The highs and lows of Jack Nicholson’s career as a screenwriter
As well as being the most-nominated male performer in Academy Awards history with 12 nods, Jack Nicholson is also one of just three men to win a trio of acting Oscars, which is only a tiny part of his legacy as one of the silver screen’s greatest-ever talents.
Bursting to prominence in the 1970s, Nicholson became a household name thanks to his combination of powerhouse dramatic performances and off-screen escapades, evolving into almost the very definition of the era’s idealised version of a movie star by delivering top-tier work in front of the camera while conspiring to raise all sorts of hell when they weren’t rolling.
For a while, though, Nicholson was almost as prolific a screenwriter as he was an actor before he decided to put down the pen one day and never pick it up again. Up until that point, he was writing almost as much as he was performing, but when his star began to rise, he opted to focus his energies on one creative outlet.
Nicholson made his feature-length directorial debut on 1971’s independent drama Drive, He Said, and he also co-wrote the script with Jeremy Larner and produced despite not appearing on-screen. That was the final time his penmanship was credited, and the wildly polarising reception it received following a Cannes Film Festival premiere may have influenced his decision to call it quits as a writer.
He was credited six times as a writer, and five of those features came between 1963 and 1968, a period in which he only played seven characters. He didn’t act in two of them but was evidently capable enough that it was determined by the people in charge he was a valuable asset even when his presence wasn’t required on set.
He scripted assassination thriller Thunder Island in 1963 – as a writer only – and the following year’s Flight to Fury, which revolves around Nicholson’s tourist getting caught up in a battle over stolen diamonds that becomes a fight for survival following a plane crash. Neither of them were massive hits, but they were solid genre flicks that indicated the star had a penchant for crafting exciting and action-packed tales.
Nicholson’s screenplay for the vigilante-driven western Ride in the Whirlwind was well-received before he helped usher in cinema’s counterculture era long before he was cast as George Hanson in Easy Rider. Hailed as the progenitor of the seminal anti-establishment classic, Roger Corman directed The Trip from Nicholson’s screenplay, which co-starred Henry Fonda and Dennis Hopper, with the entire story predicated on the psychedelia that ensues from a young man’s first LSD trip.
He then partnered up with future Five Easy Pieces collaborator Bob Rafelson for Head, another suitably surreal and mind-bending descent into the culture of the late 1960s, this time serving as the bookend to The Monkees’ TV series of the same name. It’s become a cult classic, and the fingerprints of both The Trip and Head are all over Easy Rider, in large part thanks to Nicholson.
He was a versatile writer who tried his hand at multiple genres and didn’t put his name to a screenplay that could reasonably be described as irredeemably awful, and all signs were pointing in the direction of Nicholson enjoying a successful secondary career. And yet, he simply decided that it wasn’t something of interest anymore, and the next 40 years of his professional life passed by without so much as one more script carrying his name.
