The movie that paid Jack Nicholson with a colour TV: “He did me this huge favour”
You’d assume that as a member of the Hollywood elite, there comes a point where your material desires and wants reach their limit. After years of working on movie sets and being paid sometimes millions of dollars, there must come a moment when you hit a wall and realise that actually, you don’t want any more sports cars, mansions or designer handbags and you’d settle for a small fee to star in a project you really care about.
It could be Al Pacino’s offer to star in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood for free after falling in love with Tarantino’s work, or it could be Mads Mikkelsen’s agreement to be bought a bicycle for his work in Pusher, but there are many actors whose love for a story exceeds their financial desires. While this is certainly not the case for the likes of Chris Pratt and Robert Downey Jr, who have reached new levels of greed in their acting fees, there was one actually great actor who settled for a simple gift after starring in one of his earlier films.
After a decade or so in the film business, people soon caught onto the talents of Jack Nicholson, with his performance in Easy Rider marking the beginning of a hugely impressive streak of films. At the start of the New Hollywood movement, Nicholson quickly became the face of the creative revolution, starring in influential projects like Five Easy Pieces, The Last Detail, Chinatown and The Shining, very quickly revealing him to be the most accomplished actor of his generation.
But as fame came quick and fast for Nicholson, with following roles in Reds, Broadcast News, Batman and A Few Good Men, so did his notoriety and reputation, with the actor reportedly earning several millions for each role and sometimes an overall percentage of the profits. However, when he was just starting out in Hollywood and had not been corrupted by fame, excess and outlandish materialistic pursuits, the actor accepted nothing but a colour TV set when starring in his 1971 film, A Safe Place.
Directed by Henry Jaglom, the film follows a young woman called Noah who is dating two different men and soon finds out that neither will be able to give her what she is looking for in a relationship. Nicholson plays one of the unlucky suitors, with the director describing how he persuaded him to join the project.
When discussing the film and its place in Nicholson’s career, Jaglom said, “It was made after he directed Drive, He Said, and somewhere [simultaneously] with his Carnal Knowledge. It was around the time of Carnal Knowledge, because he did me this huge favour of being in my movie, where he charged Nichols whatever he gets, which is a lot of money now, and for me, he did it for a colour television set.”
While any director would be lucky to now secure an actor for the low price of a television, Jaglom came at the right time and happened to have a vision that Nicholson would jump on board with for something relatively small. This might not be standard practice in the industry now, but many actors are not paid nearly enough as they should be anyway, and the price of television cannot make up for the struggles that come with working in the creative industries nowadays.
