R.I.P.: Bob Rafelson (The Monkees co-creator)

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Bob Rafelson Dies: Oscar-Nominated Director of ‘Five Easy Pieces’, Co-Creator of ‘The Monkees’ Was 89

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Micky Dolenz Remembers Bob Rafelson

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The Monkees had a love-hate relationship with Rafelson. On the one hand, they were grateful to him and Bert Schneider for the success they had because of them. They were also grateful that when they demanded the right to play on their recordings and choose their own songs, as opposed to Don Kirshner recording songs they didn't necessarily like but told they had no alternative, Rafelson and Schneider chose to side with them. However, Tork always felt Rafelson had other reasons for wanting to get rid of Kirshner, part of which included Kirshner's mishandling of the Monkees as individuals.

Rafelson also ridiculed the Monkees's musical efforts as a band, baiting them continuously by putting down the music they were making while holding up artists whose recordings didn't sell as being better artists. Nesmith later revealed in his biography that Rafelson didn't think much of him as an actor.

And with the criticisms the Monkees were getting from their critics and detractors, it didn't help that some of the criticism was in-house from Rafelson and that his barbs hurt them more than the barbs from the critics who didn't know the full story. As one associate of the Monkees put it, those who didn't know the full story could be forgiven. Those who knew the full story, not so much.

[erik]

It must also be said about Rafelson that he had an important place in Hollywood filmmaking during the 1950's and 1960's. He was part of that generation that totally revolutionized Hollywood as the old studio system was imploding under all the political and social turbulence of those years. This distinguished group included Rafelson; Robert Altman; Sidney Lumet; John Cassavetes; Stanley Kubrick; John Frankenheimer; Arthur Penn; Mike Nichols; Sam Peckinpah, and many others. Many of these guys, if they didn't come from independent or do-it-yourself filmmaking (Kubrick and Cassavetes both did) and broach the studio system, or from the theater (as Penn and Nichols did) ,did so by starting in television, and then graduating to the Big Screen.

So whatever shenanigans may have gone on behind the scenes with respect to Rafelson and The Monkees, he was an important film director of that era.