Bob Rafelson, who co-created the made-for-TV band the Monkees in the 1960s and helped define the ambitious, boundary-breaking ethos of the New Hollywood, directing Jack Nicholson in “Five Easy Pieces” and producing generational touchstones such as “Easy Rider” and “The Last Picture Show,” died July 23 at his home in Aspen, Colo. He was 89.
He had lung cancer, said his wife, Gabrielle Taurek Rafelson.
Brash and cantankerous, with a self-deprecating sense of humor and an almost obsessive attention to detail, Mr. Rafelson helped forge a new era in American filmmaking, directing and producing movies that appealed to younger, disaffected moviegoers and reflected his interests in European and Japanese cinema.
While his films often lacked the typical ingredients of a Hollywood blockbuster — happy endings, established stars, morally upstanding heroes — they made millions of dollars at the box office and helped propel the careers of actors including Ellen Burstyn, Jeff Bridges, Bruce Dern, Sally Field and Nicholson, whom he directed six times.
“I may have thought I started his career,” Nicholson told Esquire in 2019, laughing, “but I think he started my career.”
Like fellow directors Robert Altman and Francis Ford Coppola, Mr. Rafelson was a Hollywood renegade, battling with studio executives and looking for new ways to work outside the system. He seemed “to approach a film with absolutely no compromise and no sense of personal danger,” Coppola said in an Esquire interview. Another admirer, Wes Anderson, described him as someone who “falls into the almost nonexistent category of the movie director who does whatever he wants.”
He did so in part by co-founding his own production company, Raybert, which evolved into an influential but short-lived company called BBS. He and co-founder Bert Schneider launched the business by creating “The Monkees,” a rock band sitcom that became a smash hit after premiering on NBC in 1966, earning the producers an Emmy Award the next year. They used the show’s proceeds to finance “Easy Rider,” director Dennis Hopper’s 1969 counterculture classic about a pair of hippie bikers and an alcoholic lawyer played by Nicholson.
The film channeled the alienation and discontent of a generation of young people — “You know, this used to be a hell of a good country,” Nicholson’s character says, “I can’t understand what’s gone wrong with it” — and grossed $60 million on a budget of less than $400,000. It led to a six-movie deal between Columbia Pictures and BBS, which soon acquired a four-story office building that became a haven for Hollywood radicals and misfits.
The company went on to produce acclaimed movies including Peter Bogdanovich’s “The Last Picture Show” (1971), a black-and-white exploration of a fading Texas town, and “Hearts and Minds” (1974), an Oscar-winning documentary about the Vietnam War. It also made Mr. Rafelson’s “Five Easy Pieces” (1970) and “The King of Marvin Gardens” (1972), which both starred Nicholson and explored notions of personal freedom and disillusionment.
“In their engagement with the present moment, determination to break free of the movie-industry establishment, commitment to new forms of naturalism, and reckless, movie-intoxicated ambition,” BBS’s movies “embodied the spirit of a New Hollywood,” film critic J. Hoberman wrote in a 2010 essay.
Mr. Rafelson took his time between projects, making 10 theatrical feature films in 34 years, and acquired a reputation for being a volatile, at times prickly, figure on the set. When he felt that executives were stifling his vision or encroaching onto his territory, he could fall into a rage. He once responded to criticism from studio chief Lew Wasserman, the head of Universal Pictures parent company MCA, by trashing the mogul’s office, throwing an award, a family photo and other mementos across the room.
He was later fired from “Brubaker,” a 1980 prison drama, after allegedly assaulting a Twentieth Century-Fox executive. Mr. Rafelson said he grabbed the executive and let him go “a little forcefully,” but denied hitting him. He sued the studio for breach of contract and slander, and won, according to the Los Angeles Times.
“I am very uncomfortable in the world that I live in, and terribly displeased by it,” he told the Times in 1997. “I confront it in rather personal and arduous ways, and do combat with it every day of my life.” He added, “There’s nothing that I have done, there’s no day in my life I can remember, that has been spent entirely legally.”
Mr. Rafelson directed crime thrillers including “The Postman Always Rings Twice” (1981), the second — and steamiest — Hollywood adaptation of a novel by James M. Cain; and shot on location in Kenya for his period adventure film “Mountains of the Moon” (1990), about a pair of British explorers searching for the source of the Nile.
But he remained best known for “Five Easy Pieces,” which starred Nicholson as rebellious oil rigger Bobby Dupea, a former concert pianist who has given up his artistic ambitions and rejected his privileged upbringing. The film stunned audiences when it premiered at the New York Film Festival, landing as “a revelation,” film critic Roger Ebert later recalled.
“This was the direction American movies should take,” he continued: “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.”
The film helped establish Nicholson’s angry but wounded screen persona — in one of the movie’s most famous scenes, he sends plates and glasses flying off a restaurant table after unsuccessfully trying to place an order for toast, which isn’t on the menu — and received four Academy Award nominations, including best actor for Nicholson and best supporting actress for Karen Black, who played his waitress girlfriend.
Mr. Rafelson co-wrote the movie with Carole Eastman (she used the pseudonym Adrien Joyce) and shared Oscar nominations for best picture and best original screenplay. He later acknowledged that the movie was drawn in part from his own life, a fact that was reflected in the name of Nicholson’s character (Bobby) and the clothes he wore on-screen, including a turtleneck sweater that came from Mr. Rafelson’s wardrobe.
Discussing the film with Esquire, Mr. Rafelson grew emotional while recounting the ending, in which Nicholson’s character confronts his dying father and then abandons his pregnant girlfriend, hitchhiking north to the unknown.
“He’s doomed to leave,” Mr. Rafelson said. “He’s doomed to disappear and keep going. He’s doomed to be unsatisfied.”
The younger of two sons, Robert Jay Rafelson was born in Manhattan on Feb. 21, 1933. His father was a hat-ribbon manufacturer, and his mother was a homemaker.
While his father wanted him to go into the family business, Mr. Rafelson saw a different future for himself, inspired by his cousin Samson Raphaelson, a playwright and screenwriter who wrote the source material for “The Jazz Singer,” the first Hollywood talkie, and later worked on “Trouble in Paradise,” “The Shop Around the Corner” and other Ernst Lubitsch comedies.
Mr. Rafelson left home as a teenager and worked as a rodeo rider — he said he broke his coccyx after being thrown from a bull, which he mounted in a brash attempt to win $5 in a bet — and played in a band in Mexico. He later studied philosophy at Dartmouth College, receiving a bachelor’s degree in 1954. He managed to do consulting work for a Japanese film studio during a stint in Japan with the Army.
Returning to the United States in the late 1950s, he worked his way up in television as a story analyst and script editor to associate producer. He and Schneider, whose father was a longtime head of Columbia Pictures, then started Raybert Productions. In 1968, he made his feature-film debut with “Head,” a psychedelic comedy that starred the Monkees and was co-written by Nicholson. The film was savaged by critics, and the band splintered after its release.
Mr. Rafelson moved on to make “Five Easy Pieces” and was also an uncredited producer of French director Jean Eustache’s acclaimed drama “The Mother and the Whore” (1973). He later directed movies including “Stay Hungry” (1976), a comic drama starring Bridges as the scion of a wealthy Southern family, and Black Widow” (1987), a crime thriller with Debra Winger and Theresa Russell.
After making “No Good Deed” (2002), an adaptation of a Dashiell Hammett story, he retired to Aspen to focus on raising his two young sons, E.O. and Harper, from his marriage to Taurek Rafelson.
His first marriage, to production designer and art director Toby Carr Rafelson, ended in divorce. In addition to his wife and their children, all of Aspen, survivors include a son from his first marriage, Peter of Los Angeles. A daughter from that marriage, Julie, died at age 10 in 1973, following injuries from a gas-stove explosion.
While working on his movies, Mr. Rafelson was often consumed by details of authenticity. He said he hitchhiked across the South to immerse himself in the region’s culture for “Stay Hungry,” and prepared for “Brubaker” by spending several nights in a Mississippi prison. For “Five Easy Pieces,” he wanted to determine the precise sound that an ashtray would make rattling in Nicholson’s car during the driving scenes — and recorded the sound of 400 rattling ashtrays before finding one that suited him.
Filmmaking “comes easier to some than it does to others,” he explained, “because most people don’t [care] about the sound of an ashtray.”
