One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (film)

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is a 1975 American psychological comedy-drama film directed by Miloš Forman, based on the 1962 novel of the same name by Ken Kesey. The film stars Jack Nicholson as a new patient at a mental institution and Louise Fletcher as the domineering head nurse. Will Sampson, Danny DeVito, Sydney Lassick, William Redfield, Christopher Lloyd and Brad Dourif play supporting roles, with the latter two making their feature film debuts.

Originally announced in 1962 with Kirk Douglas starring, the film took 13 years to develop. Filming finally began in January 1975 and lasted three months, on location in Salem, Oregon and the surrounding area, and in Depoe Bay on the north Oregon coast. The producers shot the film in the Oregon State Hospital, an actual psychiatric hospital, which is also the novel's setting. The hospital is still in operation, though the original buildings in the film have been demolished. The film was released on November 19, 1975.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest received critical acclaim, and is considered by critics and audiences to be one of the greatest films ever made. It is the second of three films to win all five major Academy Awards (Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Actress, Director, and Screenplay) following It Happened One Night (1934), and preceding 1991's The Silence of the Lambs. It won numerous Golden Globe and BAFTA Awards. In 1993, the film was deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the United States Library of Congress, and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry. Additionally, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was ranked No. 33 on the American Film Institute's updated 100 Years... 100 Movies list in 2007.

In 1963 Oregon, Randle McMurphy is incarcerated for the statutory rape of a 15-year-old girl (which he claims he committed under the assumption that she was an 18-year-old), with five previous arrests for assault. He feigns mental illness so that he can be moved to a mental institution and avoid hard labor at a work farm. The medical ward is dominated by the cold, passive-aggressive Nurse Ratched, who intimidates her patients and maintains control through fear.

The other patients include young, anxious, stuttering Billy Bibbit; Charlie Cheswick, who is prone to temper tantrums; delusional, child-like Martini; the articulate and repressed Dale Harding; belligerent and profane Max Taber; epileptics Jim Sefelt and Bruce Fredrickson; quiet but violent-minded Scanlon; tall, deaf-mute Native American Chief Bromden; and several others with chronic conditions.

Ratched sees McMurphy's lively, rebellious presence as a threat to her authority, to which she responds by confiscating and rationing the patients' cigarettes and suspending their card-playing privileges. McMurphy finds himself in a battle of wills against Ratched. One night, he makes a bet with the other inmates that he can escape by tearing a hydrotherapy fountain off its base and hurling it through a locked window, but is predictably unable to lift it. Shortly after, he hijacks a charter bus, picks up his girlfriend Candy, and escapes with several patients to steal a recreational fishing boat, exposing them to the outside world and encouraging them to discover their abilities and find self-confidence.

After an orderly tells him that his sentence term does not apply in the mental institution, and can become indefinite, McMurphy questions why no one had told him this before. He also learns that he, Chief, and Taber are the only non-chronic patients who have been involuntarily committed; the others have committed themselves voluntarily but are too afraid to leave. After Cheswick bursts into a fit and demands his cigarettes from Ratched, McMurphy starts a fight with the orderlies, and Chief intervenes to help him.

McMurphy, Chief, and Cheswick are then sent to the disturbed ward, and Chief reveals to McMurphy that he can speak and hear normally, having faked deaf-muteness to avoid engaging with anyone. The two make plans to escape to Canada together. McMurphy is subjected to electroconvulsive therapy, and returns to the ward pretending to be brain-damaged before revealing that the treatment has made him even more determined to defeat Ratched. McMurphy and Chief plan to throw a secret Christmas party for their friends after Ratched and the orderlies leave for the night, before making their escape.

McMurphy sneaks Candy and her friend Rose into the ward, each bringing bottles of alcohol for the party, and bribes the night orderly Turkle to allow the party. McMurphy and Chief prepare to escape, inviting Billy to come with them. Billy refuses but asks for a "date" with Candy; McMurphy arranges for him to have sex with her. McMurphy and the others get drunk, and McMurphy falls asleep instead of escaping with Chief.

Ratched arrives in the morning to find the ward in disarray; most patients have passed out. She discovers Billy and Candy in bed together and aims to embarrass Billy in front of everyone. Billy manages to overcome his stutter and stands up to Ratched. When she threatens to tell his mother, Billy cracks under the pressure and reverts to stuttering, before Ratched orders he be locked in a separate room as punishment. McMurphy punches an orderly when trying to escape out of a window with Chief, causing the other orderlies to intervene. Locked up alone, Billy kills himself by slitting his throat with a broken glass, causing a huge commotion. Ratched tries to control the situation by calling for the day's routine to continue as usual, but her nonchalant reaction enrages McMurphy, who begins strangling her. The orderlies violently subdue McMurphy, saving Ratched's life.

Sometime later, Ratched is wearing a neck brace and speaking weakly although still sternly, and Harding leads the now unsuspended card-playing. McMurphy is nowhere to be found, leading to a rumor that he has escaped. Later that night, Chief sees McMurphy being returned to his bed. He is initially elated that McMurphy had kept his promise not to escape without him, until discovering that McMurphy has been lobotomized. After tearfully embracing McMurphy, Chief smothers him to death with a pillow. He then rips the hydrotherapy fountain off its base and throws it through the window as McMurphy had earlier attempted. Chief escapes, with Taber and the other inmates awakening to cheer him on as he runs into the surrounding countryside.

In 1962, Kirk Douglas's company Joel Productions announced that it had acquired the rights to make Broadway stage and film adaptations of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest with Douglas starring as McMurphy in both the play and the film, Dale Wasserman writing the stageplay, and George Roy Hill directing the film based on Wasserman's play. Jack Nicholson had also tried to buy the film rights to the novel but was outbid by Douglas. Wasserman's 1963–1964 Broadway stage adaptation successfully opened, but Douglas was unable to find a studio willing to make the film with him.

Kirk Douglas hired Miloš Forman to direct after meeting him in Prague during a tour of the Eastern Bloc. Avco-Embassy Pictures optioned the film in 1969, but Forman was prevented from directing the film by the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia and the beginning of the "normalization" period in which the Soviet Union forced Czechoslovakia to reverse most of its Prague Spring liberalization reforms. Forman and Douglas fell completely out of contact after the Czechoslovak StB put Forman under strict surveillance. It also intercepted a copy of the novel Douglas sent to his home in Prague, which meant he was unable to read the book.

Wasserman subsequently sold his film rights to Douglas in 1970, but then delayed the film for several more years with lawsuits. In 1971, Kirk Douglas's son Michael Douglas convinced his father to allow him to produce the film, as he was drawn to the novel's "one man against the system" plot due to his involvement with student activism at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Michael Douglas optioned the film to director Richard Rush, but Rush was unable to secure financing from major studios. In March 1973, Michael Douglas announced a new deal in which he would co-produce the film with Saul Zaentz as the first project of Fantasy Records' new film division.

Zaentz, a voracious reader, felt an affinity with Kesey, and so after Hauben's first attempt he asked Kesey to write the screenplay. Kesey participated in the early stages of script development, but withdrew after creative differences with the producers over casting and narrative point of view; ultimately he filed suit against the production and won a settlement. Although Kesey was paid for his work, his screenplay from the first-person point of view of Chief Bromden was not used. Instead, Lawrence Hauben and Bo Goldman wrote a new screenplay from a third-person perspective.

Hal Ashby was hired to replace Rush as director in 1973, but he was also replaced by Forman after Forman had successfully fled to the United States. Although Michael Douglas and Zaentz were unaware that Forman had been Kirk Douglas's first choice to direct, they began considering him after Hauben showed them Forman's 1967 Czechoslovak film The Firemen's Ball. Michael Douglas later said that the film "had the sort of qualities we were looking for: it took place in one enclosed situation, with a plethora of unique characters he had the ability to juggle".

Although Forman was suffering from a mental health crisis and refused to leave his Hotel Chelsea room in New York City for months, Douglas and Zaentz sent him a copy of the novel. Although Forman was not aware that the novel was the one which Douglas's father had hired him to direct in the 1960s, he quickly decided that it was "the best material I’d come across in America" and flew to California to discuss the film further with Douglas and Zaentz. They quickly hired Forman because, in Douglas's words, "Unlike the other directors we saw, who kept their cards close to their chest, he went through the script page by page and told us what he would do." Forman wrote in 2012: "To me, [the story] was not just literature, but real life, the life I lived in Czechoslovakia from my birth in 1932 until 1968. The Communist Party was my Nurse Ratched, telling me what I could and could not do; what I was or was not allowed to say; where I was and was not allowed to go; even who I was and was not."