50 years after producing the Oscar-winning movie adaptation, Michael Douglas details the “real sadness” of the book’s author never seeing 1975’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Co-producer Saul Zaentz shared the glory with Douglas when their hit movie version of Ken Kesey’s bestseller dominated the 1976 Oscars, claiming five awards including Best Picture, as well as a Best Adapted Screenplay win for Lawrence Hauben and Bo Goldman. The only one not reveling in the movie’s huge Oscar night performance was Cuckoo’s Nest book author Kesey, who at the time was embroiled in a legal battle with producers.

Five decades on from the triumph of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Douglas reminisced about producing the classic drama, admitting that the whole situation with Kesey was difficult, and calling it “a real sadness” that his relationship with the novelist, whom Douglas says he admired, ended in acrimony. Douglas first addressed the reasons for the ill-will between producers and Kesey, which began when the author’s screenplay draft was rejected (via ᴅᴇᴀᴅline):

Yeah, that was the one. That was the one real sadness. Ken’s script kept a lot of the literary qualities of his novel, so it didn’t quite work. The argument began under the auspices that we had screwed him somehow in his deal, but that wasn’t the case.

Douglas admits that the fight with Kesey left him with mixed feelings about what should have been the biggest night of his life:

I felt bad at the Oscars. I think Miloš [Forman] was the only person who mentioned Ken. I had worshipped him. He was an important part of my generation and I had spent a lot of time with him. But I’m not sure he ever even saw the movie.

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Douglas went into the specifics of the dispute between producers and Kesey, which saw the author ultimately “settling” for $3 million:

We felt we had been very generous in offering him 3%, but he wanted 6%. That was always a claw in the side of the project. It eventually led to a lawsuit. And by the time this came around, a couple of years after the movie was released, Ken’s 3% was worth around $3 million. We didn’t hear from Ken for a long time so we said ‘OK, Ken, we’re going to donate your share to the University Of Oregon in your hometown of Eugene. Then he finally go back to us and we finally came to a settlement…

Kesey’s issues with Douglas and his One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest production team went deeper than just money. The author was also upset over the script adaptation, which shifted the focus from the novel’s narrator Chief to the character of McMurphy. Kesey objected to Jack Nicholson’s casting as McMurphy too, arguing that the star was all wrong for the role (Nicholson went on to win Best Actor on Oscar night).

Kesey never got to judge for himself whether Nicholson pulled off the role of McMurphy, as he claimed to have never seen the film in its entirety, saying he happened upon it once on cable while clicking through the channels and immediately switched it off. The author pᴀssed away in 2001 at the age of 66.

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Douglas sounds as though he still has a lot of regret over the way things ended up with Kesey, whose One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest novel was indeed a major work among young people inclined toward embracing ‘60s counter-culture.

That Kesey had money-related issues with Douglas and his producing partners is no surprise, as that sort of thing is just part of the movie business. Kesey’s objections over the changes made to his story, and the casting of Nicholson, are more interesting as they speak to the whole question of adaptation, the delicate тιԍнт-rope-walk between being true to the source material, and making that material work on the big-screen.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest grossed $163 million worldwide on a budget of $3 million, and won five Oscars, so it’s hard to argue that Douglas and company made many mistakes in how they handled adapting Kesey’s work. The movie Kesey wanted to make would arguably have been more daring, but it’s unlikely that it would have been more successful. As with Stephen King, who famously hates Stanley Kubrick’s take on The Shining, Kesey seems to have felt that Douglas helped kill his baby, so his disowning of the film is understandable, though still regrettable.

Source: ᴅᴇᴀᴅline