actor who can take a dramatic performance and do it very well but bring a little bit of humour to it, which I think makes the performance far more complex.’
Convinced that Jack would emerge as some sort of a name, ‘but with no idea that he would become the great star that he did’, Corman cast him in Cry Baby Killer (1958), playing the sort of mixed-up teenager that proliferated in the wake of James Dean. ‘Corman had discovered something that no one else apparently had,’ says director Richard Rush. ‘That if your cast is the same age as your target audience, they’ll come to see it; that was the secret of his exploitation.’
Jack later recalled just turning up for the audition and doing a bit of crazy stuff, screaming louder than anyone else, and getting the role. ‘That’s it. Movie star.’ He thought, ‘What’s so tough?’ The film managed quite the reverse, being so down-market few theatres screened it. At the not so grand opening Ethel May was invited and Jack recalled her whacking with her purse somebody who was heckling him on the screen; ‘It was so humiliating.’
So, instead of instant stardom Jack was out of work for a year. Far from glum, he revelled in a hectic social life, staying up all night on Venice Beach, going to parties, catching Lenny Bruce’s stand-up act over at some beatnik hangout or watching the latest European art-house movie. As for his career, it was so far down the crapper he couldn’t see it. Deciding to take matters into his own hands, Jack teamed up with Robert Towne and out-of-work director Monte Hellman to literally build their own theatre in an abandoned warehouse, stealing timber from building sites at night, yanking a toilet off the wall of a local gas station and nicking electronic and lighting equipment, too. It was like the Sex Pistols stealing the instruments they played on; it was punk theatre.
Doomed to failure, of course, lasting just the one production, and just as well, for Jack had decided to leave theatre well alone and concentrate on cracking film. But would anyone give him a job? Richard Rush had just left his advertising business to set up in the movies, later becoming a cult director with films like Freebie and the Bean (1974) and The Stunt Man (1980). Back in 1959, setting up his directorial debut Too Soon to Love , he advertised in the local papers for young actors to attend a casting session. Rush still vividly recalls the moment Jack walked in. ‘He was terrific, stood out like a jewel among stones.’
Annoyingly, the lead role had already been assigned, so Rush could cast Jack in only a minor role, that of a teen hoodlum. ‘Even then he was a very accomplished actor, and gave a good performance; he was physically tough and threatening in the role. What I learned about Jack from later working with him much more consistently, first off he’s a very smart guy and you can almost call out the number of the IQ you want him to play and he can lower his on-screen intelligence very convincingly, it’s a very clever trick. He can play sophisticated people on film and he can play a bum, and play a bum successfully with great imagination, strength and charisma like he did in Cuckoo’s Nest ; it’s a strange ability.’
The only other person prepared to hire Jack in any meaningful way was Roger Corman, and over the next few years the actor appeared almost exclusively in a conveyor belt of schlockmeister howlers. ‘I either played the clean-cut boy next door, or the murderer of a family of at least five.’
One Corman role stands out from all the others, a sadomasochist patient who gets his kicks in the dentist’s chair. Little Shop of Horrors (1960) is tatty beyond belief and looks as if it was made in two days (wait a minute — it was!), but it’s Nicholson’s performance almost as much as the main attraction, a flesh-eating plant, that audiences remember. A cult classic today, Little Shop also gave moviegoers their first glimpse of Jack’s
Convinced that Jack would emerge as some sort of a name, ‘but with no idea that he would become the great star that he did’, Corman cast him in Cry Baby Killer (1958), playing the sort of mixed-up teenager that proliferated in the wake of James Dean. ‘Corman had discovered something that no one else apparently had,’ says director Richard Rush. ‘That if your cast is the same age as your target audience, they’ll come to see it; that was the secret of his exploitation.’
Jack later recalled just turning up for the audition and doing a bit of crazy stuff, screaming louder than anyone else, and getting the role. ‘That’s it. Movie star.’ He thought, ‘What’s so tough?’ The film managed quite the reverse, being so down-market few theatres screened it. At the not so grand opening Ethel May was invited and Jack recalled her whacking with her purse somebody who was heckling him on the screen; ‘It was so humiliating.’
So, instead of instant stardom Jack was out of work for a year. Far from glum, he revelled in a hectic social life, staying up all night on Venice Beach, going to parties, catching Lenny Bruce’s stand-up act over at some beatnik hangout or watching the latest European art-house movie. As for his career, it was so far down the crapper he couldn’t see it. Deciding to take matters into his own hands, Jack teamed up with Robert Towne and out-of-work director Monte Hellman to literally build their own theatre in an abandoned warehouse, stealing timber from building sites at night, yanking a toilet off the wall of a local gas station and nicking electronic and lighting equipment, too. It was like the Sex Pistols stealing the instruments they played on; it was punk theatre.
Doomed to failure, of course, lasting just the one production, and just as well, for Jack had decided to leave theatre well alone and concentrate on cracking film. But would anyone give him a job? Richard Rush had just left his advertising business to set up in the movies, later becoming a cult director with films like Freebie and the Bean (1974) and The Stunt Man (1980). Back in 1959, setting up his directorial debut Too Soon to Love , he advertised in the local papers for young actors to attend a casting session. Rush still vividly recalls the moment Jack walked in. ‘He was terrific, stood out like a jewel among stones.’
Annoyingly, the lead role had already been assigned, so Rush could cast Jack in only a minor role, that of a teen hoodlum. ‘Even then he was a very accomplished actor, and gave a good performance; he was physically tough and threatening in the role. What I learned about Jack from later working with him much more consistently, first off he’s a very smart guy and you can almost call out the number of the IQ you want him to play and he can lower his on-screen intelligence very convincingly, it’s a very clever trick. He can play sophisticated people on film and he can play a bum, and play a bum successfully with great imagination, strength and charisma like he did in Cuckoo’s Nest ; it’s a strange ability.’
The only other person prepared to hire Jack in any meaningful way was Roger Corman, and over the next few years the actor appeared almost exclusively in a conveyor belt of schlockmeister howlers. ‘I either played the clean-cut boy next door, or the murderer of a family of at least five.’
One Corman role stands out from all the others, a sadomasochist patient who gets his kicks in the dentist’s chair. Little Shop of Horrors (1960) is tatty beyond belief and looks as if it was made in two days (wait a minute — it was!), but it’s Nicholson’s performance almost as much as the main attraction, a flesh-eating plant, that audiences remember. A cult classic today, Little Shop also gave moviegoers their first glimpse of Jack’s
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