas said.
Among his producer credits is an executive producer credit on John Carpenter’s lovely “Starman.” He had wanted to play the title role, which eventually went to Jeff Bridges, because, in his words, “I was a television actor trying to make it in feature films. I was not approved,” Douglas said. “I would have loved to play Starman. It got there.” Yes it did.
“There was a period where I look back historically as a producer with my company and I’d gotten too big,” Douglas said. He might be thinking about when he produced “Stone Cold,” an action movie starring former football star Brian Bosworth (in his acting debut). Or Jean-Claude Van Damme’s “Double Impact,” the movie where he plays twins. “We had a whole active roster. And unfortunately, as I look back, my partners did not have much material for me. They were more involved with establishing their own careers,” Douglas shared.
But he does have some favorites – “the John Woo picture” “Face/Off,” starring John Travolta and Nicolas Cage, and “The Rainmaker,” based on the John Grisham novel of the same name, directed by Francis Ford Coppola and co-starring “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” standout Danny DeVito. Also “Flatliners,” directed by Joel Schumacher and shot by legendary cinematographer Jan de Bont. “Jan was a very important person in my life. He helped me out on ‘Jewel of the Nile,’ the ‘Romancing the Stone’ sequel,” Douglas said. (He also isn’t sure why de Bont hasn’t directed anything in 20 years.)
While Douglas said that he is mostly done with acting these days (don’t expect him to pop back up in the Marvel Cinematic Universe anytime soon), he did admit that he’s got a couple of “little gigs,” including something with his “Wall Street” director Oliver Stone. “I’m enjoying my life,” Douglas said. “Once you get off the merry-go-round, you all of a sudden realize, ‘Oh yeah, there’s a lot of other things out there.’”
“One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” is now available in its deluxe anniversary edition 4K UHD. We highly recommend it.
