The 1971 movie that got Jack Nicholson into a “stand-up, knockdown fight” with the censors
Few actors defined the New Hollywood era quite like Jack Nicholson, who was gaining vital experience in the industry from indie hero Roger Corman, whose often subversive approach to filmmaking inspired this new period for American cinema.
Championing the counterculture with movies like The Trip, which he penned while Corman directed, and then, of course, Easy Rider, earning him an Academy Award nomination for ‘Best Supporting Actor’, Nicholson was a leading figure of this innovative new wave.
It was only a matter of time, then, before he graduated to directing a feature film of his own, having gained enough experience as a writer and an actor over the 1960s.
So, despite a schedule which would see him appear in some incredibly iconic New Hollywood films, like Five Easy Pieces and Carnal Knowledge, Nicholson managed to find the time to make Drive, He Said, which hit cinemas in 1971. He decided not to star in this one, but he cast his previous Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces co-star Karen Black in the film, alongside newcomers William Tepper and Michael Margotta.
Inspired by the book of the same name by Jeremy Larner, who also co-wrote the screenplay, the film follows a college student’s affair with a professor’s wife, and if that wasn’t shocking enough for some audiences, the full-frontal nudity and explicit sex scenes certainly were. Hollywood was increasingly becoming more open to taboo imagery following the demise of the Hays Code a few years prior, but censors still found nudity and sex in particular quite the challenge.
Both the Motion Picture Association of America and the British Board of Film Classification wanted to cut certain scenes from the film, as well as give it an X rating, but Nicholson was not happy with this attempted censorship. In fact, he once claimed that he (via BFI) “had a stand-up, knockdown fight with your [John] Trevelyan,” the secretary of the board at the BBFC.
Nicholson explained that Trevelyan “wanted to cut just one line, which is when, at the climax of a lovemaking scene between Hector and Karen Black’s characters, she says, ‘I’m coming’”. This might seem like something rather small, but the director was adamant that this line was incredibly important to the overall narrative of the film, and he fought to keep it in.
He added, “I believe he thought I was crazy to argue over, in his view, such a small capitulation, but for me, this line is the crystallisation of what the whole film is about: the battles of the characters, and their varying abilities, to release this sexual power. Olive is the freest of the characters. Gabriel goes crazy under the stress of his vision.”
Although the BBFC released the movie with an X-rating, and despite the fact that it was hardly pornographic, Nicholson managed to get away with much of the controversial content after a hard fight; seemingly, a few nude scenes were often all it took to have censors up in arms, even in the 1970s.
