Maverick, adventurer, iconoclast: the personal works of Deceased Artiste Bob Rafelson (part 1 of two)

Rafelson and Nicholson.

If Bob Rafelson had only made his first three films and not done anything else, he still would’ve earned an important place in American cinema as one of the prime movers in the “maverick era” of the 1970s. Instead, he kept working, albeit sporadically, for another three decades and there are eight other films of his to explore.

Rafelson’s life story can be found in various places online, particularly in the last major interview he did, for Esquire. A New Yorker by birth (from the Upper West Side) and related (nephew) to playwright/screenwriter Samson Raphaelson (who wrote the Jazz Singer play and many scripts for both Ernst Lubitsch and the MGM musical division), Rafelson’s mini-bios are filled with many stories of him being rebellious and leaving behind situations in which he had to kowtow to authority.

He tried on a number of different jobs until he finally hit the one that suited him best — producing films (including his own) that would be made with no major-studio supervision. But how did he get to that place? By becoming friends with Bert Schneider, whose father Abe ran Columbia Pictures and who was eager to do something interesting within the framework of Screen Gems, Columbia’s TV arm. Rafelson and Schneider incorporated themselves as Raybert Productions and created the Monkees.

Rafelson often noted that he had the idea before Hard Day’s Night, but he and Schneider were obviously able to sell it very easily post-Lester and so, in 1966, “The Monkees” went on the air and became a major cash-cow for all involved. It did well for its first season, but ratings declined in the second season and thus the show was cancelled — by that time, though, the band members and the show’s producers had already decided to blow up the whole concept.

The result was Rafelson’s first film, Head (1968), an insane episodic cornucopia of movie genre parodies starring the Monkees that had as its main plot the band’s desire to “escape.” Rafelson’s friend, the struggling actor-turned-screenwriter Jack Nicholson, wrote the script based on discussions he had with Rafelson and the band members (on hallucinogenics — which is reflected in the film).

Columbia thought Head would be the “third season that never was,” so they backed the film and it tanked. It tanked horribly, but over the years has gathered a cult, thanks to its frantic inventiveness, crazy-quilt construction (including many guest stars, from Annette Funicello to Frank Zappa), and the great score of what might be deemed “acid bubblegum” pop-rock tunes.

Guitarist and screenwriter.

Nowadays it stands as one of the films that reflected an “acid sensibility” that was actually made by people who took acid many times (as opposed to Skidoo, by one-time user Otto Preminger; one-time user Roger Corman produced a better picture, The Trip, also scripted by Nicholson and starring users, including Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper — about whom, more below). Head belligerently declared the Monkees to be a fake creation (“a manufactured image/with no philosophies”), but also showed them off at their best and gave the Raybert duo their first experience in film production.

Whatever it is, Head truly is a wild ride, which viewers either embrace thoroughly or reject. It most certainly is a modernist work, containing all kinds of meta-weirdness, including a scene where Peter Tork’s TV character was dissected by Tork himself, with the help of the director and scripter, who confer with him onscreen (at 35:50).

Head was a giant flop, but Rafelson and Schneider still had money left over from the salad days of the Monkees’ TV show. They produced a second feature together, one that jumpstarted for real the “maverick” period that had been signaled by some earlier films (Cassavetes’ first cut of Faces, Richard Lester’s Petulia, and, if you stop and think about it, even 2001: A Space Odyssey).

With a $400,000 budget, Raybert produced Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider, the first film that actually “grabbed” the youth audience that Hollywood had been craving to capture. The fact that the film brought in $60 million at the box office famously sent the major studios scrambling to find more challenging fare that the “liberated” moviegoers of the early Seventies wanted to see — thus began the most important period in Hollywood filmmaking since the 1930s and the post-WWII “boom” in production (which gave us, among many other things, film noir).

Hopper, Rafelson, Nicholson
at Cannes, 1969.

The reason for the film’s success was obvious. Again, it was a drug film made by actual drug users, but it also had a great cast, Hopper drawing from avant-garde films for a bunch of visual techniques, and was a purebred “road movie” that fed into American myths (and the American reality, caught in the film’s closing scene). Plus, it had two secret weapons: the first was satirist extraordinaire Terry Southern’s writing in the screenplay (literate scenes like the one around the campfire where Nicholson explains to Fonda and Hopper why short-hairs hate them) and the second was a great musical soundtrack of licensed rock from famous and not-that-famous bands.

Rafelson and Schneider didn’t produce the film thinking it would become a cultural touchstone, but it did. Its major success also led to Rafelson and Schneider being able to fund six more films in the next five years, most of them being incredibly low-key character studies that perfectly fit the definition of maverick cinema.

 

After the success of Easy Rider, Rafelson and Schneider brought on another partner, Steve Blauner, and their company changed its name from Raybert to BBS (for “Bob, Bert, Steve”). Under that moniker the company made seven films, from Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces (1970) to Peter Davis’ Hearts and Minds (1974).

Five Easy Pieces is often considered Rafelson’s first as a director, and it and its successor (King of Marvin Gardens) clearly defined what a maverick film is. An extremely personal work for Rafelson, his scripter, and star, the film is one of the seminal Seventies character studies. Nicholson, who had been a coy and not all that great actor in his early and mid-Sixties films, suddenly blossomed and became a top-notch actor and a star, while the great supporting players around him moved on from the film to have quite accomplished careers.

The quietly moving scene between Bobby
(Nicholson) and his stroke-ridden father.

The film is a “tough” one, in the sense that Cassavetes’ films were tough (the emotion seeps through, even when the characters are being silent), but it also is beautifully shot, thanks to Rafelson and the incredible Laszlo Kovacs. Nicholson’s character (like a lot of Rafelson heroes, including the Monkees) is looking to escape all constraints and yet still finds himself back in the uncomfortable bosom of his family. Karen Black’s naive country-singer girlfriend is sweet on him, but offers him no way out of his malaise. The existential choice he makes at the end isn’t a true escape — but it will do for the moment.

Rafelson attested in interviews to the fact that he was influenced by American masters – Ford, Hawks, Welles – but also a sizable number of foreign filmmakers, including Ozu (whose films he said he translated into English, during the time he was in Japan), Kurosawa, and the French New Wave. While Ozu surely influenced his concentration on quietly-sundered families in Pieces and his subsequent film, the French directors and Antonioni clearly influenced his storytelling style.

Five Easy Pieces wasn’t the first American film to “feel European” because of its slower pacing, but it was certainly a breakthrough, as it became a popular hit. Coppola used “empty” long shots in The Godfather two years later, but Rafelson arrived first at using the sort of “still life” long shot that came to American cinema via filmmakers like Antonioni and Bergman. (And the somewhat sudden ending set in a gas station brings to mind the conclusion of Godard’s Contempt, where Bardot and Palance die in an accident after leaving a gas station.)

Jack and Bob.

Also linking the film to European cinema was its star-making turn by Jack Nicholson. In his Seventies prime, Nicholson was often compared to Golden Age studio system stars like Bogart and Spencer Tracy. But the trajectory of his career was similar to those of certain French and Italian stars who had the charisma and allure of classic movie stars, but who also devoted themselves to challenging roles in which they played against type or tried to break free of their “star” persona (think Delon and Mastroianni).

The sole book-length study of Rafelson’s work, Bob Rafelson: Hollywood Maverick by Jay Boyer (Twayne Publishers, New York, 1996), includes this note about Rafelson’s visual style: “The influence of deep-focus photography is unmistakable in Rafelson’s work. What is foremost in our field of vision — that which we can get at a distance — is often redefined and modified when we look at the middle distance…. It is tempting to speak of composition of one of these shots, but often there is less a sense of formal photographic composition than of detail arranged on a number of visual levels to enhance and define the characters more clearly than what appears in the center of focus. It is as if Rafelson means to remind us that in virtually every situation there is more to be known than what first meets the eye.” [pp. 6-7]

The fact that Five Easy Pieces was not only a critical hit but also made money at the box office points to how special the maverick period was. One needn’t belabor the comparison with today’s “tentpole”-oriented Hollywood production line, but it is true that the maverick period was the point where American cinema reached its maturity and was able to benefit from the easing of the Production Code and also the interest in making films that would attract adult viewers.

One important thing to remember about the film is that this sublime portrait of a nearly-middle-aged man in crisis was written by a woman. Carole Eastman used the pen name “Adrien Joyce” and became the first woman to write a film that reflected the new values in Hollywood filmmaking. (Barbara Loden scripted her own Wanda, but it was independently financed, a la Cassavetes.)

I’ve spoken to people who feel conflicted about loving the maverick era because they are good liberals and wish that there had been more representation of women and people in color in the films. Well, there WERE very important women and people of color, both in front of and behind the camera in the maverick era and while, yes, the directors were in most instances straight white males, pioneering figures like Eastman who worked on these films made that era even richer.

Carole Eastman.

Rafelson often emphasized that, while he came up with the original story, the script he shot was entirely Eastman’s, except for the famous scene set in a diner, which was conceived by him and embellished by Eastman, who had seen Nicholson “clear the table” once when angry at a cafeteria.

Eastman’s sharp scripting can also be found in the 1966 Monte Hellman existential Western The Shooting (1966) starring Nicholson and Millie Perkins, and Jerry Schatzberg’s Puzzle of a Downfall Child (1970), but is sadly not in evidence in Mike Nichols’ messy The Fortune (1975) and Rafelson’s later Man Trouble (1992).

 

While he was working as a filmmaker himself, Rafelson was also producing films for other directors as part of BBS. He, Schneider, and Blauner gave carte blanche (as long as they stayed within a very strict budget) to: Peter Bogdanovich, for his first bigger-budgeted pic (outside the realm of Corman), The Last Picture Show; Henry Jaglom, for his debut feature, A Safe Place; documentarian Peter Davis to make Hearts and Minds; and to BBS' premier actor, Jack Nicholson, to make his directorial debut with Drive, He Said.

Rafelson’s third film as a director is one of those films I've watched over and over again. King of Marvin Gardens (1972) is a brilliantly literate and quietly emotional picture that is by turns somber, very funny, and heartbreaking.

It’s a perfect creation to show off just how mature and sophisticated the maverick directors could be (with budgets provided by major studios!). Nicholson and Bruce Dern star as very opposite brothers (Dern is the alpha one in this configuration) who might be able to fulfill their childhood dream — to own an island. Dern has a plan to get such a property, but it involves gangsters and he’s not as savvy as he pretends to be. The women (again, women transforming material that could be seen as male-centric) who are witness to the brothers’ reunion in a crumbling Atlantic City are a younger woman (Julia Anne Robinson) and an aging beauty queen, played by Ellen Burstyn, who has several bravura scenes in the picture.

I interviewed the film’s scripter, Jacob Brackman, on the Funhouse TV show and got him to talk at length about Marvin Gardens. It is interesting to note that Brackman hasn’t ever been a novelist. (He mentioned having had a story or two published in magazines, but noted that fiction was never his focus.) The film has the feel of a novel, though, in that it concentrates on character and dialogue to spell out the back story of the characters, and also has an allegorical level (about that old favorite topic, the death of the American Dream) – although it should be stressed that it is a vibrant work that isn’t the kind of “literary” film that could bore one to tears.

In our interview, Brackman had noted that he stayed with his grandparents in Atlantic City when he was a child, thus providing the setting for the story of the two brothers' reunion. I asked about Nicholson’s unique profession in the film — radio monologist — and Brackman said his reference point for this was not Jean Shepherd nor any of the late Sixties “free-form” FM radio personalities, but rather Jonathan Schwartz, the WNEW DJ famous for his journeys into the Sinatra discography (who did indeed, at one point when he was on FM radio, tell stories on-air). Rafelson stresses in interviews that this aspect sprang from his having done monologues on the radio when he was in the Army in Japan — when he should’ve been playing records, young Bob would go off on tangents and talk for long periods of time.

Marvin Gardens continues the low-key style that Rafelson introduced in Five Easy Pieces. There is no musical soundtrack – music is only heard when it is being played in a given setting. The film also continued Rafelson’s infatuation with atmospheric long shots. Here, the dilapidated state that Atlantic City was in at the time lent itself to some very evocative images, underscoring the ultimate emptiness of the promises offered by the Dern character.

The film is a sublime vehicle for its three stars. Burstyn sketches a character who is incredibly realistic and sadly relatable. Dern channels all of his energetic, con-man charm into his part. And Nicholson is unforgettable in his turn as the quieter, more inactive brother, who crafts his monologues so they contain all the action and emotion that his life lacks.

On the whole, Marvin Gardens is indeed a perfect model of the maverick films that were made with major-studio money in the post-Easy Rider period, which ended with the successes of Jaws and Star Wars, although maverick films kept coming out until the beginning of the Eighties. (Nearly all of them distributed by United Artists, from big maverick works like Apocalypse Now and Raging Bull to smaller gems like Chilly Scenes of Winter and Cutter’s Way.)

Marvin Gardens has one of the most perfect beginnings, with Nicholson recounting a tale of the time he and his brother witnessed their grandfather choking on food and didn’t help him, until the old man croaked. The story is beautifully told by Nicholson, but we shortly thereafter learn that Nicholson’s character lives in Philadelphia with his grandfather, and so the story is just as fake as Dern’s promises end up being.

 

After the dissolution of BBS, Rafelson’s output was spottier. This was due to both the difficulty of getting personal movies made after 1975 and his own interest in traveling around the world. Read any decent interview with the man and you find that he prized travel and exposure to new cultures as highly as he did filmmaking. Thus, after he hit 40, there were only eight more films in the next three decades, and then he retired.

The most interesting thing about his post-BBS output is that so much of it had to do with crime. Of his eight non-indie features, five were crime pics that could either be classified as hard-boiled or noir to some degree. According to Boyer’s book, Rafelson had “little regard” [p. 19] for the film noir cycle in America, which is fascinating, given that he drifted back to the stuff of noir so often.

Of the other three post-BBS films, one was his return to personal filmmaking but in a very different genre than the low-key character studies he made in the early Seventies. (The adventure/drama Mountains of the Moon in 1990.) The two films that seem out of step with his other work are his two post-Monkees comedies, Stay Hungry (1976) and Man Trouble (1992).

The former is interesting to watch and has some amusing moments (plus a great cast), but mostly it is a bid for eccentric comedy that fails. This is intriguing, given that Rafelson helped co-create the funny and at times radically different-for-its-era Monkees TV series. But that series was the result of several peoples’ work, and it had a clear blueprint in the mid-Sixties work of Richard Lester.

Stay Hungry aims to superimpose one subculture (bodybuilding competitions) over another (the wealthy enclaves of the American South). Jeff Bridges plays an heir to a fortune who is assigned by his family’s company to chum up to a gym owner, buy his business, and then have it bulldozed under. Sally Field also stars, in what could be called her first adult role (and certainly her first theatrical film, since she stars here and had only a very small role in the 1967 Western The Way West). Also, making his “legit” acting debut (since most folks, including the actor/later governor, like to discount Hercules in New York, where his voice is dubbed in English) is Arnold Schwarzenegger as (guess what) an ambitious Austrian bodybuilder.

The three leads are all inherently likable, with Schwarzenegger’s role being created for him, as the author of the novel that the film is based on (who also coscripted) was Charles Gaines, who wrote the book that the documentary Pumping Iron was based on. (That doc was released in ’77 but was shot in ’75.) In one of the longest scenes in Stay Hungry, Arnold is in fact more likable than Bridges, who is drunk at a high-society party at his family house and being condescending to both Field and Arnold, while the latter plays it humble and smart (saving his money from the competitions and remaining loyal to his new American friends).

Supporting the leads is a nice ensemble of supporting players — one thing Rafelson did in every genre was to assemble a great supporting cast. Here, R.G. Armstrong, Robert Englund, BBS regular Helena Kallianiotes, Fannie Flagg, and Scatman Crothers do nice little turns, but still the central culture-clash doesn’t rate as either satirical enough or goofy enough to justify the raucous pace and the attempt to create a Seventies screwball comedy. (Click the words "Watch on Odnoklassniki" in the embed and watch on the site housing the full film.)

 

One need only consider that, a year before Stay Hungry, Robert Altman’s Nashville was released. There, Southern culture and the country music industry were satirized brilliantly, as Altman continued on in a fashion that he had debuted in 1969 with M*A*S*H (but which crystallized perfectly in the very eccentric 1970 comedy Brewster McCloud). As brilliant a filmmaker as Rafelson was, he was not in the same category as Altman (or Michael Ritchie, for that matter) in terms of satirizing American obsessions and odd behavior.

The late Seventies were a turning point in Rafelson’s career. He tried for two years to get an adaptation of the novel At Play in the Fields of the Lord underway, unsuccessfully. His next project was even more frustrating. He was recruited to direct Brubaker with Robert Redford and did a year’s worth of research into prisons in America before the start of the film. After 10 days of shooting he was taken off the film because he reportedly had a physical encounter (of the violent kind) with a studio executive.

These two incidents, and the box-office failure of Marvin Gardens and Stay Hungry, left Rafelson a nearly forgotten figure from Hollywood’s recent past as the Eighties came into view. It took his friend Jack bringing him back into the picture to get Rafelson’s career rolling once again — but from this point on, Rafelson was more of a hired hand on the films he directed (save Mountains of the Moon). He still did research and worked with his scripters before a foot of film was shot, but his days of making highly personal features effectively stopped in 1972 with Marvin Gardens.

To be continued...