Jack Nicholson names the worst period in Hollywood history: “There’s so much crap”
The way Hollywood has worked since the beginning is that when cinema undergoes its latest inevitable evolution, the old guard cries foul and says things weren’t like that back in their day. Jack Nicholson wasn’t even that old when he felt the same way, and things have gotten much worse since then.
Actors and filmmakers who thrived during the silent era lamented the talkies, the ‘Golden Age’ stalwarts were in uproar when ‘New Hollywood’ took cinema in a more authentic direction, and the current elder statesmen have been ganging up to shit all over Marvel, because that’s the way it always goes.
There was a hint of hypocrisy in Nicholson’s assessment, though, since he wasn’t immune from the very criticisms he levelled toward the entire industry. He broke through at a time when actors could become superstars without having a franchise to rely on, with talent more than enough to crack the A-list.
Once Easy Rider lit the fuse on the rocket strapped to his back, he never came down. Performatively, it’s not unfair to say that Nicholson was never better than he was in the 1970s, but he remained one of the best and most acclaimed actors in the business until he called it quits in 2012.
He even changed the financial power structure for cinema’s brightest stars forever when he secured the most lucrative contract in history for Tim Burton’s Batman, a blockbuster that helped convince the studio executives that high concepts and bigger budgets were the easiest way to make the most money.
And yet, by the mid-1990s, Nicholson hated what he saw, which was in itself ironic when he was one of Tinseltown’s highest-paid names and in between shooting Mike Nichols’ $70 million fantasy, Wolf, and Tim Burton’s $80 million sci-fi, Mars Attacks!, which were hardly productions made on a shoestring.
“In all my experience, and it goes back rather a long way, I’ve never known a time when there was so much crap around,” he raged. “It makes me very angry because those responsible are mostly idiots and charlatans. They know nothing about the cinema and they care very little, too. They just think in terms of ‘fast’ and ‘slow’ and ‘where’s the rooting interest?'”
Throwing stones in glass houses is never a wise idea, with Nicholson saying that “it seems like the movies are becoming more formally the circus,” an odd statement from a guy who’d recently played a character that paints their face like a clown, and had more recently played one who transformed into a werewolf.
“It’s the bigger explosion and the wilder escape from the more pyrotechnical situation,” he offered. “And it’s not very rewarding for the actor when everything is either soap opera or pure melodrama or special effects. And by now it’s been going on for so long that the audience is unused to anything else.”
Trapped somewhere between being part of the solution and part of the problem, Nicholson had one foot in each world but didn’t know where to go, although one thing he did know was that the high art of Hollywood was rapidly being replaced by commerce.
