The American New Wave cinematic movement was brief but it burned spectacularly brightly in the years leading from the phenomenal success of the stoner bikers in search of the real US in 1969‘’s Easy Rider to the ushering in of the blockbuster era by Steven Spielberg’s Jaws in 1975.
Perhaps no filmmaker of the era better exemplified the possibilities of what a new form for US cinema might look and feel like than the irascible, dedicated anti-establishmentarian Bob Rafelson, who died on July 24 at the age of 89.
Like his Aspen, Colorado neighbour and drinking buddy Hunter S Thompson — with whom Rafelson would spend gleeful hours shooting guns at targets bearing the face of their sworn enemy, US president Richard Nixon — Rafelson was a rebel dedicated to swimming against the expectations of the polite middle-class society he had been raised in.
The two men also shared a preternatural ability to see the 1970s — the decade in which both made their most memorable mark — as a depressingly self-centred, cynical era in stark contrast to the idealism promised by the free-love, mind-expanding, damn the man, chaotic uncertainty and possibilities of the 1960s.
Rafelson had made a small fortune in show business in the ’60s when, after the success of The Beatles’ film A Hard Day’s Night, his long-gestating idea for a television series following the adventures of a young rock ’n roll band was finally greenlit, allowing him to create the pop culture smash hit boy band and accompanying TV show The Monkees.
It was as the director of a film about the band, written by his new best friend — a B-movie actor with a killer smile and an equal passion for changing US cinema named Jack Nicholson — that Rafelson made his debut with Head in 1968. The box office failure, now a cult favourite, spat in the face of the Monkees’ legions of fans by deconstructing the group and satirising their clean-cut image.
The money from his adventures as a pop Svengali enabled Rafelson and long-time friend and collaborator Bert Schneider to found their own production company in partnership with Stephen Blauner, which became for a few short years the home of some of the most exciting and memorable new US films. BBS (Bert, Bob and Steve) produced Easy Rider — featuring Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda, Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show and Rafelson’s own groundbreaking ’70s existential classic Five Easy Pieces.
Released in 1970, Five Easy Pieces starred Nicholson as Bobby Dupea, the classically trained pianist son of a wealthy Eastern family who turns his back on them and finds himself working on an oil rig in Bakersfield, California. He lives what he believes is a real working class life — until he is called back home to visit his dying father and forced to face the fact that he will always be, as Rafelson told Esquire magazine in 2019, “doomed to leave ... doomed to disappear and keep going ... doomed to be unsatisfied”.
Hailed by critics as pointing the way forward for a more literary, thoughtful and introspective US cinema and earning four Oscar nominations, Five Easy Pieces firmly cemented Rafelson’s reputation as not just an important behind-the-scenes mover in the American New Wave but also one of its most singular creative voices. It made a star of Nicholson, put cinematographer Lazlo Kovacs on the road to immortality and seemed to promise, as critic Roger Ebert wrote in 2003, “the direction American movies should take: into idiosyncratic characters, into dialogue with an ear for the vulgar and the literate, into a plot free to surprise us about the characters, into an existential ending not required to be happy.”
Life, for Rafelson, has never been about making a hundred movies, breaking box office records, or winning awards. It’s about the compulsion to see what’s beyond the horizon.”
— Esquire writer Josh Karp
It was followed by the equally angst-ridden and unique examination of the difficult bonds of brotherhood, The King of Marvin Gardens in 1972, which starred Nicholson and his long-time friend Bruce Dern as a pair of very different but equally troubled brothers who become embroiled in a foolish get-rich-quick scheme with tragic consequences. Criminally undervalued and not nearly as widely seen as its predecessor, the film has stood the test of time to become what many now consider an even better example of what, for a few brilliant years, could have been the moment at which US movies became something more than simply delivery mechanisms for easy thrills and spectacle.
When he saw it, Rafelson recognised that Jaws marked the end of the American New Wave. His career — hobbled by a famous confrontation on the set of the Robert Redford starring prison drama Brubaker, after which he was fired from the film and blackballed by the industry — never achieved the heights of the ’70s. He remained a hero to many in the industry and a name whose directing credit always offered the potential for something interesting to happen on screen. Such films included the raunchy 1981 Nicholson-starring film noir remake The Postman Always Rings Twice and 1989’s passion project, the 19th-century African exploration epic The Mountains of the Moon. His last film was the uneven 2002 noir thriller No Good Deed, after which he finally retired from the movie business, living his last two decades out as a family man in his remote Aspen home.
As Josh Karp, writing in Esquire in 2019, neatly summed it up: “Life, for Rafelson, has never been about making a hundred movies, breaking box office records, or winning awards. It’s about the compulsion to see what’s beyond the horizon.” His best films remain as brilliant examinations of that compulsion and testaments to the depressingly unfulfilled promise of the invigorating movement he helped to spearhead.
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