One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (film)

Casting

Danny DeVito, Douglas's oldest friend, was the first to be cast – having played one of the patients, Martini, in the 1971 off-Broadway production. Chief Bromden, played by Will Sampson, was found through the referral of a used car dealer Douglas met on an airplane flight when Douglas told him they wanted a big guy for the character. The dealer sold a lot of cars to Native Americans and six months later called Douglas to say: “the biggest sonofabitch Indian came in the other day!”^[2]

Miloš Forman had considered Shelley Duvall for the role of Candy. While screening Thieves Like Us (1974) to see if she was right for the role, he became interested in Louise Fletcher, who had a supporting role, for the role of Nurse Ratched. A mutual acquaintance, the casting director Fred Roos, had already mentioned her name as a possibility. Even so it took four or five meetings, over a year, (during which the role was offered to other actresses) for Fletcher to secure the role of Nurse Ratched. Her final audition was late in 1974, with Forman, Zaentz and Douglas. The day after Christmas, her agent called to say she was expected at the Oregon State Hospital in Salem on January 4 to begin rehearsals.^[4]

Rehearsals

Prior to commencement of filming, a week of rehearsals started on January 4, 1975, in Oregon, during which the actors watched the patients in their daily routine and at group therapy. Jack Nicholson and Louise Fletcher also witnessed electroconvulsive therapy being performed on a patient.^[2]

Filming

With the exception of Nicholson, the rest of the cast worked for scale, or a little above that. Fletcher worked for 11 weeks, making $10,000 before taxes.^[4]

Filming began in January 1975, and concluded approximately three months later, and was shot on location in Salem, Oregon, and the surrounding area, as well as on the Oregon coast.^[5][6][7]

The producers decided to shoot the film in the Oregon State Hospital, an actual mental hospital, as this was also the setting of the novel.^[8] The hospital’s director, Dean Brooks, was supportive of the filming and eventually ended up playing the character of Dr. John Spivey in the film. Brooks identified a patient for each of the actors to shadow, and some of the cast even slept on the wards at night. He also wanted to incorporate his patients into the crew, to which the producers agreed. Douglas recalls that it was not until later that he found out that many of them were criminally insane.^[2]

As Forman did not allow the actors to see the day's filming, this led to the cast losing confidence in him, while Nicholson also began to wonder about his performance. Douglas convinced Forman to show Nicholson something, which he did, and restored the actor's confidence.^[2]

Haskell Wexler was fired as cinematographer and replaced by Bill Butler. Wexler believed his dismissal was due to his concurrent work on the documentary Underground, in which the radical terrorist group The Weather Underground were being interviewed while hiding from the law. However, Miloš Forman said he had terminated Wexler over artistic differences. Both Wexler and Butler received Academy Award nominations for Best Cinematography for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, though Wexler said there was "only about a minute or two minutes in that film I didn't shoot".^[9]

According to Butler, Jack Nicholson refused to speak to Forman: "...[Jack] never talked to Miloš at all, he only talked to me."^[10]

Filming went over the initial budget of $2m and over-schedule, but Saul Zaentz, who was personally financing the movie, was able to fund this by borrowing against his company, Fantasy Records. The movie cost in total $4.4m to make.^[2]

Critical

The film was met with heavy critical acclaim; Roger Ebert said:

Ebert would later put the film on his "Great Movies" list.^[12] A.D. Murphy of Variety wrote a mixed review as well,^[13] as did Vincent Canby: Writing in The New York Times:

The film opened with original music by composer Jack Nitzsche, featuring an eerie bowed saw (performed by Robert Armstrong) and wine glasses. On the score, reviewer Steven McDonald:

The film went on to win the "Big Five" Academy Awards at the 48th Oscar ceremony. These include the Best Actor for Jack Nicholson, Best Actress for Louise Fletcher, Best Direction for Forman, Best Picture, and Best Adapted Screenplay for Lawrence Hauben and Bo Goldman. The film currently has a 95% "Certified Fresh" rating at Rotten Tomatoes, with an average rating of 9/10.^[16] Its consensus states: "The onscreen battle between Jack Nicholson and Louise Fletcher serves as a personal microcosm of the culture wars of the 1970s – and testament to the director's vision that the film retains its power more than three decades later."

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is often considered to be one of the greatest American films. Ken Kesey participated in the early stages of script development, but withdrew after creative differences with the producers over casting and narrative point of view; ultimately he filed suit against the production and won a settlement.^[17] Kesey himself claimed never to have seen the movie, but said he disliked what he knew of it,^[18] a fact confirmed by Chuck Palahniuk, who wrote, "The first time I heard this story, it was through the movie starring Jack Nicholson. A movie that Kesey once told me he disliked."^[19]

In 1993, this film was deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in their National Film Registry.^[20]

Box office

The film was the third highest-grossing film released in 1975 in the United States and Canada with a gross of $109 million^[1], being UA's biggest hit. As it was released toward the end of the year, most of its gross was in 1976 and was the highest-grosser for calendar year 1976 with rentals of $56.5 million.^[21]

Worldwide, the film earned rentals of $76.1 million.^[22]

Others

American Film Institute

• AFI's 100 Years... 100 Movies – #20
• AFI's 100 Years... 100 Heroes and Villains:
  • Nurse Ratched – #5 Villain
• AFI's 100 Years... 100 Cheers – #17
• AFI's 100 Years... 100 Movies (10th Anniversary Edition) – #33