The one movie Jack Nicholson was banned from making: “The picture was ahead of its time”
Once Easy Rider had catapulted him into the mainstream and secured his first Academy Award nomination, Jack Nicholson rapidly ascended the Hollywood ladder to a rung so high that he could spend the better part of the next four decades writing his own ticket.
The transformative counterculture classic didn’t immediately anoint him as the newest A-list darling, though, with Nicholson having to persevere with a couple of pictures he hated making because he needed the money. However, by the mid-1970s, he was on top of the world.
From that point on, Nicholson had a level of freedom that most actors can only dream of. Effortlessly bouncing between commercial hits, acclaimed prestige pictures, and plenty of classic movies that ticked both boxes, he was so confident and comfortable in his position that he claimed that of the 50 films he starred in post-Easy Rider, only two of them ended up in the red.
It took a lot of hard work to get there, and Nicholson’s early years weren’t quite as creatively fertile and fulfilling. He couldn’t even bring himself to revisit his first few features because the mere thought of watching himself so fresh-faced and inexperienced offended him, but he did make a lifelong friend and pivotal mentor in Roger Corman.
Seven of Nicholson’s first eight features involved Corman as either a producer, executive producer, or director, and the B-tier legend was synonymous with taking a chance on untried, untested, and unknown talent on both sides of the camera. It was under the prolific mogul’s watch that he first met Monte Hellman, who’d go on to direct him four times in two years in Back Door to Hell, Flight to Fury, The Shooting, and Ride in the Whirlwind.
Thanks to their shared Corman connection, not to mention his penchant for okaying almost any film so long as it was brought in on schedule and preferably under its allotted budget, Nicholson and Hellman pitched him with an ambitious, almost metafictional drama, only for the pair to be told in no uncertain terms that they weren’t allowed to make it.
Hellman recalled that “we wrote a script together that we wanted to make starring him, and we kind of had a deal on it with Roger Corman.” However, after he and Nicholson made back-to-back genre flicks in the Philippines and returned to the producer to green light their latest project, “Roger said he was no longer confident in the commercial possibilities of it” and pulled the rug out from under them.
“It was kind of autobiographical,” Hellman explained. “It was about a young actor who was working a little bit in television and movies, and we were going to use a lot of footage from Jack’s movies. Jack has really made a lot of movies that people aren’t aware of. We were going to use footage from Studs Lonigan and from the westerns that we had done, and tie it in with the character that he was playing.”
Not only did Corman renege on his agreement with Nicholson and Hellman, but the movie would have been cheap even by his standards, considering it relied heavily on pre-existing scenes from other films that he’d already produced. Once he shut it down and banned them from shooting it, Hellman was left to rue how “the picture was really ahead of its time,” not that anyone got to find out.
