[Note: When this feature premiered here some weeks back, it was under the title "Not on DVD". As several readers were thoughtful enough to point out, this was not technically accurate, because there isn't anything that you can't find in some version on DVD provided you have access to an all-region player, live at one of the far corners of the earth, and know a guy what knows a guy. Since then, researchers in the Screengrab test labs have labored to come up with a title for this feature that will be both honestly descriptive and pithy. As you can see, they failed. But you get the idea, right?]
Today marks the 72nd birthday of Mr. Jack Nicholson. In 1958, Nicholson made his movie debut in the title role of the 70-minute Roger Corman production Cry Baby Killer, which would lead to more than a decade's worth of solid employment in low-paying jobs in low-budget indie films, many of them for Corman, most of them exploitation and drive-in fare, though a few of them (such as Irving Lerner's 1960 Studs Lonigan and the pair of "existential" Westerns, The Shooting and Ride in the Whirlwind, that Monte Hellman directed back to back on Corman's nickel in the mid-'60s. (Nicholson also wrote the script for Whirlwind and had writing credits on a few other '60s films, including Hellman's 1964 Flight to Fury, The Trip, and the Monkees vehicle Head, with whose director, Bob Rafelson, he later made Five Easy Pieces, The King of Marvin Gardens, The Postman Always Rings Twice, and Blood and Wine.) The movie that made Nicholson a star, Easy Rider, was basically an art-house version of the biker movies that Corman had made, starting with The Wild Angels, which starred Easy Rider's Peter Fonda. Nicholson had come on board Easy Rider as an afterthought, when Rip Torn, who was set to play the good-hearted good ol' boy George Hanson, got into a bitch-slapping contest with Dennis Hopper and got his invitation to join the production rescinded. In fact, at the time, Nicholson thought that his acting career was over. He was tired of bashing his head against walls trying to break into the industry and had arranged to make his directing debut with an adaptation of Jeremy Larner's 1964 campus novel, Drive, He Said. It was only when he saw Easy Rider with an audience and picked up on the crowd's reaction to his performance that Nicholson realized that his career as a movie star had just begun.
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