As it’s Mother’s Day, it seems fitting to kick things off with a Mother Goose children’s song that goes like this:

“Vintery, mintery, cutery, corn,

Apple seed and apple thorn,

Wire, briar, limber lock

Three geese in a flock

One flew East

One flew West

And one flew over the cuckoo’s nest.”

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was the film that finally gave Jack Nicholson an Oscar win after many previous nominations. It also gave Louise Fletcher an Oscar (which she memorably accepted with sign language). Those were the two cuckoos flying in opposite directions. The one that actually flew over the cuckoo’s nest was Chief Bromden (played by Will Sampson, in his debut film), the towering figure within the story who dominates the book as the narrator.

But back to film: in February of 1976 the competition was stiff. Also competing in the Best Picture category were Barry Lyndon, Dog Day Afternoon, Jaws, and Nashville. And yet One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest became the first picture in 41 years to sweep the major categories of best picture, director, actor, actress and screenplay (the previous film to do so was Frank Capra’s 1935 film: It Happened One Night). Despite the landslide, however, Sampson walked away empty-handed. But he did go on to immediately score some memorable roles in such films as The Outlaw Josey Wales, The White Buffalo, Orca, Standing Tall, and many more.

When Ken Kesey wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in 1959 (published in 1962), he dipped into personal experiences working a graveyard shift for a mental health facility in California, where he took Peyote and LSD as part of Project MKULTRA (an oblique CIA cryptonym for a program that had its origins in 1945 when the agency recruited former Nazi scientists known for torture and brain-washing). The experience made Kesey sympathetic to the patients point of view, and while on Peyote he began to write the book. His decision to use the perspective of Bromden, a native American who is almost seven feet tall and brought low by a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia, allowed Kesey to deviate away from the normal conventions of a first-person narrator and delve, instead, into a richer point-of-view of that was both hallucinatory and visionary.

A quick side note before I go further: I love both the film and the book. As is often the case when comparing a cinematic adaptation to its literary source, the rule is that to compare the two is to compare apples and oranges. But sometimes there are exceptions. Chuck Palahniuk’s seductively kinetic and nihilistic book Fight Club was clearly written with the screen in mind and David Fincher did it tremendous justice. But, as we were talking of oranges, we must remember that while Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange was very faithful to the American edition of the book, by not adapting the 21st chapter of Anthony Burgess’ novel it did knowingly alter the entire purpose of the original body of work as printed in the U.K.

Something similar happened to Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, because by switching the main point-of-view from Chief Bromden to R.P. McMurphy, the fabric of the story is altered significantly and an important element gets lost in the translation. In the book, the reader closely identifies with Chief Bromden, a man who is physically large but feels small until he has a transformative moment at the end of the book.

In the film, viewers are made to primarily identify with Jack Nicholson. And while in both the book and film R.P. McMurphy’s character is a heroic figure, in the book – as clearly viewed by Bromden – McMurphy is a mortal man struggling to keep appearances, whereas in the film McMurphy hardly ever falters as a Christ-like figure who offers redemption and ultimately dies for the sins of others.

Kesey was so upset that, as recounted in Entertainment Weekly‘s Special Oscar Guide 2001 by Chris Nashawaty, he openly dismissed the production of the film in interviews:

On the first day of shooting, the filmmakers were quickly slapped back into reality by an interview Kesey gave to the local news. According to Goldman, “The interviewer asked Kesey if he went down to the set and Kesey answered, “Does a mother preside over her own abortion?’” Goldman believes Kesey’s beef was mainly author’s pride and anger that his own script wasn’t used. Kesey filed a lawsuit against the filmmakers (which was later settled). But, jokes Goldman, “he had no problem getting his hand out to endorse the checks for his points.”

When asked for his version of events, Kesey responded to Entertainment Weekly with an e-mail: “I’ve never seen the movie. During the lawsuit one of the lawyers says, ‘Ah, you’ll be the first in line to see this flick’ — to which I responded, ‘I swear to God I won’t see it!’ And I consider it one of the smartest things I never did.”

A quick note about how the rights to the book got into Michael Douglas’ hands to produce: they were originally bought by his father, Kirk Douglas, in the early sixties. Kirk adapted it for Broadway, but it bombed and closed after six months. After almost a decade of trying to champion Kesey’s work as a film with no success, he was approached by his son, Michael, who had, at that time, mainly made a name for himself as an actor on television thanks The Streets of San Francisco.

Kirk’s problems in getting the film produced were due, in part, to his desire to be cast as R.P. McMurphy while most in Hollywood saw him as too old to play the bill. Michael had no such ambitions, and was thus able to enlist the help of Saul Zaentz and then Milos Forman who, ironically, had been originally solicited by Kirk to direct the film in the mid-sixties – but nothing came of it due to the meddling of Communist censors who intercepted the book that Kirk had sent him. This was just the kind of tyrannical bullshit that led Forman to leave Czechoslovakia in the first place (he’d fled in 1968 when the Soviet tanks rolled into Prague), so for him One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest stood as a perfect allegory for how totalitarian systems are geared to break the individual and he was happy to be on board.

Raising money to make the film wasn’t easy and Michael Douglas is to be commended for not buckling to various studio suggestions that would have softened what they saw as an otherwise too-depressing storyline dealing with mental illness. That also meant raising most of the four million they needed on their own, which ended up giving the principal players huge rewards when it racked up near $200 million (second only to Jaws, at the time).

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is one of those films that was almost never made, and when it finally did come together it was a case of brilliant alchemy that hit a deep nerve with the film-going public. But anyone who was deeply moved by the film and who is not already familiar with the book would do well to read Ken Kesey’s original work. Jack Nicholson’s face might adorn the poster to the film, but the voice in the book belongs to the supposedly mute Chief Bromden. It’s an interior voice, unique in its perspective, full of incisive and literary observations about man’s nature, suburbia, and this nation that we live in. Chief Bromden’s deep and complex insights are lost to viewers of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Which is a shame, because Bromden’s mute observations remain relevant and far more eloquent than anything McMurphy actually says.

Will Sampson, a member of the Creek Indian tribe, died in 1987 at the age of 53. He spoke of being haunted by the curse on POLTERGEIST II: THE OTHER SIDE. This despite Sampson (who was a real-life shaman) having performed an exorcism on the set once it was realized that real skeletons were used.