The Hollywood myth Jack Nicholson said doesn’t exist: “The movie business will do fine”
As an undisputed living legend, Jack Nicholson knows all about the myths of the movie industry, and he’s adamant that one of the most famous doesn’t even exist.
Being one of the greatest actors in history with three Academy Awards, boasting an extensive list of classic performances in a raft of seminal films, and knowing Hollywood inside out from his decades spent as its resident hard-partying hellraiser has given Nicholson a greater insight than most into the inner workings of the business, and he’s happy to call bullshit.
The best performers have always had an innate gift for extracting the most from even the flimsiest of screenplays, while a top-tier actor reciting the lines from a high-calibre script makes the job even easier. Having risen to superstardom at around the same time that the auteur system was phased out in favour of the blockbuster era, Nicholson has seen everything that cinema has to offer in its various guises.
Casting his eye on “a lot of the great fallacies in the movie business” in an interview with the BBC, Nicholson shot down the notion that some of the greatest screenplays ever written failed to make it into production. “The so-called great unproduced script,” he said. “That doesn’t exist.”
Focusing his attentions on the criticisms regularly being levelled at studio bosses and producers for placing too much emphasis on the name of populist entertainment at the expense of more intimate and filmmaker-driven projects, Nicholson shot that one down, too.
“They don’t want to make good pictures. They do,” he mused. “In fact, as I imagine the head of a studio’s job, there are always three or four pictures every year that he’d like to make. And then he has to fill out the programme with the rest, which are all pretty much hustled movies.”
He wasn’t done there, though, with Nicholson intimating that the many calls decrying the death of cinema in its purest form – which have been ongoing for decades, as it stands – are always premature. “These myths seem to make us want to generalise about the health of the industry,” he continued. “As long as it’s everybody’s favourite job, the movie business will do fine.”
Wise words indeed from one of the best to ever do it, and it’s easy to see how he reached that conclusion. After all, every generation, the doomsayers will prognosticate a bleak and barren future for classical cinema, and while it’s admittedly become a much lesser concern in the corridors of power once IP started to run amok as the industry’s go-to option for maximising profits, the independent scene continues to throw up instant classics on an annual basis.
Nicholson broke through when ‘New Hollywood’ was making waves, and once that eventually subsided, he and his peers simply decided to ride another one instead.
