Just saw About Schmidt last night. Jack Nicholson carries the film with his wonderful performance. It’s all about Schmidt… as it should be. What a welcome sight, the end of the film. It’s very Catholic, you know. A lost man is redeemed by one simple act of charity out of his own free will and not at the point of a government gun or an IRS summons.

I thought I was watching a typically French auteur assault on American bourgeois life… it’s a comic Death of a Salesman. No, About Schmidt uses "socialist realism," that formula Joseph Stalin shoved down the throats of Russian poets, playwrights and composers, a style which, when imported from Moscow to America by the Group Theatre, became the obligatory sign of revolutionary artistry. However, About Schmidt ends with the exquisite voice of a French Catholic nun, a missionary to Africa.

There is an X-Factor in Jack Nicholson that proves to me he is the real inheritor of the John Wayne legacy, and not Clint Eastwood. Wayne’s repeated demand for individual freedom under a Republic marked Nicholson’s career. No one can know where Nicholson is going next. A healthy human being is never predictable. So, I guess that makes Nicholson the healthiest soul in Hollywood.

He inherited the throne of the most powerful performing artist in human history… yes, Marlon Brando – the icon of the Third World and the restless ones in America. Nicholson became all the American rebels rolled into one. He’s on a par with Frank Sinatra in terms of defining what American manhood is all about.

Warren Beatty and the rest of Red Hollywood all assumed that Nicholson was on their side. But Nicholson listens to his own distant drummer.

The X-Factor….the eight ball…yes, I love pool. There is no better metaphor for life than that rainbow set of pool balls racked on the table. No one can know where those balls will go. The most expert pool shark can’t know what that eight ball is really going to do. Nicholson was always an eight ball kind of guy.

I’m an eight ball of sorts. Everyone will attest to that, whether friend or foe. I see America as what Wayne kept reminding us of. We are a nation built on all the walking-wounded individuals of the earth. Feisty in our individual freedom or, as Nicholson’s character Billy "Bad Ass" Buddusky says in The Last Detail: "Don’t you just sometimes wanna go bullgoose looney?"

Vote for me in 2008. I’ll most likely be on one state ballot only but "big oaks from little acorns grow."

I now await Nicholson’s call, anticipating his generous offer of financial support for my campaign.

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