How Jack Nicholson’s worst movie led to his greatest-ever role: “He’s godawful in it”
Given that Jack Nicholson‘s storied career saw him become the most nominated actor in the history of the Academy Awards, audiences could be forgiven for thinking Hollywood immediately recognised his anarchic, mercurial, charismatic talents and pushed him as a star from the beginning. This couldn’t be further from the truth, though. In fact, by the late 1960s, Nicholson had begun to wonder if his future lay in screenwriting instead of leading man stardom.
You see, by the time he landed the role of alcoholic lawyer George Hanson in Easy Rider, he had already been toiling away in obscurity for a decade. After making his screen debut in 1958’s exploitation flick The Cry Baby Killer, produced by Roger Corman, Nicholson went on to work almost exclusively in Corman productions, like The Little Shop of Horrors, The Raven, The Terror, and The St Valentine’s Day Massacre, or B-movie westerns that failed to even attract US distribution, such as The Shooting or Ride in the Whirlwind.
Nicholson knew his acting career was going nowhere fast, so he began writing screenplays. His psychedelic script, The Trip, was turned into a movie directed by Corman and became a countercultural cult classic. However, Nicholson’s promising screenwriting career was cut short by Easy Rider, which finally introduced him to mainstream audiences as an actor. He received a ‘Best Supporting Actor’ Oscar nomination, and all of a sudden, Hollywood was his oyster.
One of the first movies Nicholson auditioned for post-Easy Rider was the Barbra Streisand musical On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, which put him on the radar of Paramount Pictures’ Robert Evans. The legendary producer revealed in Jack Nicholson: The Early Years that he believed Nicholson “had a great personality and smile” and had seen “a lot of his bike pictures”. Evans knew that, at that point in Nicholson’s career, he “needed a big picture to be in” to prove he had the chops as a Hollywood star, so he cast him as Streisand’s brother in the movie.
However, to everyone’s dismay, this soon proved to be a pretty disastrous casting call. “He’s godawful in it,” Evans laughed, “and I think he’d offer me a percentage of the picture if I cut him out of it”. Unfortunately, Nicholson didn’t see eye to eye with the director Vincente Minnelli, and as his one song in the picture proved, he wasn’t exactly a natural singer either. It was a misfire all around.
Intriguingly, despite recognising that he was terrible in the film, Evans didn’t actually hold it against him. In fact, he knew the movie as a whole didn’t work, and that the actor’s role—the preposterously monikered ‘Tad Pringle’—was a dud. “It was really no part for him,” Evans acknowledged, “It wasn’t his fault. Nobody else could have played it any better”.
Proving that sometimes Hollywood works in mysterious ways, Nicholson falling flat on his face with On a Clear Day, which many see as his worst role ever, wound up leading him to arguably his greatest-ever part.
If nothing else, he ended that production with a supporter in Evans. So, when the producer was putting together a neo-noir set in 1930s Los Angeles a few years later, and screenwriter Robert Towne told him he’d written the protagonist Jake Gittes with Nicholson in mind, Evans was only too happy to hire the guy he saw so much potential in while making On a Clear Day.
That movie was, of course, Chinatown, a stone-cold classic whose reputation is still bulletproof more than 50 years after its release, and it cemented Nicholson’s status as an A-lister for life.
