Audiences went nuts over the 1975 blockbuster film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. And it almost didn’t get made.
Jack Nicholson plays Randle McMurphy, a new patient at a mental institution where tyrannical Head Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher) dominates the patients (played by Will Sampson, Danny DeVito, Christopher Lloyd, Vincent Schiavelli and Brad Dourif).
Based on a 1962 novel of the same name by Ken Kesey, the film was directed by Milos Forman. But before that, it was a 1963 play starring Kirk Douglas as McMurphy — and it ignited a bit of a family feud with his son Michael Douglas, according to Deadline.
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Kirk had obtained the rights to the novel and shopped it around Hollywood as a movie but found no takers. Eventually Michael, then a star in The Streets of San Francisco, asked his dad, “Let me run with this,” according to Santa Barbara International Film Festival. In exchange for a producer credit, Kirk turned the rights over to Michael.
Michael was able to get Fantasy Films studio to produce the project and United Artists to distribute the movie. Kirk insisted on playing McMurphy as he did onstage, but Michael broke the news that a younger actor was needed.
James Caan was first offered the role but turned it down. Forman’s personal choice to play McMurphy was Burt Reynolds, and producers also looked at Gene Hackman, Steve McQueen and Marlon Brando before deciding on Nicholson.
Nurse Ratched also got a thorough consideration of Hollywood’s top actresses, including Angela Lansbury, Anne Bancroft and Geraldine Page, before Fletcher won the role.
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Surrounded by men who forged friendships, Fletcher did the unexpected — she stripped off her clothes in the crowded ward! “‘I’ll show them I’m a real woman under here, you know,’” she explained years later, per Mental Floss. “I think that must have been what I was thinking.”
While the key patient roles were filled with actors, others were actual mental patients at the Oregon State Hospital in Salem, where the film was shot. Producers also decided to cast the facility’s actual superintendent Dr. Dean Brooks as the doctor assigned to assess McMurphy’s mental health. It was a huge role and Brooks’ only acting gig.
In fact, Brooks agreed with the cast and the crew’s concern about the mental state of actor Sydney Lassick (Charlie Cheswick), who became erratic and was so overwhelmed during the final scene between Nicholson and Sampson that Lassick had to be removed from the set.
And Brooks also noted something odd with actor William Redfield. He examined him and diagnosed Redfield with the leukemia that took the actor’s life 18 months later.
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The actors actually lived in the hospital, where they personalized their rooms and interacted with real psychiatric patients — or as Schiavelli said, “getting a sense of what it was like to be hospitalized.”
Nicholson was traumatized by one late-night observation at the facility. “I’ll never forget being in the maximum-security ward upstairs watching shock treatments at four in the morning,” Nicholson recalls. “They gave three of them that morning, and I watched them all, because I wanted to get it right. That atmosphere does sink in on you.”
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Sampson was working as an Oregon Park Ranger near the facility and was selected to play Chief Bromden because he was the only Native American the casting unit could find with such incredible size.
Cuckoo’s Nest had backstage drama, too: Kesey was livid about the changes to his novel, while Nicholson and Forman argued about the story to the point of not speaking to each other on set.
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The film was a big winner at the Academy Awards with nine nominations and a first-ever sweep of the big five awards: Best Picture, Best Actor (Nicholson), Best Actress (Fletcher), Best Director (Forman) and Best Adapted Screenplay.
Filmed for a mere $4.4 million, the movie raked in a whopping $163 million at the box office, making it the highest-grossing film released by UA at the time. It was extremely popular in Sweden, remaining in theaters for a whopping 11 years.