‘Henderson the Rain King’: the dream film that Jack Nicholson couldn’t “get anybody to make”
Hollywood’s biggest stars regularly leverage their status and reputation to bring their passion projects to life, but not even Jack Nicholson was capable of dragging the one movie he spent his entire career desperate to make out of development hell and onto the screen.
It’s not as if it would have been a particularly risky proposition for studios, either. After all, Nicholson was flying high as one of his generation’s most gifted performers and consistent hit-makers by lending his name to movies that weren’t exactly designed to be crowd-pleasing blockbusters and throwaway genre films.
The three-time Academy Award winner was confident enough in his abilities that he declared himself the single most successful actor in cinema history, justifying the lofty status he bestowed upon himself by pointing to the inarguable fact that virtually every single thing he’d starred in since first breaking through in the late 1960s had turned a profit at the box office.
And yet, there was one project that he couldn’t get off the ground. In most circumstances, producers and filmmakers would be falling over themselves to position Nicholson as the focal point of a picture he was so deeply invested in on a personal level, especially when he was adamant it was guaranteed to be a hit. In fact, he went so far as to compare it to one of his greatest roles.
“I know that’s a hit movie, just like I knew Cuckoo’s Nest was a hit movie,” he told the Chicago Tribune of adapting Saul Bellow’s novel Henderson the Rain King. “I tried to option Cuckoo’s Nest as a 26-year-old producer when it first came out in 1963, and I was too young to play it. I feel the same way about Henderson the Rain King. But I can’t get anybody to make it.”
The Pulitzer Prize-nominated tome follows the unhappy and middle-aged protagonist Eugene Henderson, who flees his crumbling life at home to start afresh in Africa. Packed with symbolism, spirituality, and ruminations on what it means to be alive, it’s not a stretch to imagine Nicholson winning an Oscar for the role, but not a soul in Hollywood was willing to bite.
“It’s the hardest movie to get made I’ve ever been around,” he lamented. “I’ve even talked to Mr Bellow about it. At first, I thought, ‘Well, the character is written older than me’. And I told him that they’d like me to play the part but that I’d rather direct it. And he said, ‘Oh, no, I think you’d play the part beautifully’. Well, just that single statement from him encourages me to make it.”
Try as he might, though, Henderson the Rain King never ventured beyond the realms of wishful thinking. It’s a head-scratcher that Nicholson, an A-list mainstay, proven box office draw, and awards-friendly thespian heralded as one of America’s all-time greats, still didn’t have enough juice with the power players in Hollywood to see his dream become a reality.
