When Jack Nicholson Quit Weed
I recently felt the need to rewatch Carnal Knowledge (1971) after reading the brilliant Mike Nichols bio by Mark Harris. I first watched it when I was maybe 22 and it really is part of this small group of films and books I took in around that age that taught me how not to be. I’m pretty sure that was around the time I read John Updike’s Rabbit, Run and maybe also around the first time I saw Husbands (1970) by John Cassavetes and gave me a similar feeling of I really don’t want to turn out like any of those guys. Clocking in at 97 minutes, Carnal Knowledge is shorter than the famously “unbearably long” (as Vincent Canby put it) Husbands, but you still come out of watching it feeling similarly not so great. I mean, it led Rosalyn Drexler to ask this in the New York Times:
But it’s also one of my favorite Jack Nicholson performances. I mean, set against Art Garfunkel and also featuring Candice Bergen, Ann-Margret and a brief appearance by Carol Kane, it has pretty much everybody I could ask for in a film. But after I finished watching Carnal Knowledge (my third rewatch of a film with Jack in the last year) I couldn’t help but wonder what it was that seemed so different about it. So I peeled back open the Nichols biography and read a part that helped it all become crystal clear: Nichols “also, pleasantly but firmly, told Nicholson and the other actors to refrain from smoking pot during filming. “We had all taken a vow,” said Nicholson, who had, by his own estimation, gotten high every day for fifteen years before quitting for Carnal Knowledge. “Mike felt, properly, that grass slows down your tempo a bit.”
Jack’s love of drugs is something I’m fascinated by lately, mostly because of that little tidbit and also a part in Sam Wasson’s The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood where Wasson describes Jack’s home with Sartre books on the shelves, a bowl of cash sitting on the coffee table that he invited company to take from and “an opulent cocaine pyramid, pointing skyward.”
This is all leading to two things: 1. I’d love to see a picture of the cocaine pyramid 2. This look from Carnal Knowledge is absolutely perfect. I don’t know what could top it.
Lickin' blackberry molasses out my asses
Lil’ Kim is writing a memoir. I can’t wait to read it.
Summer of Vice
I decided a few months back that I’m going to do an entire Miami Vice rewatch soon. This article by Mark Asch in Filmmaker about the show’s connection to the downtown NYC scene of the 1980s has me even more pumped for this. Some great insights from the lord Eric Bogosian:
“We were a very insular neighborhood downtown and really didn’t care what the outer world wanted from us,” recalls Eric Bogosian, who had started to bring his one-man shows to the Public Theater in 1982. “Yet, there were these ambitious streaks that started around ’80, ’81. Ann Magnuson appeared in a David Bowie movie about vampires or something…. Everybody was living in poverty, but at the same time, we were a very visual arts–oriented scene, so there were people amongst us who were starting to make huge bucks. It created this dichotomy in the neighborhood of people who had nothing, and people who were getting rich.”