Mickey, David, Mike, Peter. How many names have already been lumped together in pop history to form a band? But The Monkees were probably the first pop group for whom a sitcom was first devised and who then had to be rushed together.
It was the first success stunt of Bob Rafelson, who was born in New York on February 21, 1933. He passed away this week at the age of 89 from lung cancer. Despite the fact that the band itself was clinging to each other (the wooden performance of their Neil Diamond-written hit song ‘I’m A Believer’ is so catchy that you can’t get the song out of your head) the TV show was a and already hip, with improvised scenes, hot editing and everything else that American television had never seen before. Rafelson later recalled having conceived the show (1966-1968) before The Beatles broke through, and in any case, The Monkees in their lipstick red Pontiac GTO Monkeemobile became his ticket to ride to the more serious work. Without The Monkees no Easy Rider (1969), the Dennis Hopper-directed and Rafelson-produced America-critical nihilistic bikers road movie that catapulted Hopper, Peter Fonda and Jack Nicholson to stardom.
Jack Nicholson
Rafelson would enter into a fruitful collaboration with Nicholson in particular. The pair had known each other when Nicholson was still a bumbling B actor, and reportedly on LSD, wrote the screenplay for the flopped Monkees movie. head (1968). Rafelson would direct the actor six times, including in the four Oscar-nominated classic Five Ease Pieces (1970). With a stubborn Nicholson in the role of a classically trained pianist who has left his sluggish life behind to disappear into the life of an oilfield worker.
Unforgettable is the scene where he squabbles with the waitress in a diner over an extra portion of toast with his omelette, showing the perfect mix of his new-found stubbornness and his inherited blasé consumerism. It’s one of those scenes that captures in a single minute the American way of life that Rafelson and his contemporaries revolted against.
Rafelson remains known as one of the key figures of the so-called ‘New Hollywood’, an author-oriented film movement that has attracted directors such as Peter Bogdanovich (whose The Last Picture Show Rafelson produced in 1971), Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese.
An uncompromising control freak, he studied European and Japanese art films (Yasujiro Ozu was a favorite) to give American film a shot of artistry, regularly clashed with studio bosses to get his will, and was perfectly in tune with the zeitgeist. . He understood the rebel’s voice. “If my films have one thing in common,” he would say in the 1980s in an interview explain, “then it’s that they are about characters struggling to leave the burden of tradition behind.”