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Though established as a name, Nicholson is in the first flush of excitement at being a household word right now, and he is handling it with the respectable glee and half (but only that) the mocking humor of a sort of cutup prince regent. He is talking to Stanley Kubrick about playing Napoleon, to Bernardo Bertolucci about being the Continental Op in a film of Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest. Milos Forman is waiting for him to finish Fortune, so he can start playing McMurphy in an adaptation of Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. At no time since the burnished '30s has Hollywood been so big-name conscious. "The system is geared toward overworking the stars," Nicholson points out. "There aren't that many stars around to haul the freight."
In Easy Rider (1969) and in the freer, more personal films that flowed from its success, Nicholson became a kind of figurehead for a loose group of actors and film makers who were trying to expand the commercial genre. Nicholson, Actors Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper, Writer-Directors Bob Rafelson, Monte Hellman, Carol and Charles Eastman—none of them then well known—all cheered and boosted each other. Their work was almost always full of aggressive invention (Rafelson's Five Easy Pieces, Hopper's The Last Movie, Nicholson's own Drive, He Said), but the new Hollywood passed, the victim of erratic returns at the box office.
Nicholson passed along with it, not out of sight, as happened with many of his fraternity, but on to other things. He worked into the mainstream that he had been trying to divert, and started running with the high rollers. He now counts as two of his buddies Paramount Production Chief Robert Evans and Warren Beatty, his co-star in Fortune. Nicholson, along with his real gifts, has always had a canny ability to move with the heat. He has done it so well that now he is the heat.
He knew he had it knocked after he saw a rough cut of Chinatown. "Mogul," he said to Evans, who produced the movie, "we got that hot one. Get those checks ready—we're on our way." He also made it a point to phone up Actor Bruce Dern, a pal since they both scuffled through a bunch of low budget bike pictures, for a little needling: "Hey, Dernsie, I think you better retire, babe. I got it all covered —know what I mean?" Nicholson has called Dern "my only real competition —you and the guy on the hill" (referring to Marlon Brando, whose home off Los Angeles' Mulholland Drive is directly above Nicholson's).
All the double-edged kidding and up-front aggressiveness stand in some contrast to the cool, measured and often affectless characters Nicholson has played so well on the screen. He looks, when he is not trying, like an all-night coach passenger who is just beginning to realize he has slept through his stop. But his features have great plasticity. His friend Candice Bergen speaks of his "cobra eyes." His energy level can vary with the most careful calibration. His two best roles—as Bobby Dupea, the thwarted concert pianist in Five Easy Pieces (1970) and David Staebler, the self-consumed and self-deceived radio monologist hi The King of Marvin Gardens (1972)—are shaded with anxiety, shaped with a muted force.