The life and trimes of a lawyer on the Edge..... (Jack Nicholson - Peter Thompson)

Member Name:

Product:	Jack Nicholson - Peter Thompson
Date:	20/06/01 (90 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Jacks tha man, Good insight

Disadvantages: Its a top up biog, Not enough movie trivia

The life and times of an actor on the edge


What do we know about Jack other than the demon eyes and jet-black shades. This book attempts to reveal more of the enigmatic and much loved actor with in the biz, whilst going through his filmography and loves and drugs, not all of it above board.

The first ninety pages read like a divorce transcript as we begin with an update of frisky Jacks love life in the present day. This is most unusual for a biog and makes the first chunk really rather dull. It picks up around here as we are given some background on his early film career and triumphs.
Even the Mafia gets a look in as with most of the crowd called the legendary Jack Pack.
There are dollar signs everywhere as lawyers and ex lovers make a killing out of the loveable rogues gullibility in an industry that will take you for every cent says the author Peter Thompson.
It really is worth skipping the first quarter of the read as theres little about his films and lots about airhead women cashing on all guys hero.

Born in Neptune, New Jersey to a fourteen-year-old mother and a vagrant father he never knew, Nicholson didn’t have the best start in life. He grew up believing he was an illegitimate son and that seemed to effect his early views on relationships and women.
His heritage was from solid Irish stock so that explains his drinking habits, Hollywood would introduce him to LSD and beyond.
Mud, his nickname for the women who dragged him up when he moved to California in his late teens, was later to be reveled as Jacks sister by a magazine, much to the stunned silence from the great actor. He had no idea and asked the tabloids to bury the story until he was ready to respond.

Nicholson broke into movies through writing and helping out on film sets, rather than setting out to be an actor. He was going into the business on the crest of a new wave in Hollywood, lead by the great Marlon Brando and his unique met
hod acting.
The actor was to become good neighbors with the Nicholson clan as their friendship grew like the great mans waste line through the seventies and eighties.
With Vietnam raging, like most professionals and arty types, he engineered away around the draught with little or no military intervention. Jack chose the loophole through enlisting for the then home guard fire service.

His first film roles came through the famous pulp B movie director, Bruce Corman who would make prolifically fast movies in less than a week which had a knack of turning a small profit. Jack acted, produced and co wrote in the three films he did.
But ti was all to change when at the age of 32 years and 20 small time movies, the script of Easy Rider flopped on his apartment floor.
It was also the year when his first marriage broke up to small time actress Susan Sastonach which freed up the actors emotions to became one of the worlds great contemporary performers.

Denis Hopper and Peter Fonda were superb in this massive sixties hit across Americas hippie cinemas. But a star was born as the critics raved about Nicholsons performance, rather than the two big actors in the flick. The mix of drugs, motorbikes and women grabbed the American cinema going public and Jacks famous smile was born, splashed over every industry mag in town.
His performance as George Hanson, the guy sharing the cell with the two drug dealers in Fonda and Hopper after a bender, so enticed directors and film people that he was immediately snatched up to star in the excellent Five Easy Pieces.

Roman Polanski loved directing Nicholson in this, as he bought out the best in the young actor. So successful was this movie that it took $45 million at the box office from only a 400 hundred thousand budget. Its believed be the most profitable film ever made for under a million.
It received eleven Oscar nominations and sent Nicholson into the stratosphere as Americas most talented
and bankable star. Chinatown quickly followed on to the Nicholson CV, which again received a bag full of nominations, but still not the big one for best actor.

John Hutson, the notoriously tough and eccentric director was running the film. He was not best pleased when he found out during filming that Jack was seeing his beautiful daughter Angelica, who the actor later married.
The book author believes that the extra tension between the director and actor was the formula needed to bring out Nicholsons best performance yet.

Jacks attitude with women was very old fashioned and selfish.he quoted as saying the more a guy acts the part, i.e. selfish, boorish and arrogant, the more the women wants the man and so the more the guy regresses.”I treat women how they need to be treated, rather than how they wanted to be”, well, the master has spoken guys.
This could explain why women go for ass****s all the time over a nice safe guy.
This philosophy was reflected in his next big hit by the name of Carnal Knowledge no holds bar sexually explicit film reveling the most explicit scene yet seen in mainstream cinema in the 1970s.Only Emmanuel went any further in the conservative decade.

The film that to me encapsulates Nicholson was up on the big screen next. One flew over the Cuckoos Nest
Blew me away when I first saw it. Little did I know though that I had misinterpreted the writers plot and meaning.
Apparently, Nicholsons character, which ducks out of hard prison labor for a long sentence after raping women, is also suffering a mental illness as he serves the time in the mental hospital. The write does admit that the film and director Miles Forman bury the story a little by casting Nicholson as a rebel and anti authoritarian.

American audiences were also suckered as they stood up and shouted kill the bitch as Jacks character tries to throttle the bossy nurse.
Interesting side note is the meticulous plannin
g the writer went into. He even resorted to electric shock treatment to give Nicholsons character authenticity. The film was produced by a young Michael Douglas to,(yes,the posy actor) .Nicholson would finally pick up the golden statue for his stunning performance.

An actor to play the tall Indian guy character could not be found anywhere so the director had to go out to the reservations to find someone to fit the role. Amazingly they found him at the Mount Rainer National Park gatehouse in Montana.
They asked the stunned Indian as they rode up to him on horses if he wanted to be in the movies. A very different reflection on the cowboy and Indian history of the not so United States.
Again Jack was the toast of the town whilst picking up his second best actor statue. He could virtually name his price for the next project.

But he decided to team up with his friend and mentor Marlon Brando in what became Nicholsons biggest flop so far in a western called Missouri Breaks.Brando was auditioned as a svelte macho cowboy and turned up weighing in at 250 LBS!.
His behavior was so truculent during the shoot that Jack had to pursuade the actor through the picture. The bulking thespian refused to learn his lines on principal over the treatment of American Indians, his then current bugbear and cause.

Farcical situations evolved when q-cards were places in various places to help the films completion. Barn walls,car roofs and peoples backs were amongst some of the locations for the written text.
The situation reached chaos levels when a line of script was taped to an actor’s forehead over Nicholsons shoulder for big Brando to read.
But the actor complained he couldn’t see so holes were cut in the cardboard.

Hollywood’s greatest got back into his winning ways with the weepy Terms of Endearment starring the enigmatic Merly Streep.Jack developed a crush for her acting talent amongst other things which resulted
in a massive portrait going up on the walls of his Mullholland Road Drive mansion.
With a third Oscar in the bag, Nicholson joined an exclusive club of three people ever to achieve that feat.

The awards he as accrued seem to suggest that he doesn’t pick winners or winners pick him.its more of a case that there are only so many movies Jacks style fit and they are almost made for his demonic eyes and wit. Being the best actor in that sub group, he’s going to clean up with all the prizes.
Witches of Eastwick followed which if ever a film was right for Jack Nicholson, this would be it. He was as happy as flies in s**t surrounded by three sexy actresses and all the acclaim on the globe.

Nicholson outside of the movies was an avid basketball fan and would follow his beloved LA Lakers team all over the country, regardless if he’s on location or not. In his contract for the fairly recent, Blood and Wine filmed in Miami with Michael Caine, the agreement allowed for time and money to watch the home and away games. Sometimes he would have the film company hire a jet at $50,000dollars a pop!.

He is a notorious Lakers fan and is often involved in courtside controversy. One time involved Jack clipping the legs of the opposing coach as his team were on the losing side. The coach turned around and bawled a stream of abuse at the balding actor and his balding hairline and drug habit.
The fans to join in the fun much to Jacks mirth. Home fans once held up a banner with the words”go choke on your coke”. He loved that so much he printed up T-shirts for his nearest and dearest show biz friends.

Batman would expose Nicholson to a whole new audience of young people and adulation a like as the Joker.The grosses were big and the great man bagged 60 million1 through smart contract work and dollars from merchandising.
But in his personal life Jack was a juggler and a joker as he tried to keep Angelica Hutson and
now pregnant lover Rebecca away from each others throats after Hutson was furious that the baby she longed for from Jack was in the belly of a secret lover. Throw in a model who’s last film was called “Stripped to Kill”with a kiss and tell story and you have trouble brewing in the old boozer.

The trouble came when a motorist cut up the actor and his entourage which resulted in a Basil Fawlty style attack with a piece of iron on the unlucky drivers car. The motorist was duly compensated and Nicholson retreated to the late nights and white powder.
Filming of the Chinatown sequel, The two Jake’s was also getting held up by the actors antics and it duly bombed in the mainstream cinemas as the audiences who hadn’t seen the original were totally confused by the movie.

In the nineties with a shortage of decent scripts, Jack took up golf and English girls as he regularly visited the capitols nightspots and IT girls. Amanda de Cadnet and Tara Palmer Twitkinson were duly debagged as the player himself went on a randy rampage.
He returned briefly to America to work with actor/director Sean Penn’s film, The Crossing Guard to return the favor from an earlier Nicholson directed project. He also excepted minimum wag $495 dollars to help the young director’s grosses with an excellent script.

Jack took a big hit when he had a phone call telling of his sister’s murder with three slugs in the back of the head after a domestic. Just as teenage pregnant mums have teenage mums when they came into the world, Jack, an illegitimate kid himself, confessed to fathering seven children from seven different women in yet another candid Playboy interview.
This of course opened the floodgates as paternity suits came flying at him from all directions like delinquent Pakistan cricket fans.

At the end of the book the author pays heavy tribute to John Parker’s biography,”Jokers Wild”and in
truth this book is basically an add on to the best seller with nothing really new. The read finishes up full circle with up to date goings on from the rampant star.
That is in all truth the reason for the book as it’s essentially a top of with redtop gossip from the tabloids to fill out a new biography.

Nicholson now according to AA Gill is no longer the hero off the hedonistic male and staggers around sadly with an arthritic shuffle. He even has to ring round these days for the girls who want to be seen with the great womanizer of the past as old age catches him up purposely.
He’s still up for an all-nighter at a select few drinking establishments around the globe and is not short of a line or to. A beautiful reporter tried to lure him into a trap or two in a low cut dress and thigh length skirt.
Reporter:”You like to dance Jack”.
Nicholson: Wrong verb honey, wrong verb”.

After the success of As good as it Gets, Jack is still the only one up during the witching hour with sociology students and Peter Stringfellows off the globe around the planet. The girls are still there when he flies into our green and pleasant land, but B-list soap bunnies in Patsy Palmer and Martine Mucutcheon have replaced Susan George and Raquel Welch seeking that legendary signature and look.

The saying in Hollywood is that when Jack Nicholson dies everyone else moves up a notch in the talent hall of fame, such is the esteem the legendary hedonist is held in. Somewhere out there a young stunning starlet is getting the full teeth and demonic eyed leer from Hollywood’s Mr Devil……What a man aye guys!.

Summary: