Five Easy Pieces of four: The title of "Five Easy Pieces" refers not to the women its hero makes along the road, for there are only three, but to a book of piano exercises he owned as a child. The film, one of the best American films, is about the distance between that boy, practicing to become a concert pianist, and the need he feels 20 years later to disguise himself as an oil-field rigger. When we sense the boy, tormented and insecure, trapped inside the adult man, "Five Easy Pieces" becomes a masterpiece of heartbreaking intensity... The movie is joyously alive to
Jack Nicholson as a writer/director. His first real taste of writing success was the screenplay for the 1967 counterculture film "The Trip" (directed by Corman), which starred Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper. After first reading the script, Fonda told Nicholson he was totally impressed by the writing and felt it could become a great film. However, he was disappointed with how the film turned out, and blamed the editing which turned it into a "predictable" film, and said so publicly. "I was livid", he recalls. Nicholson also co-wrote, with Bob Rafelson, the movie "Head", which starred The Monkees. He also arranged the