Jack Nitzsche: The day an Oscar-winning musician was arrested on reality TV
Hollywood is a machine that can lead you to a life of award-winning greatness as quickly as it can lead you towards criminality and tabloid disgrace.
The industry often feels like a pressure cooker environment that makes people more susceptible to unleashing their darkest sides, toppling you from your shiny throne until you’re a shattered mess of cracked gold.
This was the case for Jack Nitzsche, who went from winning an Oscar and working on some massive Hollywood films to having his arrest publicised on the Fox reality show Cops. How the mighty can fall. He wasn’t always this way though, having started his career in the 1950s as a saxophonist and songwriter.
Living in Los Angeles during these heady days of musical experimentation and evolution must have been pretty special because Nitzsche was soon introduced to some huge names, and he went on to collaborate with artists who would dominate the industry with their groundbreaking songs.
He wrote, composed, or played on songs that were performed by everyone from Doris Day to The Rolling Stones, but it was his time spent with Phil Spector that allowed him to become a genius of his craft. The now-disgraced producer (Spector murdered Lana Clarkson in 2003) had a massive hand in creating the sound of the 1960s, but he couldn’t do it all alone. Spector worked closely with Nitzsche, and this allowed the latter to become a well-known figure in the industry, respected for his close involvement in bringing Spector’s Wall of Sound technique to life.
Thus, he soon made his way to Hollywood, working on soundtracks like The Exorcist with Mike Oldfield and the Academy Award-nominated One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Nitzsche had the industry at his fingertips, and in 1982 he even won an Oscar for his work on An Officer and a Gentleman.
Yet, Nitzsche is proof that Hollywood seems to attract some questionable individuals who, despite their talents, seem unable to control their most reprehensible impulses. Before Nitzsche truly fell from grace by being exposed on television for brandishing a gun while drunk, he had been charged with threatening to murder his girlfriend, Carrie Snodgrass, in 1979. He beat her with a gun, which left her in the hospital, and while he was also accused of rape, the charge was later dismissed.
Clearly a vile man, if this isn’t an indication that Hollywood freely lets the grossest kind of men freely enter its starry corridors, then I don’t know what is. He won his Oscar only a few years after this horrendous incident.
Nitzsche continued to work in spite of his crimes, but by the 1990s, he had lost it. Drinking heavily, he was caught pulling a gun on some young people who had stolen his hat, and this embarrassing incident, which led to an arrest, was captured on Cops. He even tried to argue that he was an Oscar winner, a shameful ‘do you know who I am?’ attempt that didn’t help his case at all.
The composer is one of many Hollywood men who have been able to achieve success despite committing heinous crimes, but finally he got what was coming for him when less-than-flattering footage made him ‘that guy who was arrested on Cops’, and no longer the ‘Oscar-winning Phil Spector collaborator’.
