The movie Jack Nicholson refused to release for 30 years
While Jack Nicholson undoubtedly had a memorable experience making the movie, he chose to keep The Passenger entirely out of circulation for three decades after obtaining the rights to one of his starring vehicles. Eventually, he relented and made it available to the public.
As a fan of the filmmaker, Nicholson didn’t take much convincing to star in Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1975 dramatic thriller. It featured him as a journalist who heads off to Africa to cover a conflict but ends up assuming the identity of a dead man and getting caught up in the recently deceased’s misdeeds as a result of his risky gambit.
Although it was well-received, it was far from being one of Nicholson’s most notable roles of the 1970s. Not that there’s any shame in that when the remainder of the decade saw him set out his stall as one of the most famous and awards-laden talents in Hollywood.
The film was distributed by MGM, with whom Nicholson had an agreement to headline another project, which was ultimately abandoned by the studio years later. Having dedicated so much of his time working on something that wasn’t going to end up getting made, he demanded compensation for his labour.
As a result, the rights to The Passenger were placed into Nicholson’s hands, where he ended up doing nothing with them for over 30 years. There was a short run on VHS in the 1980s, but any prospect of a DVD, remastered Blu-ray, or theatrical re-release required his approval, which he was highly reticent to give.
It was Sony Pictures Classics who eventually twisted his arm, with the subsidiary suggesting that The Passenger was worthy of returning to the big screen. In October 2005, Antonioni’s slow-burner made its way back to the multiplex and earned a respectable $769,000 before arriving on DVD in April of the following year.
Explaining his decision to the Los Angeles Times, Nicholson compared the prospect of cinemagoers discovering The Passenger as akin to the joys he used to find in his younger days. “My friends and I would go to the art houses expecting to see a masterpiece every week, and we did,” he said. “Whether it was Antonioni, Kurosawa, Godard, Fellini, Satyajit Ray, Truffaut or Bergman, we knew we were in good hands.”
“Today, we have cheap, smart indie movies, but it’s not the same thing,” he continued. “Antonioni didn’t feel that he needed to get every single point across right away. Today, we’re just slaves to melodrama.”
It took him a while to get there. Still, Nicholson finally relented and allowed The Passenger to be screened for a wide audience, which may well have had the same effect on an aspiring cinephile that his own cinematic idols had on him.
