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QuickTake:
Some cast and crew of the 1975 movie — based on Ken Kesey’s novel and filmed at the Oregon State Hospital in Salem — were in Eugene for an anniversary showing and a panel discussion at the Art House.
By the time Chief Bromden is committed to the Oregon State Hospital in the film and book “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” he has the weight of Native American history in Oregon on his shoulders.
Multiple generations of his family would have experienced life in Native American boarding schools. His religion had been outlawed for years. His father’s sale of the sacred Celilo Falls, which was submerged with the construction of The Dalles Dam, symbolized a loss of connection to his own culture and identity.
Bromden, who pretends to be deaf and mute, notes in the book: “It wasn’t me that started acting deaf; it was people that first started acting like I was too dumb to hear or see or say anything at all.”
Cynthia Prater, the former director of Native American Services at the state hospital and an enrolled member of Cherokee Nation, said she heard the same thing from Native American patients. When she was able to coax a few words from patients apprehensive about their treatment teams, they said they were used to not being heard, so they didn’t speak.
“They have said this quote, long before I even knew this quote,” she said.
Prater shared her perspective at a panel discussion before a 50th anniversary screening of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” in Eugene on Saturday, Dec. 6. The event was a celebration of the film, which premiered Nov. 19, 1975, and was shot in Oregon. It was adapted from the 1962 novel written by Ken Kesey, the legendary Oregon author who grew up in Springfield.
The film, directed by Czech-American filmmaker Miloš Forman, starred Jack Nicholson as rebellious convict-turned-patient Randle Patrick McMurphy, Will Sampson as Chief Bromden and Louise Fletcher as the controlling Nurse Ratched. It’s a member of an exclusive club — one of only three films ever to take home Academy Awards for picture, director, actor, actress and adapted screenplay.
Though Nicholson, now 88, was not in attendance, other special guests were. Mews Small, the actress who played Candy, a sex worker friend of McMurphy, whom he brings to the hospital ward, and Irby Smith, Forman’s assistant director, were both in the audience.
During the panel, veteran Eugene filmmaker Katherine K’iya Wilson talked about her experience as the on-set liaison for then-Oregon Gov. Bob Straub, and highlighted the film’s importance in her long career in Oregon film. Wilson went on to be the location scout for “Animal House” and “Stand by Me,” and in recent years has mentored students in film.
“I jokingly tell everybody I started on ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’ and worked my way down to student films,” Wilson said.
Stephen Rust, who teaches cinema studies classes at the University of Oregon, highlighted Sampson’s role as Bromden, a textured performance that came after producers were looking for a stereotypical tall, stoic Native American.
“He took advantage of being typecast to say, ‘I don’t have to be that character,’” Rust said. “I’m going to bring this character to life and play me, and also this character in the novel, who’s educated and highly articulate.”
Dennie Brooks, who worked as the location coordinator and liaison between Oregon State Hospital and the production, talked about the hospital superintendent’s role in the production. She knew him well: He was her father, Dr. Dean Brooks, who also appeared in the movie as Dr. John Spivey, his fictional counterpart.
She talked about his response to accusations the movie had personally set the psychiatry profession back 25 years, and quoted his comments verbatim from an Atlanta conference of psychiatrists: “I submit that ‘Cuckoo’ is not controversial because of the material or because it is set in a mental hospital, but because it has exploded into consciousness the things we have all refused to look at.”
Brooks also talked about her work starting the Museum of Mental Health at the Oregon State Hospital in 2012 with Prater, noting the amount of young nursing students that come through with questions about the film and novel’s clinical villain, Nurse Ratched.
“They focus on the question: When have we been Ratched?” Brooks said. “To really examine this woman who didn’t get up in the morning figuring out how she wanted to hurt people, but in fact, did hurt people because she thought she knew better than they knew themselves.”
