Last week marked the 50th anniversary of the premiere of Oregon’s most consequential movie, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. The film swept the Oscars, hastened the emptying of mental wards, and burnished the national reputation of Eugene-based author/prankster Ken Kesey (who hated it). Eight months before the movie’s debut, WW correspondent Ken Margolis drove down to Oregon State Hospital in Salem, which had become an unlikely film set.
This story first appeared in the March 17, 1975 edition of WW.
Ken Kesey’s first novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, was an underground book for one summer after its publication in 1962. Now director Milos Forman is filming Cuckoo’s Nest in the Oregon State Hospital in Salem…