(Originally published at Hollywood Elsewhere, March 2004)
MILLER’S GHOST
By
Rodger Jacobs
“You stumbling and reeling through the streets like some broken thing, hearing people laugh at you, breaks my … you were such a gifted boy.”
With those twenty-four simple but powerful words from his 1972 Pulitzer Prize winning play “That Championship Season” Jason Miller prophesied the sad arc his own life, both personal and professional, would take.
“He’s quite fascinating,” film journalist and author David Ehrenstein (“The Scorsese Picture: The Art and Life of Martin Scorsese”) remarked to me when I told him about my new play based on Miller’s turbulent but very private life. “You don’t find too many people who flame out two careers at once.”
I have been haunted by Jason Miller for fourteen years, since the first day I met him in early 1990 when I was a stage manager at Hollywood Center Studios – formerly the ill-fated Zoetrope Studios – where William Peter Blatty was hastily shooting new footage for “Exorcist 3” to include Miller’s character of Father Damien Karras at the studio’s insistence.
Until the day I encountered Miller I had only read about – and foolishly admired – dissipated, hard-drinking writers. Seeing the real deal up close and personal was another matter entirely. He had eleven more years of life ahead of him but there was already a look of whipped misery in his eyes. There was a rumor floating around the production unit that Blatty had to fly to Miller’s hometown of Scranton, Pennsylvania, sober him up from a drunken binge, and escort the brilliant playwright and actor to the set for the short but hellish shoot.
On the set Jason and I spoke on brief occasions about his passion for Notre Dame football, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway.
And I have been haunted ever since.
“I’m not surprised he haunts you,” distinguished character actor John Mahon (“L.A. Confidential”) and life long Miller friend told me via e-mail. “He would have that effect.”
When I urged Mahon to divulge more, to explain in greater detail why my abbreviated encounter with this dissipated genius left such a scar on my psyche, he simply fell silent and the e-mail dialogue ceased.
As of this writing, it has been six weeks since John Mahon contacted me in response to my posting on the Craig’s List online forum looking for friends, acquaintances, and co-stars of Miller’s as research for the play, “Go Irish: The Purgatory Diaries of Jason Miller.”
“Miller and I went to school (University of Scranton) together in the 50s,” Mahon wrote me in early September. “We did plays while in school. In 1965 he came to New York City and moved in with me. We worked as bus boys together in the Met Museum, worked as welfare workers together, did plays in NYC for years together. I directed ‘Championship Season’ with Broderick Crawford three times. In 1976, Miller and I roomed together until 1981 … we then parted ways.”
“I know Jack Miller probably as much as anyone ever knew him,” Mahon wrote in closing. “The problem is I know too much.”
Friends knew Jason Miller as “Jack” or “Jackie.” He was born John Anthony Miller in Long Island City, N.Y., the son of John A. and Mary Collins Miller. He later took the name Jason because he “always liked that story in mythology.”
When Miller, an only child, was still a baby the family moved to the predominantly Irish Catholic anthracite mining town of Scranton, PA. Scranton would remain home to Miller his whole life, as beloved as his Notre Dame Fighting Irish.
Miller was a standout basketball player at West Scranton’s St. Patrick’s High School, an experience he would draw upon for “That Championship Season”, a bleak and intense drama that used the occasion of the twentieth reunion of the Pennsylvania Champion high school basketball team at the home of their coach as a catalyst to explore the hopelessly fleeting nature of fame, pride, and youth.
“I’m writing in ‘Championship’ about men going into their middle age with a sense of terror and defeat,” Miller wrote for the dust jacket of the Antheum Press release of his play. “They’re desperately holding on to their youth. The only thing that holds them together is the memory of when they were together. The play is a rite of passage. Every man is looking for his father. The best I could do with these people was to admit their mystery … They’ll be back next year for another reunion. They’ll come back to live out their myths.”
His own myth began in May, 1972, at the New York Shakespeare Public Theatre when “That Championship Season” opened under the guiding hand of legendary Broadway producer Joe Papp. Two years prior the struggling stage actor and playwright – who earned a master’s degree in drama from Catholic University – had two original works produced off-Brodaway, “The Circus Theatre”, a series of one-act plays, and a full-length play, “Nobody Hears a Broken Drum.” In 1963 he married Linda Mae Gleason, daughter of actor and comedian Jackie Gleason. He worked a series of odd jobs while pursuing his career.
In September, 1972, “That Championship Season” moved uptown to Broadway and was awarded the New York Drama Critics’ Award for Best Play and the Outer Circle Critics’ Award.
1973 saw Jason Miller’s golden year, the championship season of his own. He was awarded the Tony for Best Play and the Pulitzer Prize. His film debut as troubled Jesuit priest Father Karras in the Warner Bros. release “The Exorcist” garnered Miller a Best Supporting Actor nomination at the 1973 Academy Awards (He lost to John Houseman in “The Paper Chase.”)
And then the party was over. 
“Jason was a complex individual, haunted by demons, real and imagined,” wrote Joseph Flannery in the Scranton Times-Tribune one week after Miller died in May 2001 from a massive heart attack while reading the Sunday papers and enjoying brunch with his girlfriend Dana in a Scranton pub.
Flannery enjoyed a decades-long friendship with Miller and – unlike other locals who have now lionized him beyond comprehension, refusing to admit post-mortem that a curse had fallen over his head – he has no qualms about speaking the truth.
“No doubt, he was a genius with words who should have been enshrined in the Pantheon of the greatest American playwrights, but he drank too much, much like some of his heroes: actor John Barrymore, the subject of one of his plays (“Barrymore’s Ghost”); novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald, whom he played in a television drama (“F. Scott Fitzgerald in Hollywood”), and author Ernest Hemingway, all of whom liked their liquor.”
When I partnered with Pennsylvania playwright and song writer Tom Flannery, the son of Joseph Flannery, to bring Jason Miller, the man and the myth, to life in a one-man show Tom was met with great resistance from old friends of Jason’s in Scranton.
“If you weren’t Joseph Flannery’s son I’d hang up the phone right now,” one Miller confidant told Tom when he called seeking information about Scranton’s beloved, Pulitzer Prize winning son. The year before Miller died, he staged a production of Tom Flannery’s original play “The Driveway” at the Scranton Public Theatre where Miller served as the artistic director.
“Jason’s drinking was overblown,” said another. “He just had a low tolerance for beer. He didn’t have a backyard and a family, so what else was a poor lonely Irish Jesuit supposed to do with his time after dinner anyway?”
Jason bonded better with “ordinary people”, says Joseph Flannery. That’s why he returned to Scranton in the early 1980s and never returned to Hollywood except for brief excursions. When Paul Sorvino and Gary Sinise bought the film rights to “That Championship Season” in 1999 (Miller directed his own version for Golan-Globus in 1982 – the less said about that disastrous voyage the better) Miller refused to come to Hollywood, sending the pages of his screenplay adaptation via fax machine.
At the time of his death at the age of 62, Miller was writing a screenplay for Showtime about his former father-in-law, Jackie Gleason. But no matter what he did he would always be Father Karras from “The Exorcist” and the hometown hero who won a slew of trophies for his brilliant dramatic skills.
Miller was an intensely private person, an element of the man that one of his sons, actor Jason Patric, confessed once to admiring. You can count on one hand the number of times Patric has spoken of his famous father in interviews. Like a lot of areas of Jason Miller’s life one is left to speculate.
With “Go Irish: The Purgatory Diaries of Jason Miller” I would like to think that I have exorcised the man from my life but now Tom Flannery and I begin the process of finding an actor equal to the task of bringing this dynamic and sadly pathetic man to life on the stage.
It won’t be an easy task. There was only one Jason Miller.
I don’t know how the hell this flew under my radar, but my play (with Tom Flannery), Go Irish: The Purgatory Diaries of Jason Miller, received a rave review from veteran theater director and critic Jack Shaw in the March 19 issue of Stage magazine.
