What other films do you know that produced immediately afterwards the archetypes which were only projections when the film was made?
Jack NicholsonFootnote 1The notoriously tumultuous year of 1968 is characterized in part by the global wave of protests that surged on college campuses. One of the more notable demonstrations took place at Columbia University in New York, where student activists occupied several of the Ivy League school's administration buildings. Protesters opposed the university's affiliation with the Institute for Defense Analysis (IDA), a weapons research think tank that aided the United States military in Vietnam. They also took issue with Columbia's plans to construct a gymnasium in nearby Morningside Park, a city-owned property located between the university and the Harlem neighborhood. Columbia claimed it would let Harlem community members access the new gym, but only on a lower level with a separate entrance from the one used by university personnel. Protesters labeled the project “gym crow” and charged that it would segregate the mostly white and affluent Columbia community from the largely Black and lower-income Harlem residents.Footnote 2
Not all Columbia students were dissatisfied with the university. Counterprotesters encircled the occupied buildings, attempting to force out the demonstrators by blocking their compatriots from delivering food and supplies. These counterprotesters were known as jocks; clean-cut, conservative, and almost entirely white male students. Columbia's crew coach Bill Stowe affectionately described the jocks as “brave, manly, ambitious, focused, patriotic and goal-driven.”Footnote 3 Jocks were not necessarily athletes. But their identification with sports served as a shorthand for their conservatism.
The jocks composed a stylistic and ideological contrast to the protesters, who were nicknamed pukes. The pukes, according to The Nation's Robert Lipsyte, were “woolly, distractable, girlish and handicapped by their lack of certainty that nothing mattered as much as winning.” In a report published shortly after the Columbia protests, one jock explained the rationale behind his adversaries’ pejorative sobriquet: “just looking at these dirty bearded twerps with their sneers and their sloppy girlfriends is enough to make a guy vomit.” The pukes, by contrast, viewed the jocks as “right-wing idiots” and used their antipathy toward sport to demonstrate their countercultural identities.Footnote 4
The Columbia protests firmed up stereotypes of sport as an instrument of the establishment that sustains a conservative fantasy that the decidedly pukey Lipsyte dubbed “an ultimate sanctuary, a university for the body, a community for the spirit, a place to hide that flows with that time of innocence when we believed that rules and boundaries were honored, that good triumphed over evil.”Footnote 5 Sport, the activity by which jocks defined themselves, composed a haven for traditionalism and an adjunct to militarism that prized conformity. It was an Althusserian ideological state apparatus that supported and maintained dominant hegemonies while muffling dissent.Footnote 6
Critical interrogations of sport were gaining currency alongside the student revolts. The sociologist and former athlete Harry Edwards engineered the Olympic Project for Human Rights, which informed protests at the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City that took place shortly after the Columbia demonstrations. As Edwards's The Revolt of the Black Athlete contends, “the sports world is not a rose flourishing in the middle of a wasteland, it is part and parcel of that wasteland.”Footnote 7 Jack Scott, another athlete who transformed into a radical academic, wrote Athletics for Athletes (1969) and The Athletic Revolution (1971), which endeavored to “abolish the authoritarian, racist, militaristic nature of contemporary college athletics.”Footnote 8 This swell of sports criticism, and its relationship to the broader countercultural movement during the Vietnam era, has been carefully documented and contextualized by an interdisciplinary group of humanistic sport scholars that includes M. Aziz, Amy Bass, Tim Elcombe, Douglas Hartmann, Gregory Kaliss, and David Zang.Footnote 9
But other cultural texts that have not yet received scholarly attention participated in this effort to appraise and reimagine sport. For instance, New Hollywood cinema emerged at this time with films tailored to young viewers like the student protesters that featured countercultural subject matter and daring conventions influenced by European art cinema. Several foundational New Hollywood films, in fact, used sport as a foil against which to demonstrate their countercultural values. In addition to these New Hollywood films, a spate of less memorable “youthsploitation” productions dramatized campus revolts like the one at Columbia and similarly depicted sport as part of the establishment that merited critique and desperately needed reform.
BBS Productions’ obscure film Drive, He Said (dir. Jack Nicholson, 1971) combines New Hollywood sensibilities with the themes of the campus revolt films. An adaptation of Jeremy Larner's 1964 novel marketed as a story about the “disenchantment of an All-American jock,” Drive, He Said focusses on the college basketball star Hector Bloom (William Tepper), who is torn between his love for athletics and his growing identification with radical sentiments on campus that dismiss sport as retrograde. Drive, He Said dramatizes and builds on many of the arguments about sport that critics like Edwards and Scott were leveling at the time. Specifically, it offers an ambivalent take on the culture and politics of sport. Hector Bloom is a pukey jock who cherishes basketball while resisting its authoritarianism, traditionalism, and economic exploitation.
This article offers a critical analysis of Drive, He Said, the industrial and cultural contexts that shaped its production, and the reception it attracted. The film, the first that Jack Nicholson directed, was disparaged by reviewers. But it usefully complemented and expanded on the work of sports critics, a point that neither contemporary reviews nor retrospective scholarly explorations of the film have considered. Drive, He Said imagines how sport might resist the conservatism that stereotypically defines jock culture – how we might have sport without jocks.Footnote 10
Drive, He Said and the contexts surrounding it show how film augmented critiques of sport and efforts to rethink what it meant to be a politically engaged athlete during the Vietnam era. These debates were forged across sport, media, and culture, and they cannot be unpacked by considering sport or film in isolation. While sports scholars have investigated activist interrogations of athletics, they have not explored how New Hollywood cinema or campus revolt films contributed to these critiques. Similarly, media scholars have given Drive, He Said only passing mention, and their work on New Hollywood and campus revolt films does not examine the small but significant ways in which these productions engaged the politics of sport. My analysis of Drive, He Said creates connections between sport studies and media studies while demonstrating how these conversations can mutually enrich each other. This requires an interdisciplinary approach that stretches the boundaries of both fields. I take critical and methodological inspiration here from American studies, which, as Joseph Darda and Amira Rose Davis write, “invites sports studies to undiscipline itself.”Footnote 11 My article extends this invitation to media studies by using Drive, He Said to show how the intersection of sport and film can help to explain the thorny cultural meanings of sport during this transformational moment.
“GROOVIER THAN THE WAY IT HAD BEEN DONE BEFORE”
Jack Nicholson saw in Drive, He Said a novel ripe for adaptation that complemented his overlapping interests in politics, drugs, sex, and sports. Jeremy Larner's sometimes psychedelic and surreal book, which won the Delta Prize for first novels, grew out of his work as a journalist and activist.Footnote 12 His tale about Hector Bloom's strained relationship to basketball amid political upheaval on campus anticipated the student protests against the involvement of universities in weapons research that occurred later in the decade.Footnote 13 “I felt it was a subject through which I could say a lot of what I wanted to say,” Nicholson explained of Larner's heady book. “One of the things I like about the college film is that when people are naïve and young, for me they have license to state philosophy; it never plays right with older characters.”Footnote 14 But Nicholson was only a minor Hollywood player at the time known mostly for his role as a B-movie actor and the screenwriter of Roger Corman's LSD film The Trip (1967) who did not yet have the clout to direct his own picture. He was finally able to make Drive, He Said through BBS Productions after the surprising success of Easy Rider (dir. Dennis Hopper, 1969), which earned him an Academy Award nomination for his depiction of the lovable and alcoholic lawyer George Hanson.
BBS Productions began as a partnership between Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider to create The Monkees (1966–8), a television comedy about a prefabricated musical act that parodied the Beatles and films like A Hard Day's Night (dir. Richard Lester, 1964). The duo formed Raybert Productions to make Head (dir. Bob Rafelson, 1968), a genre-hopping production based on The Monkees and cowritten by Nicholson that took the program's satire to more biting heights by combining critiques of consumer culture with an indictment of popular entertainment's complicities in Vietnam. Raybert enfranchised directors by letting them select their subject matter and giving them the creative freedom to experiment. “We didn't have any burning ambition or slogan to change Hollywood,” Rafelson later recalled. “We just knew there was a way to do something that was groovier than the way it had been done before.”Footnote 15 Raybert films were shot on location to show a grittier side of America that did not get much attention in glossy Hollywood movies made on studio lots. They also resisted the tidy and optimistic narratives typical of Hollywood cinema. As Rafelson said, “I don't like perfect pictures, and, to me, the imperfections create a sense of awe beyond order, a surprise, a ragged edge.”Footnote 16
Raybert morphed into BBS Productions when Steve Blauner joined the company shortly before the release of Easy Rider, a Kerouacian road film about Wyatt (Peter Fonda) and Billy (Dennis Hopper), two shaggy bikers who ride from California to New Orleans with the money from a cocaine deal. The journey celebrates the duo's liberation from traditional social norms through their lifestyles, clothes, drug use, and sexual escapades. The film also laments intolerance toward these unorthodox but decent and peaceful folks when the bikers are senselessly gunned down by a group of backwoods bigots. Easy Rider unexpectedly captured the zeitgeist and became an emblem of the 1960s counterculture. The low-budget production was also one of the highest-grossing films ever, earning $60 million after being made for a modest $400,000.
Hollywood studios, which had spent the 1960s struggling to attract young audiences, took immediate notice of Easy Rider – especially its profit margins. As the film critic Teresa Grimes explains, Easy Rider showed the major studios “that a ‘youth’ audience existed and that low-budget films could be good business.”Footnote 17 “Every studio in town was narcotized by Easy Rider grosses,” remembered Joan Didion of the ripple effects the film had.Footnote 18 Duly intoxicated, Columbia Pictures made a deal with BBS that allowed the company to produce six films without studio interference so long as the budgets stayed under $1 million per picture. The Columbia agreement transformed BBS into what film scholar Geoff King calls “the centerpiece of the Hollywood Renaissance and counterculture” during the blossoming of New Hollywood cinema. BBS film historian Peter Biskind adds, “opened Hollywood to the counterculture.”Footnote 19 It also, as Grimes writes, “led to a period of greater creative freedom; the major studios began to make room for younger, unknown directors who hoped they might be able to reproduce Easy Rider's popularity.”Footnote 20 While BBS “became synonymous with the development of independent cinema,” the company's Columbia-funded films were still studio-backed productions that would not have enjoyed their widespread visibility apart from the marketing and distribution their corporate parent furnished.Footnote 21
BBS films often used sport to demonstrate their countercultural values.Footnote 22 The early moments of Head transition from footage of screaming fans at a Monkees concert to a scene in which the band members portray cheerleaders at a packed football stadium full of similarly impassioned spectators. The Monkees lead fans in a mocking variation of common game day chants: “Gimme a W! Gimme an A! Gimme an R! What's that spell? WAR!” The bloodthirsty cheer suggests that the zealous fandom at sporting events reflects the patriotic jingoism that unthinkingly valorizes military brutality. The cheerleading sequence gives way to a battle scene in which the Monkees play soldiers fighting in trenches. At one point Monkee Peter Tork must leave his post to secure more ammunition. While slinking through the battlefield Tork is suddenly tackled by the former Green Bay Packers linebacker Ray Nitschke, who wears a football uniform. Nitschke grunts like an ape and even scrapes his knuckles on the ground while mindlessly growling “We're number one!” After the initial tackle, Tork manages to escape Nitschke, who throws his helmet at the soldier and then proceeds to run into a wall headfirst. Again, the film jokingly highlights the connections between sport and war while making fun of jocks like Nitschke, who seem incapable of distinguishing between the two.
Easy Rider extends Head's absurdist references to jock culture with more subtle sports imagery. During their voyage, Billy and Wyatt are briefly locked up in a rural Texas jail after being profiled for their appearances. While in jail they meet fellow prisoner George Hanson, a straitlaced but kindhearted young ACLU lawyer who is sleeping off a drunk. Hanson likes the bikers and is thrilled by their plans to visit New Orleans. When Wyatt invites George to come along, the quirky attorney improbably accepts. “You got a helmet?” Wyatt asks before they take off. “Oh, I got a helmet! I got a beauty!” George responds with an eager nod. It is a football helmet, not a motorcycle helmet. The headgear signifies George's position as a square misfit in Billy and Wyatt's hip world. At a campfire after a long day on the road, George, wearing his high-school letterman sweater to keep warm, ruminates about his old football gear. “Well, old buddy. I never thought I'd see you again,” he muses to the helmet. “You know, I threw this thing away one week ago,” he continues to Billy and Wyatt as the fire crackles.
My mother of all people retrieved it. I can't understand that. She didn't even want me to play football; was afraid I was gonna get hurt. And here twelve years later I find it on my pillow with a note pinned next to it that says, “save this for your son.”
The helmet is a family heirloom that will presumably guide his eventual son's entry into jock culture. George's mother may not have liked football, but she approved of the values it represents and maintains. But George never gets a chance to pass the helmet along. Early the next morning, he is beaten to death in his sleep by men who took issue with the trio's hippie lifestyle, which threatened the conservative values that the helmet symbolizes.
A cluster of campus revolt films built on Easy Rider's countercultural spirit while exploiting interest in the widespread student demonstrations. Film scholar Aniko Bodroghkozy explains that Hollywood studios sought to cash in quickly while campus protests were in vogue.Footnote 23 Five such productions were released between 1969 and 1970: The Activist (dir. Art Napoleon, 1969), Getting Straight (dir. Richard Rush, 1970), The Revolutionary (dir. Paul Williams, 1970), RPM (dir. Ian Sharp, 1970), and The Strawberry Statement (dir. Stuart Hagmann, 1970). The Strawberry Statement, which won the 1970 Cannes Grand Jury Prize, adapted James Simon Kunen's 1968 memoir about his experience as a student athlete who participated in the protests at Columbia. A Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer press kit marketed The Strawberry Statement as an earnest but still firmly countercultural variation on Easy Rider that would deliver theaters similarly lucrative results: “These Easy Rider days movie industry veterans are having a hell-of-a-time understanding the upheaval in their business. Star-studded, rainbow-colored blockbusters frequently bust at the box office while low-budget, technically inferior, wandering idyls clean up … Some tune out, as in Easy Rider. Some tune in, as in The Strawberry Statement.”Footnote 24 While the campus revolt films were not as formally inventive as Easy Rider, which included trippy aesthetic flourishes, they reflected BBS's efforts to convey authenticity by shooting on actual college campuses and casting real students.
The campus revolt films also joined BBS Productions’ frequent critique of sport. In The Strawberry Statement, the main character, Simon (Bruce Davison), is a member of the crew team whose activist girlfriend (Kim Darby) chides him for participating in athletics. “It's not real,” she says of crew. “It's a game; the movement is real.” A montage during one of Simon's practices cuts from the coxswain yelling “stroke!” to protesters hollering “strike!” to demonstrate Simon's growing political awareness and the cultural divide that exists between sport and the rest of campus. Later, one of Simon's teammates berates the student demonstrators in the locker room. “Did you hear what those pukes did?” the jock says to Simon, assuming they share the same political values. “I'd like to beat the shit out of every one of them.” Participation in sport, The Strawberry Statement indicates, is a barrier to Simon's radical politics. RPM depicts sport similarly. In the film, students occupy an administration building and force the university's president to step down. Attempting to satisfy the students, the school appoints Professor Paco Perez (Anthony Quinn) as its new president. Perez is a young, popular, and progressive sociologist whom the university's leadership hopes can calm things down. Shortly after Perez is appointed, the football coach (Norman Burton) summons him to the practice field for a chat. The coach calls the protesters “unwashed shaggies” who “have no ethics, no morals, and no decency.” He then offers to activate his team to help bring order to campus. “Feel free to call upon this end to send our people in to clean that place out,” he says to Perez. The football coach is presented as a dangerous buffoon who is willing to deploy his obedient squad of jocks as if they are a military unit. Athletics, which the coach separates from the rest of campus by calling his domain “this end,” is presented as an avowed enemy to the counterculture.
Drive, He Said shares topical similarities with the campus revolt films while demonstrating BBS's commitment to formal experimentation and taking sport as its main backdrop. Nicholson had established himself as a countercultural darling after his breakout role in Easy Rider. But he was also a passionate basketball fan who hired actual players to perform in Drive, He Said and help him to stage its game sequences. Although the film is set at a fictional Ohio college, Nicholson shot Drive, He Said at the University of Oregon in Eugene and included footage from student demonstrations taking place on campus as the film was made.Footnote 25 He further aligned Drive, He Said with the values of campus protesters by contributing $15,000 to support minority programs – the creation of which was a common demand of student activists –for the right to shoot at the university.Footnote 26
“TO YOU, IT'S POETRY. TO ME, IT'S STAYING AFTER CLASS IN YOUR UNDERWEAR.”
The opening moments of Drive, He Said make clear that Nicholson was aiming to create a different type of sports film that aligned with BBS's bold ethos. It opens with a close-up shot of Hector Bloom isolated in front of a black background while elevating for a jump shot in super-slow motion alongside a pulsating instrumental track by the experimental composer Moondog and the diegetic cheers and squeaking sneakers of a basketball game in progress. Hector stares ahead with steely concentration as he releases the shot and watches the ball's flight. His sweaty face shifts from intense focus to a satisfied grin as the ball swishes through the basket and the crowd howls approvingly.
The moment of joyful solitude that Hector experiences while hitting the shot in visual isolation gives way to a frenetic game conveyed through a montage of elbows flying, coaches barking orders, and referees blowing whistles. Hector's life off the court does not match the occasional serenity he achieves while playing the game at which he so excels. The star player is ambivalent about basketball despite its material and social benefits. He finds the infantilizing demands of his disciplinarian coach (Bruce Dern) to be increasingly ridiculous. But he does not totally agree with his radical roommate Gabriel's (Michael Margotta) contention that the game is an inane instrument of the Establishment. “Why don't you drop all of this ra-ra jive game, huh?” Gabriel says to Hector with a fast-talking hipster lilt. “The game's not jive to me,” Hector responds. “To you it's poetry. To me, it's staying after school in your underwear,” Gabriel concludes dismissively. “That's why you're here – a hang-up, a game. We're going to tear the mother down, man.” Gabriel wants Hector to join him in creating a revolution. But Hector is reluctant to follow his dissident roommate or his conservative coach. Hector's unease is further exacerbated by his affair with Olive (Karen Black), who is pregnant with his child but does not want to leave her husband, a young and liberal professor (Robert Towne). The opening moments of Drive, He Said show the poetry Hector experiences at play and gesture toward the challenges he faces participating in a sport that represents values with which he is uncomfortable. Drive, He Said is not a conventional sports film about an athlete striving to win a big game, but one about an athlete who is questioning whether he wants to play at all.
The initial scene cuts between the game itself and a black-and-white television broadcast of it that Gabriel and a group of student revolutionaries are watching in the bowels of the arena. Gabriel and his cronies are staging a demonstration to disrupt the event, which they see as a commercialized distraction from the realities of a world at war and a visible platform that will help them to convey their insurgent message. The student radicals turn out the stadium lights and enter the arena wearing military fatigues and carrying fake rifles. Gabriel hijacks the public-address system as a spotlight scans the darkened venue. “Ladies and gentlemen. This game has been interrupted for reasons which relate to national security. This is a US military operation … We are seeking to flush out an enemy agent. Turn to the person next to you and see if he has a subversive appearance.” Gabriel then screams, “There he is!” as the spotlight follows the “subversive,” who is fleeing the student protesters masquerading as soldiers. They catch the enemy, an Asian woman, put her on her knees at center court and shoot her with a toy gun that ejects an American flag – a satirical re-creation of the execution of Nguyên Vān Lém and Eddie Adams's haunting 1968 photo of it that became an icon of the antiwar movement.
After the political theater, the lights turn back on, the pukes are forcibly removed by the police, and order is restored. As the basketball game resumes, Nicholson cuts between the sporting event and footage of protests outside the arena, which was shot of actual demonstrations at the University of Oregon with handheld cameras by cinematographer Bill Butler to suggest the point of view of a participant.Footnote 27 The basketball game continues despite the momentary disruption and the discord just outside the walls of the coliseum where it takes place.
When the game ends the university's rattled athletic director (Don Hanmer) ushers Hector to a television interview. “I told you you shouldn't run with him,” scolds the administrator, who is worried about the negative media attention that Hector's friendship with Gabriel might generate. “I thought it was a great happening,” Hector says of the students’ demonstration with a shrug. “No. No. No,” yells the mortified athletic director, wagging a finger in Hector's face. “I don't want you to do anything rash on nationwide television,” he commands. “Nobody has ever done anything rash on nationwide television,” Hector retorts with an eyeroll. He then provides the broadcaster with a mockingly predictable soundbite that evidences his comment about television's inherent superficiality. “What can you give in advice to kids watching you across the nation that might help them follow in your footsteps?” the interviewer asks. “Don't lie, don't cheat, and don't be afraid,” Hector answers with a knowing smirk. His response pokes fun at the conventional jock script that the athletic director and broadcasters expect him to follow. The short interview demonstrates Hector's role as a pukey jock; he participates in athletics but does not completely buy into the status or responsibility that accompanies his sports stardom.
As the film proceeds, Hector becomes estranged from his team and is briefly suspended for various infractions. The basketball star is miffed by the fact that he cannot simply play ball without having to follow all the paternalistic rules and expectations that come along with participation in sports. “What is this, a secret society?” he vents to his teammate Easly (Mike Warren). “Are we Shriners? Because I'm not.” Hector has offers to play professionally after college, but he is uncertain whether he wants to remain in sports. “It bothers me not knowing what to do next,” he complains to Olive and her husband at their dinner table. Hector grabs a grapefruit from a bowl as he continues to fret about this future – a gesture toward the sexual liberties he has taken in their household. He cradles the fruit, which resembles a basketball, in front of his face. A medium close-up makes it appear that the grapefruit has replaced Hector's head, which represents the dehumanization he endures in sports. Hector is struggling to find an identity beyond basketball. He wants to participate in sport without giving way to the uniformity of jock culture.
Gabriel is meanwhile concerned about his own institutionalization through military induction, and he is taking speed and refusing sleep so he will seem unfit for service. “This is no game, you understand?” Gabriel says to Hector, whose basketball talent will enable him to avoid the draft. “This is army, war, death, shoot, blood, fear, kill. No way, man.” At his induction evaluation, Gabriel shouts obscenities, jumps on tables, and even attempts to vomit on a military doctor. “I'd like to puke in your face!” he shrieks at the doctor with his eyes bugging and jaw clenched from the speed. Here, Gabriel is a puke who is literally trying to puke on the man. The drugged-up revolutionary then flees the induction center and goes into hiding. “Do something, man,” Gabriel tells Hector before he disappears. “Do something before they take it all away from you. Because that's what they're going to do. You understand that? Don't count on anything else.” Gabriel reminds Hector that he is ultimately nothing more than a momentarily valuable asset that the commercial sports establishment seeks to exploit.
Hector takes Gabriel's advice to heart when he meets with executives from the professional basketball league that plans to draft him after the season. The businessmen are surprised that Hector has arrived alone without an agent or attorney. “You are not representing yourself, are you?” one of the suits asks incredulously. “As a matter of fact, I do represent myself,” Hector responds with a chuckle that suggests he finds their business-driven understanding of human interactions to be ridiculous. “I might not sign. I have a few conditions,” Hector then says to the executives. “You sell hot dogs for fifty cents, you know that?” he continues. “Try eating one. The day I sign, I want you to eat one, I want them to cost twenty-five cents, and I want them to taste OK.” The businessmen assume Hector is joking and attempt to continue the negotiation. One of them hands him a document that he must sign before they can, as he puts it, “begin the formalities of the draft.” Hector snickers. “Draft … that's pretty funny,” he replies while shaking his head at the irony. The businessmen do not see the dark humor that Hector detected – that this draft will spare him from military service while friends like Gabriel might have to go to war. At this point, the executives get frustrated with Hector's unusual behavior. “Young man, just what would you do if you don't turn professional now?” one of them asks. “I don't know,” Hector says with another bemused chuckle. Hector understands that the executives are attempting to use him, and he leverages his limited bargaining power in weird but anticapitalist ways. “Hector is not too intelligent,” explained Jack Nicholson of his film's protagonist. “And yet even Hector, when he tries to do something in the scene where he is negotiating his contract, does try, within his own terms, to be revolutionary.”Footnote 28 Paralleling Gabriel's wild performance at the induction, Hector disrupts this very different draft by questioning the similarly debasing common sense that organizes it.
Eventually, Hector comes to agree with Gabriel's warning that basketball is using him. “Gabriel's right,” Hector says to Easly. “They're trying to add inches to their dicks at my expense.” Easly is similarly unsure about his own athletic identity. When interviewing Easly before a game, a sportscaster (Harry Gittes) offers a characteristically shallow question that invites a similarly inane response. “I guess it's the old-fashioned glory that keeps you going, isn't it?” the reporter asks before offering Easly the microphone. “It's the bread,” Easly impassively replies. Rather than fulfilling the interviewer's expectations, Easly admits that he is primarily motivated by money. Moreover, Easly, who is played by the former UCLA basketball star Mike Warren, is the film's only Black main character. Drive, He Said intertextually comments on the racial dimensions of sport's exploitation of athletes through Warren, who was friendly with Harry Edwards and boycotted the 1968 Olympics alongside his more famous teammate Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. In fact, Warren declined an offer to play in the American Basketball Association after college because the league was, as he explained, “too cheap.”Footnote 29 Warren turned to acting because basketball would not provide the bread. Drive, He Said links Easly's attitude to Black athletes’ efforts to achieve economic enfranchisement within the business of sports.
But Drive, He Said centers its story on a white protagonist despite the disproportionate number of African Americans in basketball – a sport that was becoming increasingly Black during the 1970s. Moreover, it ties Hector's disillusionment with sports to his intersecting gender and sexual identities. Hector is upset that Olive will not leave her husband to be with him. Yet he refuses Olive's request that he not sleep with other women. “You're being done in by a bitch,” Gabriel callously tells his lovesick roommate. While Hector identifies with many nonconformist attitudes, he is traditionally masculine, and he feels entitled to the sexual opportunities that his basketball stardom makes possible. Indeed, his coach continually links sporting success to heterosexuality by commanding his team not to “play like fags.” Although Hector disagrees with most of his coach's establishmentarian ideas, he similarly links his personal fulfillment to conventional masculine and heterosexual expectations.
Drive, He Said ends with Gabriel's descent into drug-fueled psychosis. After reemerging from hiding, he inexplicably trashes a house, attempts to rape Olive, and finally runs naked into the university's biology lab, where he releases specimens from their cages and jars. Campus police and nurses from a psychiatric hospital arrive to take him away. “I want you to know one thing, I'm completely sane,” Gabriel unconvincingly says while surrounded by the snakes, lizards, and mice he has liberated. Gabriel has avoided the military draft, but he has gone mad in the process. After wrapping the nude student in a blanket, the nurses escort Gabriel to a van. Hector rushes to the scene. “Your mother called!” he hollers as his friend is shuttled off campus. Hector will presumably continue his life as a pukey jock who is at once sympathetic to Gabriel's struggle but unwilling to abandon sport. As with the demonstration at the beginning of the film, the university chugs along after the disruptive puke is removed. Like BBS's other productions, Drive, He Said avoids a clear or sentimental resolution that might valorize the university's status quo or glorify the campus radicals. But it does use Hector to articulate a sort of athlete who exists, however uncomfortably, between the worlds of jocks and pukes.
“THE YEAR'S MOST REPULSIVE PICTURE”
Drive, He Said was controversial even before its release. In exchange for permission to shoot at the University of Oregon campus, BBS promised to remove all signs identifying the university and agreed that no nudity or drug use would be filmed on campus.Footnote 30 Nicholson ignored the deal, most blatantly with the scene in which Gabriel runs naked into the biology lab. The university consequently sued BBS for $525,000 and unsuccessfully attempted to block the film's release.Footnote 31 Drive, He Said became additionally scandalous when the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) gave it an X rating – making it the first Columbia production ever to receive this designation and narrowing the film's potential audience. Because BBS maintained the right to the final cut, Nicholson staunchly refused to edit Drive, He Said in ways that might mollify the MPAA. But Columbia appealed the X rating and hired the former United States Attorney General Ramsey Clark to make its case. Clark used statements gathered from clerics and psychologists to argue that the film was “about young people in a state of stress” and to contend that “it would be unfair and unreasonable to bar all people from seeing it.”Footnote 32 Clark's rationale satisfied the censors, and Drive, He Said was reclassified with an R-rating.
The film was selected as an official US entry in the 1971 Cannes Film Festival, which had awarded The Strawberry Statement its Jury Prize the previous year. According to Variety, Drive, He Said was the only film at Cannes that drew hostile reactions. “As the lights came up, the people hooted, screamed, and whistled,” reported the New York Times. “Some got to their feet and waved indignant fists toward where Nicholson and his two actors, William Tepper and Michael Margotta, were seated.”Footnote 33 The incensed spectators were mainly reacting to the film's gratuitous nudity and indelicate sex scenes. Columbia attempted to transform the controversy into a marketing opportunity before Drive, He Said's theatrical premier in June 1971. “They raised fists at Cannes,” read one promotion. “We're saying RIGHT ON!! Drive, He Said is a controversial movie, and the kind of movie you'll want to see for yourself, to decide for yourself.”Footnote 34
Beyond the outrage at Cannes, most critics considered Drive, He Said to be overly indulgent, exploitative, and messy. The Independent Film Journal called it an “unmade bed of a movie,” the Washington Post named it a “disaster,” and the Austin American-Statesman found Nicholson's direction “lousy.” The Lowell Sun's William E. Sarmento anointed Drive, He Said “the year's most repulsive picture” and said that the film was “enough to keep you away from movies forever.” Even the countercultural magazine Creem thought Drive, He Said was sophomoric.Footnote 35
The trade publication Box Office reported that Drive, He Said did reasonably well among college-aged audiences after its premier.Footnote 36 But, as Bodroghkozy explains, “By early 1971, the industry's infatuation with the nation's rebellious young had cooled considerably” and interest in campus revolt films waned.Footnote 37 “Surely no movie genre has burnt itself out more quickly,” observed the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's George Anderson of the campus revolt movies shortly after the release of Drive, He Said.Footnote 38 Despite its formal differences from films like RPM and The Strawberry Statement, Drive, He Said struck many critics as derivative because of its topical similarities to these antecedents. Reviewers panned its “overworked core theme,” inclusion of the “now standard draft-dodger scene,” and “vaguely distorted reflections of the mass of cliches that have piled up from such earlier films along these lines.”Footnote 39 These critiques were particularly damning considering BBS's identification with unique and forward-thinking filmmaking. The University of Oregon even dropped its defamation lawsuit because it figured that any court case would simply give more attention to a film that was not getting much notice beyond the negative reviews.Footnote 40
Nicholson was dismayed by the cold reception his first film attracted. “Cannes and the first reviews here put me on the defensive,” he admitted. “I'm depressed by it.” The director, however, insisted that Drive, He Said was far different from and superior to the more predictable campus revolt pictures that came before it. Drive, He Said, according to Nicholson, “was the only one to give a 360-view of the situation” on college campuses at the time. “I was so sure that Getting Straight, The Strawberry Statement, RPM, all those films would be in production before mine,” Nicholson continued. “Those films are b—–, I wouldn't even act in them. Most people can't do this type of material realistically, they just want to make friends.”Footnote 41 Nicholson implied that the negative reviews were partly responding to his offbeat depictions of college athletics. The little praise Drive, He Said received tended to celebrate those elements that reproduced the conventions of traditional sports films, such as Bruce Dern's performance as a martinet coach and the realistic basketball scenes.Footnote 42 But Nicholson suggested that his film gave a grittier and less compromised vision of sports on campus that mainstream film culture was unwilling to indulge.
THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION IN SPORTS
While the campus revolt film had largely petered out by the time Drive, He Said was released, a surge of books criticizing sport emerged alongside the film's release. “College athletics as we enter the 1970s is facing its most severe crisis,” wrote Jack Scott in The Athletic Revolution, which was published one month after Drive, He Said's theatrical premier.Footnote 43 Scott attributed this crisis to athletes’ rising willingness to challenge sport's institutionalized authoritarianism and abuses. Scott released The Athletic Revolution as part of his Institute for the Study of Sport and Society, a hub for progressive sports criticism he founded in 1970 with his partner Micki Scott. The institute also supported Dave Meggyesy's Out of Their League (1971), Gary Shaw's Meat on the Hoof: The Hidden World of Texas Football (1972), and Paul Hoch's Rip-Off the Big Game: The Exploitation of Sports by the Power Elite (1972). These Scott-affiliated books were joined by similar works including Chip Oliver's High for the Game (1971) and Bernie Parrish's They Call It a Game (1971).
This raft of publications built on many of the general critiques of sport that Drive, He Said articulated. Meggyesy, a former professional football player, explained his disillusionment with sport by describing himself as “a man in the middle – unable to commit myself to football, but also unable to find a substitute.” Meggyesy recounted coaches discouraging him from befriending “beatniks” and reading “subversive” books like Jack Kerouac's On the Road (1957).Footnote 44 Along these lines, Oliver, another football player who gave up the sport for ideological reasons, imagined a version of athletics that existed apart from despotic coaches and greedy administrators. “I have a vision of a team without coaches, without silly restrictions or rules,” he wrote. “It would be a communal team where the players would live together, eat only the finest natural foods and practice yoga and transcendental meditation. The entire element of control from coaches would be gone.”Footnote 45 Like Hector Bloom, Meggyesy and Oliver were pukey jocks. They did not wish to eradicate sport, but rather to create a more humane and less exploitative version of it. As Scott explained, “The ultimate goal of the athletic movement is to abolish the authoritarian, racist, militaristic nature of contemporary college athletics, not college athletics itself.”Footnote 46 These caustic tomes expanded on Drive, He Said's more general critiques of sport. But they similarly tended to center on white and male perspectives regardless of the many inequities that marginalized communities experienced in sport.
Despite the overwhelmingly negative reviews Drive, He Said received, Nicholson claimed that he was pleased with the film. He was especially proud of what he viewed as Hector Bloom's creation of a new type of jock that anticipated the activist basketball star Bill Walton, who began playing for UCLA shortly after Drive, He Said was released. “I honestly feel that if you wanted to know what was happening from an anthropological point of view at the time, that Drive, He Said is the film you'd have to look at,” he noted by way of differentiating his movie from productions like The Strawberry Statement and RPM.
One of the things I like about it is that the fictional characters in the film came into existence just two or three years after the film was released. I mean, Bill Walton, after all, is a basketball player who doesn't want to play the conventional team heroic game, who had a radical political roommate and influence in college and has behaved in an extremely Bloomesque way.
In a separate interview Nicholson commented,
The film might almost be called The Bill Walton Story. Walton has expressed the very philosophies that Hector Bloom expressed in relation to his professional career. What other films do you know that produced immediately afterwards the archetypes which were only projections when the film was made?Footnote 47
Bill Walton, according to sports historian John Matthew Smith, was “the most controversial white basketball player of his generation.”Footnote 48 Walton was a long-haired, vegetarian, Grateful Dead fan who was outspoken about his antiwar, antiracist, and anticapitalist views. He participated in student demonstrations while starring for UCLA's basketball team, which rankled his traditionalist coach John Wooden. “I want to see the end of wars,” Walton said. “There are some people on this campus who agree and intend to act. I intend to act with them”Footnote 49 At one point, he was arrested for joining students in occupying UCLA's Murphy Hall. “I've been taught all my life to be peaceful and to respect my fellowman,” Walton commented after his arrest. “So, when I see my government annihilate a whole country, I just have to do something about it.”Footnote 50
Like Hector Bloom, Walton was ambivalent about sport, and he did not see basketball as his only pathway to fulfillment or success. “I'm built for basketball and I have the potential to be a top player, but I'm not sure that I want it for a profession,” he told the Boston Globe's Bill Libby. “I think I'd rather be a criminal lawyer and offer a free service to those in the ghettoes who are discriminated against by our society. I could make more of a contribution to mankind that way.”Footnote 51 During his rookie season in the NBA, he briefly considered leaving basketball to start a consciousness-raising league that would travel around the country, play exhibition games, and discuss social issues.Footnote 52 Echoing the scene in Drive, He Said when Hector meets with the executives, Walton was comfortable upending sport's commercialism. But also like Bloom, Walton did not abandon basketball or completely deny himself the benefits that came with it.
As Walton was developing his views he began corresponding with Jack Scott, who sent the ballplayer a copy of The Athletic Revolution.Footnote 53 The simpatico duo became fast friends, and Walton invited Jack and Micki to live at his house in Portland during the 1974–75 season. Scott's role as Walton's politically radical roommate echoed the relationship between Hector and Gabriel in Drive, He Said. Walton even published an impassioned article defending the Scotts, who were under FBI investigation because of their political activities. Beyond supporting the Scotts, the piece articulated Walton's intersecting grievances about Vietnam, imperialism, inequality, and capitalism. At one point, Walton mentioned how sport participates in these troubling circumstances. “Political statements and sports have always been a widely accepted duo so long as they stress the ‘correct’ politics,” he wrote. “We only have to look as far as this year's Academy Award-winning documentary, Hearts and Minds, to determine the relationship of politics and sports in this country.”Footnote 54
An antiwar documentary about America's involvement in Vietnam, Hearts and Minds (dir. Peter David, 1974) was the last film made by BBS before the company folded. Building on Head, Easy Rider, and Drive, He Said, Hearts and Minds weaves sport into its critique of the cultural attitudes that support war. The documentary opens with a scene of former prisoner of war Lieutenant George Coker giving a patriotic speech. Coker explains how the lessons he learned playing high-school sports helped him to survive captivity. Coker is depicted as the ultimate jock: he is a soldier and an athlete. A separate scene from Hearts and Minds shows a preacher from Niles, Ohio delivering an impassioned pep talk to a high-school football team that weaves together sport, religion, and war. The documentary's references to sport compose the only material in Hearts and Minds that is not explicitly war-related. But they continue BBS's established critique of sport's role as a proxy for militarism and conservatism.
Columbia Pictures refused to distribute Hearts and Minds because of the documentary's dissident subject matter, which effectively ended the studio's partnership with BBS and precipitated the small company's dissolution. But Warner Brothers stepped in to distribute Hearts and Minds, which won the Academy Award for best documentary feature. BBS's Hearts and Minds, as the film historian Jon Lewis explains, constituted “a final countercultural gesture from Hollywood's most successful counterculture production unit.”Footnote 55 With Drive, He Said, BBS helped to create a framework through which Bill Walton emerged. With Hearts and Minds, BBS helped Walton to articulate the understanding of sport and politics that was so crucial to his identity as an activist athlete.
BBS Productions contributed to a robust wave of progressive sports criticism that emerged during the early 1970s. In particular, Drive, He Said – perhaps BBS's most obscure and critically reviled film – participated in these discourses by imagining a pukey jock who exists uneasily between the stereotypically traditionalist world of sports and the counterculture. More generally, Drive, He Said and BBS demonstrate how film participated in this interrogation of mainstream sports culture, which extant scholarly commentaries typically attribute to radical critics like Jack Scott and former athletes like Dave Meggyesy. These insights require an interdisciplinary approach that puts sport studies and media studies into dialogue, thus stretching the boundaries of either field but developing generative new connections in the process.
