Why Ken Kesey hated the ‘One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest’ movie
One of the best movies of the 1970s is undoubtedly Milos Forman’s 1975 effort One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, based on Ken Kesey’s 1962 novel of the same name. It stars Jack Nicholson as Randall McMurphy, a new patient at a mental hospital who is only admitted because he feigns insanity after being convicted of raping a 15-year-old girl.
McMurphy changed the lives of his fellow inmates by disrupting the strict orders of the institution’s head nurse, Miss Ratched. The film became the second movie to win all five major Academy Awards (‘Best Picture’, ‘Best Actor’, ‘Best Actress’, ‘Best Director’ and ‘Best Screenplay’).
While the film remains one of the most admired cinematic works of the 20th Century, Ken Kesey himself was less than impressed with the effort that screenwriter Laurence Hauben and Milos Forman had made in bringing his novel to the big screen, even though the author had actually refused to watch it.
Kirk Douglas had played Randall McMurphy in the 1963-64 Broadway version of the novel and had purchased the rights to make the film adaptation. However, he’d found it difficult to find funding and passed the rights on to his son Michael, by which time Kirk was too old for the lead role.
Eventually, the younger Douglas managed to get the film funded and brought in Saul Zaentz as a co-producer. Kesey had also been brought in to work on the screenplay after Laurence Hauben had had an initial try. However, he had problems with the producers over casting choices and left the production.
Michael Douglas once told The Guardian: “My producing partner, Saul Zaentz, felt an affinity with Kesey. After Larry and I made a first attempt, Saul asked Kesey to write a screenplay and promised him a piece of the action. But like a lot of novelists trying to adapt their own material, it didn’t work out.”
He continued: “We fell out with him after that. It was our only longstanding, painful issue. We got into a financial dispute – it was silly, but maybe it was his way of defending his ego.” Indeed, Kesey had actually filed a lawsuit against Douglas and Zaentz and won a considerable payout.
He felt that he was owed more financial credit for having written the original novel and had also been irritated by the producers and writers’ insistence on removing Chief Bromden as the story’s main narrator. The film was an undoubted success, but it was always a poor attempt in the eyes of Kesey, who was once said to have skipped over it one night when he was flicking through the TV channels.
