The brief screenwriting career of Jack Nicholson
Nobody embodies barely-controlled psychosis quite like Jack Nicholson. The legendary American actor has played fake crazy people, real crazy people, supervillains, mob bosses, and even Lucifer himself. All the while, his ability to teeter on the edge of madness gives him a strange allure. There’s something going on behind that charming exterior. But that talent for channelling human emotion initially hit a barrier when Nicholson was a young actor. By the time he was 30, Nicholson had yet to make an impact as either a leading man or a character actor.
Not wanting to get out of the industry, Nicholson decided to focus his efforts elsewhere. Beginning in the early 1960s, Nicholson began a side gig as a screenwriter. His connections with industry figures like Roger Corman allowed Nicholson the opportunity to write B-movies like 1963’s Thunder Island.
His writing career had some added benefits: in films like 1964’s Flight to Fury and 1966’s Ride in the Whirlwind, Nicholson was able to both star and write. As the psychedelic era began to take hold, Nicholson’s writings reflected Hollywood’s interest in tapping into the new counterculture. Nicholson’s collaboration with Corman on 1967’s The Trip represented one of the first mainstream films to focus on LSD.
“I hired him because I knew he was a very good writer,” Corman told Flavorwire in 2015. “He had written several scripts before. His career wasn’t really doing that much at that time. I knew he had experience with LSD, so I hired him as a writer. I was thinking of possibly using Jack for the role that Bruce Dern played. But I wanted to repeat some of the casting, particularly Peter Fonda and Bruce Dern from The Wild Angels, so I went with Bruce for that reason.”
Fonda would turn out to be one of the most consequential parts of Nicholson’s eventual rise to stardom. Although the two butted heads in the aftermath of The Trip, Nicholson, Fonda, and co-star Dennis Hopper would all reunite for 1969’s Easy Rider. For his role as the alcoholic lawyer George Hanson, Nicholson was nominated for his first Academy Award as ‘Best Supporting Actor’. With that, Nicholson’s acting career was solidified, leaving his final film as a writer to be 1968’s collaboration with The Monkees, Head.
“When they were shooting, I didn’t do anything on the production side; I was just there and mainly paid attention to my acting job,” Nicholson told Sight and Sound about Easy Rider. “Afterwards, at everyone’s request, I had a go-through of the editing of the film, from where my character entered to the end. Henry Jaglom had a similar job with the first half of it at the same time. That was the next-to-last stage of editing. It was just a very close collaboration of a lot of people.”
Although he would mostly stick to acting for the next four decades, Nicholson occasionally returned to scriptwriting. When he was spearheading his first film as a director, 1971’s Drive, He Said, Nicholson took on multiple roles throughout the film’s production, including writing and producing. It would be his final effort as a writer, as his final two directing jobs, 1978’s Goin’ South and 1990’s The Two Jakes, credited other writers.
