American Icons: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Studio 360 with Kurt Andersen
PRX
4.6 • 675 Ratings
🗓️ 12 October 2017
⏱️ 51 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This is the story of America’s fight against authority.
Ken Kesey had worked in a mental hospital, but his first novel was really a parable of what happens when you stand up to the Man—a counterculture fable that doesn’t end well. Despite his far-reaching influence, Kesey was shut out by filmmakers who turned the story into an Oscar-sweeping phenomenon. “Cuckoo’s Nest”changed how many people thought about mental illness and institutions. Sherman Alexie debunks the myth of the silent Indian; we visit Oregon State Hospital, where the director played himself on screen; a psychiatrist explains how the movie gave mental hospitals a bad name, with tragic consequences; and actress Louise Fletcher takes us into the mind of one of the most fearsome movie villains, the sweet-faced Nurse Ratched. “She doesn’t see her behavior as it really is. Who does? Who sees that they’re really evil?”
(Originally aired September 20, 2013)
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | From PRX |
| 0:03.4 | Studio 360 |
| 0:08.8 | One flew east, one flew west, one flew west, one flew over the cuckoo's nest. |
| 0:30.9 | I'm Kurt Anderson, and in this hour of Studio 360's American icons, it's one flew over the cuckoo's nest. |
| 0:41.0 | It was a littlew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. It was Ken Keezy's first book. |
| 0:43.4 | He was just 27, but it tapped into the zeitgeist and made him an overnight star. |
| 0:49.4 | Before 1962, there was no real counterculture, no hippies, no sex drugs and rock and roll generational tide. |
| 0:57.4 | Just a few beatniks and artists and weirdos. |
| 1:00.3 | People who were very much on the fringes during the 1950s. |
| 1:04.2 | But in the early 60s, wall-to-wall, all-American normality was starting to break apart. |
| 1:10.1 | There was a whole real strong need for this counterculture. |
| 1:14.3 | Brad Durf, who played Billy Bibbitt in the movie. |
| 1:17.6 | And one flow over the cuckus nest was very much an expression of that. |
| 1:22.1 | Let's get out of this rut we're in. |
| 1:25.9 | Let's try to be like ourselves. |
| 1:29.7 | I mean, people were dropping acid for a reason. |
| 1:32.7 | They really wanted to have an authentic experience. |
| 1:35.0 | Yeah, baby. |
| 1:36.7 | Is that Ken? |
| 1:42.6 | This is Ken Babbs, formerly the intrepid traveler of the Merry Pranksters. |
| 1:48.2 | Ken Babs met Ken Keezy when they were grad students together at Stanford. |
| 1:54.6 | While Kesey was there, he got a job working the night shift at the place that would inspire his first novel. |
... |
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