Marathon Actor Part I: Bruce Dern, Billy Clerk, and Bikers

"Everybody can't be like Redford and pop out there and make big bucks right away because you look like a Greek god."

- Bruce Dern in Interview magazine, January 1976

In some circles, it is affectionately referred to as the “sentimental vote,” when members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences nominate an elderly performer for an Oscar – a venerable actor or actress who has long since paid their Hollywood dues but for whatever reason and despite previous nods, was denied the honor of accepting the golden statuette. One year before his death in 1982, 76-year-old Henry Fonda (nominated only twice earlier for Academy Awards) finally took home the Best Actor Oscar for his performance in “On Golden Pond.”

Twenty years after the role of Sgt. Stryker in “The Sands of Iwo Jima” earned John Wayne his sole, previous Oscar nomination, the 62-year-old screen icon won the Best Actor Academy Award in 1969 for his broadly stroked portrait of one-eyed boozing lawman Rooster Cogburn in “True Grit.” Four decades after his film debut, Jack Palance won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his role as the irascible cowhand, Curly, in 1991’s “City Slickers.” He was 73. At the age of 82, Christopher Plummer’s six-decade-plus career was capped off with the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in 2012’s “Beginners” (and he’s still going strong).

Peter O’Toole, who was nominated eight times without a single win, was given an honorary Oscar at age 71 in 2003. Less sensitive, acerbic types have come to refer to such an award as the “Deathbed Oscar.” Perhaps leery of Henry Fonda’s failing health, the Academy gave him a Lifetime Achievement Award the year prior to his win for “On Golden Pond.” Poor Richard Burton, a Shakespearean actor once deemed the “natural successor to (Laurence) Olivier,” was nominated for seven Oscars without a win or even so much as an honorary prize.

 

Bruce Dern as Woody Grant in "Nebraska"

After a half century of acting in television and movies, 77-year-old Bruce Dern finds himself as the sentimental favorite among the Academy’s Best Actor nominees for his outstanding performance in “Nebraska” as Woody Grant, an alcoholic senior citizen in Billings, Montana, who is bound and determined to make the trek to Lincoln, Nebraska, to collect a $1 million sweepstakes prize he’s convinced he has won. The picaresque road movie is reminiscent of director David Lynch’s “The Straight Story” (1999), which garnered veteran character and longtime Hollywood stuntman Richard Farnsworth a career-topping Oscar nomination at age 79 for his role as an infirm World War II vet who journeys 240 miles on a John Deere lawn tractor to make amends with his estranged, invalid brother (Harry Dean Stanton).

 

The turgid 1970 melodrama "Bloody Mama," produced and directed by Roger
Corman, featured Shelley Winters as '30s gangster matriarch Ma Barker, whose
depraved brood includes Robert De Niro as heroin addict Lloyd Barker and
Robert Walden (above left) as bisexual Fred Barker, cozying up with Bruce Dern
as cellmate Kevin Dirkman (based on real-life gangster Alvin "Creepy" Karpis).

A lot of people out there believe that Bruce Dern got his start playing miscreants and psychos in late 1960s biker flicks like “The Wild Angels,” “Cycle Savages,” and “The Rebel Rousers,” and drive-in pulp like “The Trip,” “Psych-Out,” and “Bloody Mama,” but, in fact, since his 1960 screen debut in director Elia Kazan’s “Wild River” (starring Montgomery Clift and Lee Remick), he had been tirelessly toiling in small film roles and in appearances on numerous TV series. Dern would later recall, “I did little parts, like ‘lab technician,’ ‘Billy Clerk,’ interns and shit like that.”

Bruce MacLeish Dern was born June 4, 1936, into a life of privilege in the affluent community of Winnetka, Illinois, fifteen miles north of Chicago. His maternal great grandfather, a Scottish immigrant named Andrew MacLeish, joined Carson, Pirie, Scott and Co. in 1867 and established the firm’s first retail department store in Chicago. Along with oil industry titan and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller, Andrew MacLeish cofounded the University of Chicago. Dern’s grandfather and namesake, Bruce MacLeish, became a chairman of the Carson Pirie Scott department store chain.  Dern’s maternal great uncle, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Archibald MacLeish, served as the Librarian of Congress during President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration.

Dern’s paternal grandfather, George Henry Dern, was the governor of Utah from 1925 to 1933 and subsequently, despite his personal pacifist bias, served as FDR’s Secretary of War until his death in 1936. Bruce Dern’s godmother was Eleanor Roosevelt. His godfather was Illinois governor and two-time presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson, who was also a partner in Dern’s father’s law firm.

Raised primarily by a governess, Bruce Dern was shuttled off by his parents to a prep school in Wallingford, Connecticut, which he later likened to a “f***in’ concentration camp,” recalling, “I’d never seen 500 more unhappy kids in my life.” He dropped out of the Ivy League’s University of Pennsylvania to pursue an acting career, having appeared in the Philadelphia premiere of Samuel Beckett’s absurdist play “Waiting for Godot.” “My family was very disappointed in me,” Dern later noted. “They were all great men, and they made it clear they did not think I was going to be a great man.”  His parents derisively told him, “You’re going to spend the rest of your life by pretending!”

In the late 1950s, Bruce Dern began his career as a Method actor in New York City, studying under Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio and working in theater with Elia Kazan.  Off the stage, he drove a cab and, as he recalled in a 1976 interview, “saw the really grim side of it,” hacking from four in the afternoon until two in the morning, six nights a week. “I made about 140 bucks a week clear,” he said. “I’d go home in the day to study acting.”

It was at the Actors Studio where Dern met Marilyn Monroe, who told him, “Oh, yeah, you’re (Elia Kazan’s) new wunderkind.” Dern remembered saying, “Come on, please, he doesn’t say that.” According to Dern, she responded, “Yes, he does. He also says nobody’s going to know who you are until you’re in your late sixties.”

In June of 1961, Dern went to Hollywood, lured by a guarantee to appear in the popular TV series “Surfside 6,” starring ‘50s heartthrob Troy Donahue. From 1962 to 1963, Dern had a costarring role on the single season of the TV series “Stoney Burke,” featuring future (original) “Hawaii Five-O” lead Jack Lord as an adventurous rodeo star. “I always made a living as an actor when I came to California,” Dern stated, “I never had to do anything else.”

The cast of "Stoney Burke" (left to right): Robert Dowdell,
Bruce Dern, Jack Lord, Warren Oates

Before his acting career took off, Bruce Dern was a tireless long-distance runner, logging up to 4000 miles a year. Allegedly, he once ran from Santa Monica, California, to Denver, Colorado, on a whim. “I tried to make the Olympics team in 1956,” he recalled. He finished ninth in his division. He continues to run almost every day, adding to his 100,000-plus lifetime miles.

Not surprisingly, Dern incorporated running scenes into a number of his screen roles, however, none approached the personal best he brought to his performance in a little heard-of 1986 film titled “On the Edge” as an aging, disgraced amateur athlete who participates in the Cielo Sea Race. Also known as The Dipsea Race, the grueling, 7.4-mile marathon from Mill Valley to Stinson Beach in Marin County in northern California is notable as the oldest cross-country trail running race. Pam Grier and, in his last movie role, John Marley (immortalized in cinema as the cantankerous Hollywood mogul who discovers the severed head of his prized stud horse in his bed in “The Godfather”), costar in what Roger Ebert deemed “an angry, original, unpredictable movie…about the reasons athletes carry in their hearts after all strength and reason have fled.”

Bruce Dern in "On the Edge" (1986)

Bruce Dern once figured he had probably run four times around the Earth. “I’ve had every kind of injury you can have…I tore my quadriceps off my knee…When I walk, it’s kind of a controlled stumble.”

Dern himself said that “show business in general is a marathon.” With that in mind, the moviehouse would like to revisit particular mile markers in Bruce Dern’s long-distance run for recognition.

In his storied career, renegade producer-director Roger Corman mentored several fledgling filmmakers, including Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, James Cameron, Ron Howard, Jonathan Demme, Joe Dante, and Peter Bogdnovich, as well as helping launch the acting careers of Jack Nicholson, Robert De Niro, and Peter Fonda.

Following a string of successful screen versions of horror tales by Edgar Allan Poe starring Vincent Price, Roger Corman found himself “drifting further from the Hollywood mainstream,” as noted in his memoir How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime. “My filmmaking instincts were growing more radical.” Corman wrote. “No two films in my career reflect more vividly my natural attraction for stories about the outsider or misfit than ‘The Wild Angels’ and ‘The Trip’ – films about outlaw bikers and acid dropouts…two of the most controversial and most commercial projects of my career.”

“In the process,” Corman said, “these films put me together with a group of actors – Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, Jack Nicholson, Bruce Dern – who would become known for their portrayals of antiheroes…part of a vibrant new counterculture within Hollywood.”

As the producer and director of “The Wild Angels” (1966), Roger Corman viewed the bikers “riding free as a modern-day cowboy…outlaws on the fringe, openly flaunting society’s conventions,” challenging “the Establishment’s norms and values.” George Chakiris, who had won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his role as Sharks gang leader Bernardo in 1961’s “West Side Story,” was initially cast as Hell’s Angels leader Jack Black but backed out because he couldn’t ride a motorcycle. Peter Fonda, whom Corman pegged to play Black’s ill-fated buddy, The Loser, replaced Chakiris, but only under the condition that his character’s name be changed to Heavenly Blues. As Fonda explained, the seeds of Heavenly Blues Morning Glories were used for centuries by Mexican Native American cultures as a hallucinogenic substance in religious ceremonies.

Corman, who subsequently cast Bruce Dern as The Loser, remembered, “I had seen Bruce in ‘The Shadow of a Gunman’ in New York and he was brilliant, one of the best young actors in the country.” As recalled by Dern, “I only had six lines and was onstage for maybe fifty seconds. But a guy named Bill Smithers had the lead and he was fantastic. I always thought Roger had somehow superimposed my name over Bill’s in his mind…and I never told him the difference. So I always thought I had Bill Smithers’ career…”

The abovementioned Bill Smithers in one of his most recognizable
roles, as Steve McQueen's long-standing but sympathetic warden
in 1973's "Papillon"

In his endeavor to make an accurate, realistic, “possibly even sympathetic” depiction of the Hell’s Angels, Corman hung out with them, “learning to ride a chopper and financing some of their parties.” He recruited a local chapter of the Angels as extras for $35 a day, plus $20 per man for their bikes and $15 for their old ladies. Apparently, word did not get out to all the chapters, as Bruce Dern related, “I got punched out by a couple of Angels because I was wearing their colors…They said, ‘Take it off, motherf***er!’ And I said, ‘Wait a second, I’m making a movie.’ They said, ‘Nobody’s making a movie about the Hell’s Angels, not unless we’re in it…’ Before I could get it off, I was out cold on the sidewalk."

The Loser (Bruce Dern) shares his plans for the future with his old lady, Gaysh
(played by Dern's then real-life wife Diane Ladd), in "The Wild Angels" (1966).
When both Diane and her lookalike daughter, Laura Dern, were nominated for,
respectively, Best Supporting Actress and Best Actress Oscars for the 1991
Depression Era-set drama "Rambling Rose," Laura Dern admitted to Arsenio Hall
she had been conceived during the shooting of "The Wild Angels." She said,
"My family portrait is my father dead with a joint in his mouth and my mother
laying her head on his shoulder. He's wearing some bizarre biker helmet."

Peter Bogdanovich, the future director of “The Last Picture Show,” was a mere movie buff and journalist when Corman paid him $300 to do a major overhaul on the screenplay for “The Wild Angels.” Short on extras for a fight scene between the bikers and local townspeople, Corman ordered Bogdanovich, “Go ahead, run in there.” As recounted by Bogdanovich, “So I go running in there…looking like a townie. I hit the ground and covered my head as all these Angels just beat the shit out me until Roger yelled, ‘Cut!’” Ironically, the San Bernardino chapter of the Hell’s Angels later sued Roger Corman for defamation of character and even made threats against his life.

Peter Fonda as Heavenly Blues, Nancy Sinatra as Mike ("Monkey") in "The Wild
Angels"...Made for a mere $360,000, "The Wild Angels" has, over time, raked in
more than $10 million. The movie was invited to be shown opening night at the
Venice Film Festival, where the festival director called it "one of the most
important American films of the past ten years." On the other hand, Bosley
Crowther of The New York Times called it "that notorious Roger Corman film"
and a "brutal little picture," while Leonard Matlin viewed it as a "predecessor
of 'Easy Rider' without that film's class...OK after about 24 beers."

By movie’s end, it’s difficult to decide who delivers the worst performance between the two second-generation stars – Peter Fonda, whose previous screen presence was a gangly fresh-faced innocent in such early 1960s pap as “Tammy and the Doctor,” “The Victors,” and “Lilith,” or Nancy Sinatra, then a recent graduate of mindless teen dreck the likes of “For Those Who Think Young,” “Get Yourself a College Girl,” and “The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini.” As Heavenly Blues’ old lady, “Mike,” Nancy’s lifeless mumblings make Peter’s stilted grade-school recitations sound like his pop’s Lincoln-esque soliloquies as Tom Joad in “The Grapes of Wrath.” (Nancy Sinatra appeared in only one more movie, 1968’s “Speedway,” alongside Elvis Presley, before wisely disappearing from the screen.)

It's Peter Fonda's big moment at the bacchanalian funeral for The Loser in
"The Wild Angels" when he schools the uptight preacher: "We want to be free!
We want to be free to do what we want to do! We want to be free to ride! We want
to be free to ride our machines without being hassled by the Man! And we want
to get loaded! And we want to have a good time!"

In a 1975 interview, Bruce Dern commented, “Any time you’re in a movie with Peter Fonda it’s very hard to do quality work as an actor, because he’s just not an actor. He just doesn’t have a clue. I don’t know why they stand for it. I don’t think they will much longer.”

In his 1998 book Don’t Tell Dad: A Memoir, Peter Fonda recalled “The Wild Angels”: “One of my best experiences on the shoot was working with Bruce Dern, whose work I’d admired for some time. His persona was unique, and he filled his moments beautifully. He wasn’t into smoking anything, nor did he know about bikers, and though I provided him with a pair of glasses and some of the dialect, he did all the rest. I think he played The Loser much better than I could have. Diane Ladd was a delight, too.”

Bruce Dern as the perversely sadistic biker Keeg, compelled to break the
hands of an artist with the audacity to sketch his gang in "The Cycle Savages"

For Dern, the role of The Loser led to parts in the biker flicks “The Cycle Savages” and “The Rebel Rousers.” In the 1975 book Jack Nicholson Face to Face, Dern said, “Seventy-five percent of everything I learned about the business, I learned from those movies, because you weren’t directed…The guys that were directing them didn’t know. They were just making a scam film to make bucks. They were involved in the deal somehow…So what you did was to learn to do it yourself. You learn how to survive, and be real, and be good, and be interesting, exciting, and…to continue on…and that was seventy-five percent of the game.”

In 1967, director Roger Corman cast Peter Fonda as a disillusioned director of TV commercials facing an impending divorce who decides to experience LSD for the first time in “The Trip.” “More than plot, I wanted an impressionistic, free-form trip in every sense,” Corman later recalled. “A straight guy spends eight, ten hours tripping his brains out, comes down. The trip ends, the film ends.” Corman said, “I tried to present the hero’s experience without moralizing…so that the audience could judge for itself whether the trip had been a good or a bad one.”

Just as he had hung out with real bikers as research for “The Wild Angels,” Corman decided he had to experience LSD firsthand. He spent seven hours face down in the grass beneath a tree in Big Sur, convinced he had created a new art form just by sending his thoughts into the earth. "Anyone who wanted to experience it would simply lie face down on the ground anywhere in the world," he later explained, "and the work of art would be transmitted through the earth from the mind of its creator directly into the mind of the audience." Corman also imagined himself floating in a golden sunset-lit sky when a fantastic clipper ship adorned with jewels sailed toward him, and the sails transformed into "the movements and curves of a woman's body."

Bruce Dern portrayed Fonda’s bearded, professorial guru in "The Trip," spouting such sage advice as, “You’ve got to turn off your mind and relax, then just float downstream; you’re beautiful, man,” courtesy of a script written by Jack Nicholson, who had hoped to play Dern’s part. ("Jack Nicholson wrote a good script," Corman acknowledged. "If there were any problems it was that he wrote in millions of dollars in special effects.") “Bruce was straight,” Corman later recalled. “Everyone else was fairly counterculture. I wanted Bruce to give some validity to the picture.”

Critic Judith Crist wrote, " 'The Trip' amounts to very little more than an hour-
and-a-half commercial for LSD...a totally incoherent movie with erratic, repetitious
and fake-arty effects that simply nauseate...This is one trip to skip." Leonard
Maltin called it "definitely a relic of its era."

“I was bugged in ‘The Trip’ because my character gives Peter the acid, I guide him through the first part of his trip, he panics, runs away, and then you never see me again. And they said, ‘Well, that’s what happens on acid.’ And I said, ‘Well, I don’t f***ing know that because I don’t take acid.’ I’m just looking at my part as an actor and suddenly I’m out of the f***ing movie…I’ve worked three days and I’m gone and yet I’m one of the stars.”

While Roger Corman considered Peter Fonda “a highly intelligent and sensitive actor,” Dern remained unimpressed. “I started to get fed up,” he said, “because Peter Fonda was a star and I wasn’t. And Peter couldn’t act. He never bothered to sit and learn. He never studied. And he just kind of larked out. Now, I don’t begrudge the fact that he has talent. But he’s not an actor, by any stretch of the imagination.” (To be fair, 30 years after “The Trip,” Fonda came into his own as an actor with a well-deserved Oscar nominated performance in “Ulee’s Gold.”)

Dennis Hopper provides a shepherding conscience for Peter Fonda's
wandering libido in "The Trip"...After a complicated, circling dolly shot
was completed, the sound man told director Roger Corman, "Dennis just
broke the all-time record. He used 'man' thirty-six times in one speech."
Corman's reply was, "Great, print it, man."  

The bottom line for Dern was the fact that “the culture bothered me,” as he remarked in a 2003 interview, “and because it bothered me – and I was playing people involved in the culture – it bothered me even more, because I had to be a very good actor to get through both (‘The Wild Angels’ and ‘The Trip’)…I was not into the drug culture at all…I ran every day and I thought drugs would make me get hair on my palms or go crazy.”

Susan Strasberg, the daughter of Method acting guru Lee Strasberg who had a small but significant role as Peter Fonda’s unhappy wife in “The Trip,” was subsequently cast as a deaf, wide-eyed runaway searching for her errant brother among the Haight-Ashbury flower children of San Francisco in 1968’s “Psych-Out.” She falls in with a struggling psychedelic rock band called Mumblin’ Jim whose moody, charismatic leader, Stoney, is played by Jack Nicholson in a ludicrous ponytail extension. A.V. Club critic Scott Tobias, who dubbed the film "an amusingly dated and noxious compendium of counterculture cliches," observed, "Only a star of his caliber could make such beautiful noise without moving a finger on the guitar."

Jack Nicholson and Susan Strasberg, looking particularly angelic, in "Psych-Out"
(the original title, "Love Children," was dropped because test audiences thought
the film was about illegitimate babies)

When “Psych-Out” director Richard Rush and his crew arrived in the Haight-Ashbury district for location photography, the locals greeted them with hostility, suspecting that the production would exploit them and cash in on their “Summer of Love.” Rush recruited some Hell’s Angels he had befriended while making “Hell’s Angels on Wheels” (starring Jack Nicholson) to keep the peace. As the producer of “Psych-Out,” Dick Clark’s (yes, Mr. “American Bandstand”) responsibilities included “cutting out little round pieces of flesh-colored adhesive tape” to cover the nipples of topless actresses. Clark admitted, “Unfortunately, they didn’t ask me to apply them.”

Bruce Dern tries to decide who has the silliest hairpiece - himself or
Jack Nicholson - in "Psych-Out."

Despite Bruce Dern’s misgivings about the drug culture, the actor was cast in “Psych-Out” as The Seeker, a crazed, messianic sculptor who happens to be Strasberg’s missing brother. Dern later noted, “They wanted me to look wild and crazy, so they gave me a No. 7 Apache from Western Costume, and I look like I just came off the reservation.”

Another good actor in "Psych-Out," another stupid wig...Dean Stockwell as
Nicholson's cerebral, ultra-cool buddy. SPOILER ALERT: When "sexy babe-
in-the-woods Susan Strasberg" (to quote A.V. Club writer Scott Tobias)
accidentally trips out on STP, she dashes through the streets of San Francisco
as flames burst all around her, and when she ends up staggering through
speeding traffic on the Golden Gate Bridge, Stockwell sacrifices himself by
pushing her to safety, nobly expiring with the last words, "Reality is a
deadly place. I hope this trip is a good one."

“Psych-Out” was not the first screen pairing of Bruce Dern and Jack Nicholson, whose offscreen friendship would lead to Dern’s breakout as an actor who made audiences realize that he could “play.” In 1967, both Nicholson and Dern had bit parts in Roger Corman’s gangster flick “The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre,” a docudrama-like exposé unleashing Jason Robard’s over-the-top performance as a rabid Al Capone. The two actors don’t appear together, with Nicholson portraying a raspy-voiced henchman and Dern popping up as a hapless auto mechanic in the wrong place at the wrong time when the Tommy guns start blazing in the northside Chicago garage.

Bruce Dern and his mighty forefinger in "The Rebel Rousers"
(1967), with Jack Nicholson in  the background as Bunny

Also in 1967, Dern played “J.J.,” a biker with a conscience, in “The Rebel Rousers,” contending with antagonistic Rebel “Bunny,” played by Nicholson in flashy, striped trousers, along with a knit hit foreshadowing his Oscar-winning role as Randle Patrick McMurphy in 1975’s “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” Costarring Diane Ladd, Cameron Mitchell (then 49 years old, portraying 31-year-old Dern’s high school alumnus), and Harry Dean Stanton, the film was shelved for three years and finally released in 1970 to cash in on Nicholson’s Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination for “Easy Rider.”

The Time magazine reviewer noted Nicholson “looks like an all-night coach passenger who is just beginning to realize he has slept through his stop,” while critic Leonard Maltin observed, “Nicholson, decked out in outrageous striped pants, steals the show in this amusing time capsule.” Nicholson himself would comment, “I think it’s the only movie of mine I’ve never seen.”

During his early tenure as an actor and sometime screenwriter for Roger Corman in the 1960s, Jack Nicholson, along with Francis Ford Coppola and Monte Hellman, was given the opportunity to direct some scenes in the inscrutable horror cheapie “The Terror,” starring Boris Karloff and Nicholson. In 1971, following Oscar nominations for his performances in “Easy Rider” and “Five Easy Pieces,” Nicholson directed his first feature film, “Drive, He Said,” advertised as “A Cautionary Tale of Campus Revolution and Sexual Freedom.”

In “Drive, He Said” (the title of which comes from a poem by post-Beat Generation poet Robert Creeley: “ ‘Or shall we – and why not – buy a goddamn car and drive?’ he said. ‘And for Christ’s sake, look out where you’re going’ “), screen newcomer William Tepper and actor Michael Margotta (who would become a renowned acting instructor) portray unlikely college roommates, one a popular but disenchanted basketball player about to turn pro, the other a tightly wound antiwar activist facing the draft. The inimitable Karen Black appears as the wife of a university professor (played by writer Robert Towne, who would win an Oscar for his screenplay for 1974’s “Chinatown”) with whom Tepper is having an affair. In a role that easily could have been a clichéd caricature of antagonism, Bruce Dern delivers a surprisingly sympathetic performance as the basketball coach.

Jack Nicholson directs William Tepper and Karen Black in "Drive, He Said"
(1971). Tepper had hopes that this role would be his big break to movie stardom.
After a dozen years of obscurity, Tepper popped up as Tom Hanks' older brother
in the raunchy 1984 comedy "Bachelor Party." In 2006, Tepper wrote and co-
produced the direct-to-video mobster comedy "Grilled," starring Ray Romano,
Kevin James, Juliette Lewis, and Burt Reynolds.

By 1971, the unique combination of college hoops (it’s no secret that Jack Nicholson is an avid basketball fan, having been a season ticket holder for Los Angeles Lakers games since 1970) and campus unrest was overlooked by moviegoers already inured by the previous year’s onslaught of dramas depicting Vietnam War-torn turmoil on the American college scene, including “Getting Straight,” “The Strawberry Statement,” and “R.P.M.” (as in “Revolutions Per Minute”). A positive voice among critics belonged to Newsweek’s Paul D. Zimmerman, who called “Drive, He Said” a “serious but ultimately flawed film,” writing, “This is Nicholson’s film, transformed everywhere by his irreverence, honesty, and energy.”  Nicholson would admit, “It was a disaster. I knew it was going to set me back.”

"If you don't care and you win, you lose"...Bruce Dern attempts to give
William Tepper an attitude adjustment in "Drive, He Said" (1971).

Roger Ebert singled out Bruce Dern’s role as the coach in “Drive, He Said” as “a small masterpiece of accurate observation,” a performance which garnered Dern the National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Supporting Actor.

In 1972, Jack Nicholson and his pal “Dernsie” were paired in “Tbe King of Marvin Gardens,” a bleak, nihilistic drama directed by Bob Rafelson, who had earlier elicited an Oscar-nominated performance from Nicholson in “Five Easy Pieces.” Nicholson purposely turned down roles in “The Sting” and “The Godfather” to work again with Rafelson, whose movies are, in Nicholson’s words, “full of departures, they don’t relate to other films, they’re germinal films.” Indeed, in what could be deemed role reversal, Nicholson was cast as a bookish, introverted, downright depressive radio talk show host lured by his fast-talking, gregarious brother (Dern) into a get-rich-quick real estate scam with a tragic outcome.

Bruce Dern and Jack Nicholson in "The King of Marvin Gardens" (1972)

“Together we’re really great,” Bruce Dern would marvel. “In ‘Marvin Gardens’ you’ll see it. You probably won’t see two American actors as right on as we are in that film. And both cast totally different than either one of us has ever been cast in our lives, and that’s the exciting and fun thing about acting.”

Bruce Dern said in a 1975 interview, “The King of Marvin Gardens” was “the World Series, and I won the car. They may not know I won the car, but I won the car, because I know I was great in that film. I’ve never done as good work in my life.”

Jack Nicholson and Bruce Dern in one of director Bob Rafelson's
more imaginative compositions in "The King of Marvin Gardens"

Dern told the interviewer, "I've done twenty-five films, over a hundred television shots, I did a series for a year...and I logged all that time climbing the ladder bit by bit by bit. I did what I call fourteen or fifteen 'A' movies, multimillion-dollar-budget movies...but in those pictures I was always the ninth or tenth man, and I always had one or two scenes that I was very good in, but so, who gives a shit? By the time they get around to explaining about my character, the movie's over."

For Dern, the turning point from the “ninth or tenth man” in the credits came with his roles in “Drive, He Said” and “The King of Marvin Gardens.” In 1976, he told Interview magazine, “Since I’ve started to star in pictures I have always managed to retain my singularity of purpose when I got into the business, which was to be an artist, as an actor, more than anything else.”

To be continued...