Michael Douglas has admitted his first big Hollywood gamble very nearly went up in smoke thanks to a superstar who left him hanging for six months.
Reuniting with Danny DeVito, Christopher Lloyd and Brad Dourif ahead of the 50th anniversary of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Douglas revealed that Jack Nicholson left him hanging for ages.
The actor was already tied to another film when he signed on, forcing Douglas to stall production on his producing debut.
For a rookie producer, that kind of delay should have been career-ending. Instead, it turned out to be the secret weapon. “You guys remember Jack was doing another picture?” he said in an interview with People for the the anniversary and the 4K UHD release coming out in November.
“So we postponed the actual shooting for about six months,” Douglas recalled. “The postponement of Jack was actually a tremendous blessing for how great this picture was cast.”
That extra time gave Douglas and director Miloš Forman the chance to play with casting in a way few films ever dared. Forget standard auditions... this was more like a pressure cooker.
“We would go up and we had the semicircle, and you go up for an audition and it was basically improv,” DeVito remembered. Lloyd added: “Yeah, she would say things that would stir us up… say something hoping we would start tangling.”
Douglas watched as the experiment turned into alchemy. “Every one of you guys just delivered. It just blew everybody away,” he told his old castmates, admitting the delay gave him the gift of time to assemble the perfect ensemble.
It wasn’t just the film that benefitted. The makeshift group therapy sessions sparked friendships that would shape Hollywood careers for decades. DeVito, already Douglas’s friend and ex-flatmate, bonded instantly with Lloyd, his future Taxi co-star.
“That was the first time I worked with Chris Lloyd,” he said. “We’ve been friends forever, and we talk to each other four times a month, at least, on Zoom.”
And Nicholson? The man who caused the hold-up? He walked away with lifelong friends too - not to mention an Oscar.
Cuckoo’s Nest premiered in November 1975 and went on to sweep the Academy Awards, proving the six-month pause wasn’t a disaster but destiny. A 4K UHD edition lands November 11, just ahead of its 50th anniversary on November 19.
For Douglas, the takeaway is simple: what felt like the moment that could cost him everything ended up giving him the career-defining film of a lifetime.
