Excerpt from: Jack on Jack: In a candid Q&A, the larger-than-life star of ''About Schmidt'' tells how he took on a 'small' roll and started acting his age. No fooling. (Interview with Jack Nicholson)
by Benjamin Svetkey?
There's a big bowl filled with ripped-up money sitting on Jack Nicholson's coffee table. Mostly it's shredded $1 bills, but dig around and you'll find a couple of torn 10s and 20s and even a crumpled piece of an old 50. "I have a long story about that," Nicholson offers, arching one eyebrow so high it practically qualifies as a hairstyle. "But I only tell it to people who rip up their money and put it in."
(...)
EW: [Ripping up a $5 bill] Okay, what's the story with the bowl of money?
NICHOLSON: One night years ago I was here with my friends Harry Dean Stanton? and the author Richard Brautigan [Trout Fishing in America]. We were talking about a project we were going to do with [director] Hal Ashby? at the time. Now, Richard had this literary thing going. He keeps saying how he doesn't care about money and how Hollywood is for whores. And after we had been imbibing for a while and admiring the art collection, he takes out two $50 bills and tears them up and throws them at the fireplace.
Well, the next morning, I find some of the torn 50s on the floor and I just mindlessly put them into this thing here. It's some sort of candy dish but everybody always used it as an ashtray. For some reason, though, after I put the 50s in there, nobody used it as an ashtray ever again. Instead, people would always ask me about it — what's with the torn money in the dish? And I started to realize that I was creating a work of art. It was sculpture, as much as that Salvador Dali piece over there. In fact, of all the things that are in this room - the Picassos, the Francis Bacon, the Magritte — this bowl of money is the one piece of art that always draws the most comments and attention.
EW: So, how much do you suppose it's worth?
NICHOLSON: I don't know. I haven't counted it in a while. How much did you put in?
Entertainment Weekly?
January 3, 2003