Eugene veteran filmmaker Katherine K’iya Wilson still remembers a private screening of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” she attended at Salem’s Elsinore Theatre in December 1975.

The film’s director, Miloš Forman, producers Saul Zaentz and Michael Douglas, and actor Jack Nicholson were visibly worried that their work might offend the audience: patients and staff of the Oregon State Hospital.

When the film ended, there was a five-minute silence, said Wilson, 74, who has family ties to the Nez Perce Wallowa Band. Then something unexpected happened.

“Finally, they had a [hospital] spokesperson coming out in tears to tell the filmmakers what a beautiful film it was, and they [the audience] felt that was gonna change the world because they were being depicted as human beings — their identity was not of being disabled or mentally unstable,” Wilson said.

“Cuckoo’s Nest” was first released in the U.S. on Nov. 19, 1975, and won all five major Academy Awards the following year. Based on the 1962 novel by Oregon writer Ken Kesey, it tells the story of a struggle against authoritarian control, embodied in the clash between free-spirited patient Randle McMurphy and Nurse Ratched, the tyrannical head nurse of an Oregon psychiatric hospital.

At the time, Wilson was a University of Oregon student serving as liaison officer to Govs. Tom McCall and Bob Straub, coordinating between the state, hospital and production crew while filming took place at the Oregon State Hospital and Depoe Bay from January to April 1975.

Wilson fondly recalls Nicholson’s playfulness on the set. Some props — including the wooden bench where he sat while portraying McMurphy — are now part of a permanent “Cuckoo’s Nest” exhibit at the Oregon State Hospital Museum of Mental Health.

Life-changing experience for patients

Built in 1883, the Oregon State Hospital is the state’s oldest psychiatric institution still in operation. It was once notorious for controversial treatments such as electroconvulsive therapy, lobotomies and hydrotherapy.

Parts of the original building were demolished during its 2013 reconstruction, while the remaining sections were renovated and now house the museum.

The hospital was also the childhood home of Dennie Brooks, daughter of the late Dr. Dean Brooks, the hospital’s former superintendent, who supported the film project.

Brooks, 82, recalls when Zaentz visited Salem in 1974 to scout locations, he asked her to serve as location coordinator for the crew, patients and staff.

“I found it odd and said, ‘You don’t have to hire the boss’ daughter to do this.’ He said, ‘No, you don’t understand. I know movies and I know the film business … The focus is to be on telling an important story, but … doing it at the hospital in a way that does not denigrate or abuse the patients that are there and the staff and the facility,’” she recalled.

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Brooks oversaw the screening process to ensure patients consented to work and be filmed. She said many patients told her the experience was life-changing. The production also broke traditional hospital hierarchies: Some patients played doctors or nurses, while real staff appeared as patients in background scenes.

Despite local enthusiasm, the film drew heavy criticism from the national psychiatric community after its release. Some psychiatrists accused Dr. Brooks of allowing a portrayal that was “venal” and “anti-psychiatric,” but he argued that “Cuckoo’s Nest” is fiction that reveals universal truths and shouldn’t be viewed as a documentary in a mental hospital.

Chief Bromden’s voice

After the Museum of Mental Health opened in 2012, Dennie Brooks and Salem-based behavioral health clinician Cynthia Prater created “Project Bromden,” an educational outreach program inspired by Chief Bromden, the half–Native American patient who appears deaf and mute in the film.

Held weekly, the program invites high school and college students and their teachers to explore Native American mental health topics — including boarding schools, forced relocation and intergenerational trauma — challenges that someone like Chief Bromden and his family might have faced.

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Prater is a member of the Cherokee Nation whose ancestors walked the Trail of Tears. During her two decades at Oregon State Hospital, she noticed that Native Americans were overrepresented among patients. Many, like Chief Bromden, chose not to speak, which she interprets as reclaiming power in a system that has historically silenced Indigenous voices.

Prater connects Project Bromden to truth, reconciliation and justice. “Let’s talk about the truth about what’s going on, and then once the truth is out there, we can look for justice and we can offer forgiveness,” she said.

Wilson says she felt torn when the filmmakers shifted the story’s focus from Chief Bromden — the novel’s narrator — to McMurphy, a white man. The decision, she says, stemmed from their belief that studios and distributors in the 1970s would not back a film told from an Indigenous perspective.

Still, Wilson sees hope in a “Cuckoo’s Nest” television adaptation now in development by Paul Zaentz, nephew of the late Saul Zaentz, which plans to restore Chief Bromden’s point of view.

“To me that feels like a healing, to honor Ken [Kesey],” she said. “I think that’s so beautiful.”

On Dec. 6 at 5 p.m., Wilson will host a 50th anniversary screening of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and a panel on Indigenous representation in film — featuring Brooks, Prater and special celebrity guests — at Eugene’s Art House theater.

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2025/11/19/cuckoos-nest-film-release-50-anniversary/