Carole Eastman: Rediscovering a Hollywood Maverick

Judging from the total lack of information on screenwriter Adrien Joyce (Carole Eastman), Academy Award nominee for her original story and screenplay of Five Easy Pieces, I could have concluded that she did not exist. – Estelle Changas

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The above quote comes from Changas’s profile of Carole Eastman for the May 2, 1971, issue of the L.A. Times. The story of this talented writer, one of her era’s most enigmatic figures, has gone virtually untold in film history. Best known for writing Five Easy Pieces (1970), Eastman is also notable for having been an intense recluse who wrote nearly all her films under pseudonyms (Adrien Joyce, A. L. Appling) and only ever allowed a handful of pictures of herself to be taken. About as much biographical information about her exists as you would find in an encyclopedia entry. To date, the most detailed source for her existence is Peter Biskind’s book about New Hollywood, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls. Below is the paragraph that introduces her (p. 118-119):

Nicholson prided himself on his eye for talent, and Eastman was one of his discoveries. She broke in as an actress, then turned to writing, making a specialty of working-class characters. She had a great ear for the lilt and humor of blue-collar dialogue. A sensitive soul, nerves very close to the surface, she was striking to look at – tall, blond, rail thin, with a long neck, a skittish bird apt to take flight at the rustle of a leaf. Except that she had a fear of flying. “She wouldn’t step on a plane if you put a gun to her head,” recalls Buck Henry. “She was born to be an eccentric old lady.” Carole was a bit of an agoraphobe, wouldn’t leave Los Angeles, wouldn’t ride in someone else’s car unless she drove. She was phobic about having her picture taken, obsessive about food at the same time that she coughed continuously from chain-smoking. Even in L.A., she rarely went to places with which she was not already familiar. Her sexual orientation was a matter of endless debate; men hit on her all the time, but she never seemed to have a lover, of either sex.

Digging online doesn’t yield much more than this, aside from a few obituaries, quotes from collaborators, and blog posts about her. She receives occasional mention in biographies like Star: The Life and Wild Times of Warren Beatty by Peter Biskind (where several of his anecdotes reappear near-verbatim), Nicholson: A Biography by Marc Eliot, Jack’s Life by Patrick McGilligan, Mike Nichols: A Life by Mark Harris, and Warren Beatty: A Private Man by Suzanne Finstad.

Beyond this, however, it’s difficult to state anything for certain. Everything that’s maybe true about her also maybe isn’t. Or at least, not the way we thought. All details of her life are shrouded in ambiguity. Mainly, the total mystery of her two-decade absence from Hollywood and public life.

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Here’s what we know.

Carole Eastman was born on February 19, 1934 in Glendale, California. She attended Hollywood High, but frequently ditched to attend dance classes (describing herself as a “constant truant”). Her father was a grip at Warner Bros., her mother a longtime secretary for Bing Crosby, and her older brother, Charles K. Eastman, grew up to become a screenwriter in his own right. Carole originally pursued a career as a ballet dancer, but a foot injury ultimately prevented her from continuing on this path, so she pivoted to a career as a model and workaday actress, appearing in small roles on TV shows (Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Untouchables) usually amounting to a few minutes of screentime. Today, these offer some of the only glimpses of her appearance.

Eastman moved in a loose circle of California show business talents who emerged under the imprint of B-movie guru Roger Corman, including future industry heavyweights Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty, Warren Oates, Monte Hellman, and Robert Towne, many of whom subsequently became her professional collaborators. In 1966, her friendship with Nicholson (whom she reportedly met in Jeff Corey’s acting class) led to her first produced script for Monte Hellman’s The Shooting, a trippy western about a mysterious woman who hires three bounty hunters for a revenge plot. It stars Nicholson, Warren Oates, and Millie Perkins. Easily the most fun Eastman script. She gets to show off her slangy, vernacular voice with lines like “I don’t give a curly-haired, yellow-bearded, double-dog damn if you did” and “look what that splain-ape, glanted, spammin’, wind-broke, damned, troop-necked, galled, stumblin’ corn went and stuck me with!”1

Great as the movie is, the studio essentially shelved it. It appeared at a few festivals, but never found an American distributor, and was thus relegated to semi-obscurity, only later resurfacing in syndication on television. However, having now broken into screenwriting, Eastman began cultivating more work. She wrote a handful of episodes of the TV show Run for Your Life and helped rewrite the script for Richard Lester’s Petulia (1968), though her revisions were ultimately unused.

Most notably, she wrote English dialogue for Jacques Demy’s Model Shop (1969). This was the first American feature by a French New Wave director – a bit of a historical landmark – covering a 24-hour period in the life of a guy who needs a hundred dollars to stop his car from being repossessed. After his aspiring actress girlfriend breaks up with him over his lack of ambition, he spends the rest of the day driving around LA, asking acquaintances for money. At one point, he catches sight of a beautiful woman and follows her to her place of employment – a model shop where men pay to take pictures of girls. The film is quite good, but it didn’t make much more of a splash than The Shooting did. Shortly after its release, Demy returned home to his native France.

It wasn’t until 1970, the year Five Easy Pieces was released, that Eastman finally got a taste of mainstream success. Co-written with director Bob Rafelson, the film follows the unresolved wanderings of a drifter named Bobby Dupea, who is pulled between an affluent family of musicians and a blue-collar life as a California oil rigger. The film became a generational touchstone and a classic of the New Hollywood era. It was also the biggest hit Eastman ever had, taking in roughly $18 million at the domestic box office and earning Oscar nominations in four categories – Best Picture (Bob Rafelson and Richard Wechsler), Best Actor (Jack Nicholson), Best Supporting Actress (Karen Black) and Best Original Screenplay (Bob Rafelson and Carole Eastman). Most importantly, it was Jack Nicholson’s first-ever leading role and made him a star.

That same year, Eastman also scripted Puzzle of a Downfall Child, the directorial debut of fashion photographer Jerry Schatzberg, starring Faye Dunaway as a once-famous model who suffers a nervous breakdown, then retreats to a beach cottage on Long Island. The film is virtually unknown today. As of this writing, it’s not available on any major streaming service. Critics at the time attacked it for its plot contrivances, and audiences similarly failed to respond. In one representative early review, Pauline Kael wrote “the title is enough to warn one that this is going to be literary in the worst way” (which she had a lot of nerve saying, considering her favorite movie was called Last Tango in Paris).

In the intervening years between this and her next project, Eastman was quoted, alongside several other prominent women in Hollywood, for a 1972 TIME magazine article titled “Behind the Lens.” Apparently, she’d planned on making her directorial debut soon, but this sadly never materialized. Eastman’s productive ’70s period came to an end with the release of The Fortune (1975), a screwball comedy starring Nicholson and Warren Beatty that sought to replicate the success of a recent string of hit movies about Depression-era con artists and criminals (Bonnie and Clyde, The Sting, Paper Moon). The floodgates of criticism opened wider, and although the film didn’t make a dent in Nicholson and Beatty’s careers, it seems to have made one in Eastman’s (though not everyone blamed her – Time Out wrote that “Adrien Joyce’s much hacked-about script sounds as though it was once excellent: a pity everyone treats it so off-handedly”).

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Nobody seems to be too clear on exactly what happened next, but this period of produced works culminated with Eastman turning her back on fame. For the next 17 years, she more or less vanished. She left the world of show business and didn’t give any interviews or allow herself to be photographed. Most notably, she didn’t make any films. Where she spent all those years holed up or what she did for money isn’t clear. Did the inspiration just dry up? Was she sucked under by economics? Did the studio heads just not want to hire her anymore?

Mysterious stuff, even by Hollywood standards. Even more mysterious is why this period of self-imposed isolation was punctuated in the ’90s when Eastman abruptly re-emerged above-ground and began mounting a comeback. She returned to the press circuit, granting interviews to the L.A. Times in 1991 and Scenario: The Magazine of Screenwriting in 1995, and began easing back into mainstream life. She also, for the first time in her writing career, started using her real name. Collaborating again with Nicholson and Rafelson, she set to work on 1992’s Man Trouble, a rom-com in which Nicholson plays a philandering guard-dog trainer.

The script was originally written in the 1970s, perhaps indicating that Eastman’s years of seclusion didn’t produce a lot of new work. It’s an odd film – in the first minute, an animated sequence featuring a cartoon dog announces that the film is being presented by then-Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi. Like so many others in Eastman’s career, it flopped, receiving largely negative first-run reviews. Eastman herself was vocally dissatisfied with the results. “It seems to me, as to everyone else, that Fox is cutting its losses,” she told the L.A. Times in 1992. “No one wants to be sliced up by the reviewers, but I prefer it to sweeping this under the rug.” She also downplayed the idea that the film was an attempt at falling back on her previous successes. “This was, in no way, intended to be a ‘reunion movie.’ . . . It was much more a case of catch-as-catch-can.”

Eastman died of Epstein-Barr virus on February 13, 2004, at age 69. Her final released work was an HBO film called Running Mates (which I haven’t been able to find). In obituaries, Nicholson referred to her as “one of my oldest and dearest friends” and said she was “hysterically funny. I had more laughs with Carole than just about anybody.” He apparently spoke at her funeral for 20 minutes.

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Biographical information about great artists is always of interest, particularly if they choose to stay out of the spotlight on purpose. An unintended consequence of this is that your elusiveness can actually add to your intrigue and draw even more attention to you (you become famous for not wanting to be famous). Whose life does Eastman’s most resemble, after all, if not Terrence Malick’s? A promising career as a bright, young talent in late ’60s and early ’70s Hollywood, followed by two decades of self-imposed isolation, then a sudden reemergence in the ’90s.

There aren’t many people who are knowledgeable about the Carole Eastman canon, but I got a chance to speak with both Jerry Schatzberg and Eastman’s former agent, Mike Medavoy. Both remembered her fondly, though neither could offer much explanation about why she was so intensely-private or what motivated her decision to step away from Hollywood. “She was so shy that it’s hard to tell what she wanted to do or how she wanted to do it,” Medavoy explained to me.

Secondary scholarship on Eastman’s life is also limited. I was able to draw on only a few retrospectives written about her for online publications like LitHub and the punk website Please Kill Me, one excellent 2014 essay by Nick Pinkerton for Film Comment magazine, a section devoted to her career in the book The Limits of Auteurism by Nicholas Godfrey, and a lengthy chapter in Matthew Spektor’s essay collection Always Crashing the Same Car. The last of these doubles as a personal memoir by the author and an impressive investigative article, probably the most comprehensive attempt to assess Eastman’s career that I’ve seen so far.

Puzzle of a Downfall Child would seem to offer the greatest insight into Eastman’s life’s story. Although the film is based on recordings Schatzberg made with the 1950s model Anne St. Marie when he was a fashion photographer, it’s difficult to overlook the fact that Eastman essentially lived out the plot of the film in real life. She was a model herself who’d appeared in Vogue at one point, then retreated from public life, only later granting a few limited interviews. I asked Schatzberg2 whether he thought Eastman was writing about herself in some sense. “Partially,” he said. “She was very good at picking out characters to write about herself through.”

Perhaps a better question might be, what sort of miserable shape would you have to be in to go from being a professional actress/dancer/model to refusing to let anyone even take your picture? Maybe Eastman just wanted to stop her life from becoming central to audiences’ understanding of the films and to prevent people from looking for meaning in references outside the work itself. Maybe she felt that any reading of this kind was bound to be reductive. Or maybe she just wanted to defend her privacy against nosy journalists like the author of this piece.

Reading about this figure, I always feel a little sad, because I connect with her writing, but I know very little about her. Even someone who enjoys Eastman’s films only casually may feel the itch to learn more, yet in the absence of solid answers and evidence, it’s difficult to do this without turning into a virtual stalker. It can get creepy and intrusive fast. Among the few facts that remain consistent across accounts of her life, Eastman was protective of details about herself, and the people who knew her seem to honor that protectiveness, so in trying to be gracious, maybe it’s best to leave these stones unturned.

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What we’re left with, in the end, is her work. Although we don’t know much about her writing process, a number of Eastman’s collaborators have remarked on the pace at which she wrote scripts. “She took her time,” Medavoy told me. “She wasn’t somebody who would just sit down and you’d have it in three months, which is usually what it takes. But people admired her writing, so they would wait.” Nicholson reportedly nicknamed Eastman “speed,” because of her tendency to languish over scripts and overwrite them. She apparently turned in a 240-page first draft with no third act for The Fortune and a 300-page draft of the script for Puzzle of a Downfall Child.

Stylistically, Eastman’s movies have their own peculiar rhythm and logic. They resist a simple narrative progression from A to B. Critics often praised her ear for dialogue, but her friends and collaborators seem more interested in highlighting her sense of humor. And indeed, her scripts are littered with jokes and visual gags – Jack Nicholson standing up after sex to reveal a Triumph motorcycle T-shirt or Faye Dunaway enduring a torturous photoshoot with a falcon, only to end up with her elbow on the cover of Vogue. Other features of Eastman’s writing include cowboy motifs; troubled, inscrutable protagonists; narrative ellipses and existential themes. It’s also worth noting that she wrote only original screenplays (no literary adaptations).

According to Marc Eliot in Nicholson: A Biography, Eastman’s pseudonym (Adrien Joyce) was a nod to “her literary hero, James Joyce,” and Peter Biskind wrote in Easy Riders, Raging Bulls that she “regarded herself as a Virginia Woolf.” The invocation of these authors, the two foremost figures of modernist literature, gives perhaps the strongest clue about her creative approach. Literary modernism was a late 19th-century and early 20th-century movement based around demolishing the traditional architecture of the novel to create fragmented narratives that prioritized subjective, individual experience over objective reality. The focus was on intricate psychological depth, avoiding generic resolutions and portraying a more sharply drawn psychological complexity. Thematically, these works also tended to reflect disillusionment with religion, morality, and traditional values.

The modernists insisted on the power of ambiguity, and Eastman seems to have internalized this lesson as well. In her 1995 interview with Scenario, she explained:

As to intentions or trying to impart anything to the world, the plain fact is, I don’t always know what I’m doing other than feeling my way as l go. I mean, writing is sometimes like going around poking at lifeless things to see if they move. At least for me. Other times, it’s like digging to China, while simultaneously trying to reduce in oneself the sense of any enormous undertaking or burdensome obligation of really having to get there.

Eastman aimed for the kind of innovations achieved by these writers, and in Five Easy Pieces, she succeeded. She subtly showed Bobby’s development throughout a suggestive narrative, where each time the film seems to move toward a more traditional novelistic development, in which Bobby finally accepts the values of love and family, almost the exact opposite happens. The story turns on tiny, sudden alterations of mood. Events seem almost unconnected or very loosely connected. It’s this lyrical quality that makes it so indirect and evocative.

The film climaxes with a heartbreaking monologue delivered by Nicholson to his mute, wheelchair-bound father. It’s one of the most emotionally devastating things I’ve ever seen on-screen, a perfect summation of Bobby’s hopelessness, his recognition of his own failures, and his longing to be a different person. Like Hamlet, he’s a character defined by hesitation and avoidance, yet he’s painfully articulate in this brief moment of soul-baring, and Nicholson delivers the speech with an impassioned restraint that makes it all the more convincing.

I don’t know if you’d be particularly interested in hearing anything about me. My life, I mean. Most of it doesn’t add up to much that I could relate as a way of life that you’d approve of. . . . I move around a lot. Not because I’m looking for anything really, but because I’m getting away from things that get bad if I stay. Auspicious beginnings, you know what I mean. . . . I’m trying to imagine your half of this conversation. My feeling is, I don’t know that, if you could talk, we wouldn’t be talking. That’s pretty much the way that it got to be before I left. . . . Are you all right? I don’t know what to say. . . . Tita suggested that we try to, I don’t know. . . . I think that she feels that we’ve got some understanding to reach. She totally denies the fact that we were never that comfortable with one another to begin with. The best that I can do is apologize. We both know that I was never really that good at it anyway. I’m sorry it didn’t work out.

The film is at its most honest when it admits that these things are too much for Bobby, that he’s not going to change or get better, and that in the end, his bad choices are the ones that most define him. Yet it views him with such intense empathy that it almost overwhelms his selfish abrasiveness. It’s easy to miss just how close to the edge he is. In the original shooting draft, Bobby drives into a lake at the end with Rayette in the passenger seat and he dies, but she survives.

Five Easy Pieces is Eastman’s requisite entry into the American film canon, but if there’s one work of hers that seems destined for a reappraisal, it’s Puzzle of a Downfall Child. Although it isn’t surprising that the movie frustrated or confused a lot of viewers at the time, in my view, its structural audacity and unreliable narrator are a successful choice to reflect how the world of modeling makes people self-conscious, how people get taken advantage of, and how this kind of abuse can create a divided psyche. It’s an experimental work of writing, a portrait of mental disintegration in which Eastman plays around with time and structure, telling the story a-linearly through a series of interwoven flashbacks. It can often be hard to decipher whether certain episodes take place in the past, present, or future, or are products of the main character’s imagination. Is this pretentious? Overwrought? Yes, but it’s also an effective way of depicting the psychic and symbolic landscape of a troubled person, which was Eastman’s specialty.

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The list of legends who’ve expressed admiration for Eastman’s work doubles as a who’s who of the last 50 years of American film. Roger Ebert named Five Easy Pieces the best movie of 1970 and later added it to his “Great Movies” collection. In his review, he wrote “the film’s greatest influence came through the screenplay, by Rafelson and Carole Eastman; it allowed detours and digressions, cared more about behavior than plot, ended in a way and tone that could not have been guessed from its beginning” and had “the complexity, the nuance, the depth, of the best fiction.”

In 2023, Greta Gerwig cited Model Shop as an influence on Barbie, and a few years earlier, Quentin Tarantino called it a major influence on Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood (2019). Tarantino also named Five Easy Pieces one of the best movies of the ’70s and (along with filmmakers Martin Scorsese and Jim Jarmusch) has listed The Shooting as one of his favorite westerns. Additionally, both of the Coen Brothers put The Fortune in their top five favorite movies of all time (Joel actually listed it as his number one), and in their 2007 TIME magazine conversation with Cormac McCarthy, Joel called Five Easy Pieces “fantastic.” McCarthy also mentioned liking Five Easy Pieces, one of the rare instances where he commented on contemporary films, and it’s difficult to think of a literary icon who could have offered a more prestigious endorsement.

Each of these is a work of genuine distinction. The Shooting, in particular, gave birth to an entire subgenre – it’s usually considered the first example of the “Acid Western,” predating El Topo, Dead Man, Rudy Wurlitzer, and Blood Meridian. That Eastman’s films produced so many offshoots and that so many of the contemporary greats of the film world bear her influence is proof of her enduring impact. She had a tragically terminated career, and she produced a small body of work, but she should be recognized for the pivotal figure she is – a true original and one of the most important American screenwriters. “Her work, by those who knew writing, was always highly regarded,” Medavoy explained. “She was clever, smart, did some great work, very original. . . . She was kind of an enigma. You didn’t know a lot about her, but she was very talented.”

“I absolutely believe that she’s been overlooked,” Schatzberg told me. “Working with Carole was one of the great experiences in my career.” When I asked how he would like people to remember her, he said, “as a brilliant student of whatever she was involved with. She was very kind, generous and had a very strong sense of humor. I’m very happy someone is finally recognizing her and writing about her.”

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Unlesss otherwise noted, all images are screenshots or public domain images.