New series to mark fifty year anniversary of iconic film finally solves mystery

Fifty years after One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest debuted as one of the greatest films ever made, winning all five top Oscars – best picture, director, actor, actress and screenplay – the story by counter-culture icon Ken Kesey is to be revived in a new television series.

Hollywood has tried in vain for decades to come up with a sequel that met with the approval of Kesey’s estate. But producers finally have his family’s blessing for a series that follows the troubled, comical and ultimately tragic lives of patients in a repressive mental institution, where a rebellious convict – played in the film by Jack Nicholson – is sent for psychiatric evaluation, and encourages the intimidated patients to seize control of their own lives and defy the tyrannical Nurse Ratched.

The 1975 hit movie had a dramatic impact on the public perception of mental health institutions, raised awareness of abuses, increased government scrutiny, and helped empower patients to take greater control of their treatment.

Set in 1963, its harrowing depiction of electro-convulsive therapy and the horrors of lobotomy surgery ignited public outrage towards the psychiatric community. The film also won Nicholson his first Oscar, launched actor Michael Douglas’s career as a film producer, and introduced the talents of Danny DeVito and Christopher Lloyd.

It also led Michael Douglas to a bitter falling out with his father, Hollywood legend Kirk Douglas, who wanted to play the role of Randle McMurphy that eventually went to Nicholson.

“That’s the picture where you destroyed me,” Kirk reminded his son three decades later, still harbouring a grudge at the snub.

“Here we go again,” groaned Michael Douglas, adding sarcastically: “So nice to know he forgives and forgets.”

Kirk Douglas had the foresight to purchase the movie rights to Cuckoo’s Nest after reading an unpublished galley of Kesey’s novel in 1962. He was enchanted by the free spirit of McMurphy, a disruptive yet charismatic petty criminal transferred from prison to a mental institution where he rouses up the cowed inmates.

But while he starred as McMurphy in a 1963 Broadway stage production, he found Hollywood reluctant to finance a film set in an asylum: every studio passed. After a fruitless decade, son Michael asked to make the movie, telling his father: “I’ll make my best effort for you to be in it.”

But the career-making role of McMurphy was first offered to Gene Hackman, Marlon Brando and Burt Reynolds, who all turned it down before Michael Douglas turned to Jack Nicholson.

Kirk Douglas, who died in 2020 aged 103, never forgave his son.

“It was extremely difficult for him,” admits Michael, 80. “I reminded him that the director has the final say. I tried, but it wasn’t possible.”

Author Ken Kesey was also deeply dismayed, disowning the film and refusing to watch it, outraged by everything he heard about it. In his original novel the leading character and narrator is the towering Native American Chief Bromden, not McMurphy.

Kesey also objected to Nicholson’s casting, and successfully sued producers after his own draft of the screenplay was rejected.

“That was the one real sadness,” Michael Douglas told Deadline in a recent interview. “Ken’s script kept a lot of the literary qualities of his novel, so it didn’t quite work.”

The coming television series should make Kesey rest more comfortably in his grave.

“It’s based on the book, and the book was told through the eyes of Chief Bromden,” says producer Paul Zaentz, son of the original movie’s co-producer Saul Zaentz. “So the television series would be told through his eyes.”

The first season will end with McMurphy’s mercy killing after a lobotomy leaves him a shell of his former self, and season two will follow the Chief after he escapes from the secure mental ward.

Casting has not yet begun, but hopefully will not be as fraught as it was for the 1975 movie.

Danny DeVito was the first actor cast: a former roommate of Michael Douglas, he had played psychiatric patient Martini in an off-Broadway revival of Cuckoo’s Nest, and reprised the role for the film. Louise Fletcher played cold, cruel Nurse Ratched, after the part had been turned down by stars including Anne Bancroft, Angela Lansbury and Colleen Dewhurst. The only Cuckoo’s Nest spin-off so far has been the 2020 prequel series Ratched, which was axed after one season.

The film’s producers spent months searching for someone to play Chief Bromden, who pretends to be a deaf mute, before finding mountainous Native American Will Sampson, who was working in Washington state as a forest fire ranger.

Douglas recalls flying with Nicholson to meet Sampson: “When he walked through the arrival gate, with cowboy hat and cowboy boots on, all seven feet of him, Jack said, ‘That’s the Chief.’ We flew back down to Oregon in a tiny plane, so Jack basically had to sit on Will’s lap.”

They filmed on location in Oregon at a working mental asylum, whose director, Dean Brooks, asked if some of the inmates could work on the film. Brooks portrayed a psychiatrist in the movie, and several inmates played extras.

Nobody had bothered telling Nicholson, however, who stormed out of the cafeteria during lunch on his first day of filming, upset at the somewhat deranged behaviour of his dining companions. “Who are these guys?” Nicholson yelled at Douglas. “Don’t they even stop being in character for lunch?”

Douglas recalls: “I told Jack that some of the actors were real inmates. He thought about what I said, then laughed.”

The production occupied an entire wing of the Oregon State Hospital’s psychiatric centre, and the cast lived on the asylum grounds to immerse themselves in their roles.

“The floor above us had some seriously disturbed people who had committed murder,” recalls DeVito.

A scene where Nicholson steals away to take fellow patients fishing on a boat also proved stomach-churning.

“We were out there for a week and people were dry heaving, nauseous,” says Douglas. “That was a tough one to get through. There were tears.”

Nicholson and director Miloš Forman also had a bitter falling out, refusing to speak through much of the production. Forman wanted the inmates to be rowdy when McMurphy arrives in their midst, while Nicholson wanted them to only start rebelling after he encouraged them.

Kesey’s book was part of an anti-psychiatry movement that believed therapy, not pills or electro-convulsive therapy, were the solution to mental challenges, and the movie brought that message to a global audience.

“The film had a huge impact on the public’s perception of mental institutions, shaping their views of lobotomy and electric shock therapy as inhumane and barbaric when used not for treatment but as methods of control,” says Prof Steve Noll, who teaches a course on Cuckoo’s Nest at the University of Florida.

“The movie helped the movement away from the institutionalisation of the mentally ill, and toward treating them within the community, combined with the development of psychotropic drugs. America saw an 80% drop in the number of people institutionalised, and I believe the UK saw a similar response.”

Critically acclaimed, Cuckoo’s Nest became 1975’s second-biggest box office hit, beaten only by Jaws. And Michael Douglas believes the film is as relevant today as ever.

“I think the movie reflects what’s happening in America right now, in terms of the presidency and a struggle that we never anticipated we would see in our country: a struggle for democracy. There is a parallel between Nurse Ratched and the system she operates within, and what’s happening in America today.”

Apparently likening the US to a lunatic asylum under the direction of a cold-hearted authoritarian Nurse Trump.