Betty White Rejected Jack Nicholson Hit Due to Disturbing Scene

If you wanted to work with the great Betty White at some point in her extraordinary 70+ year career, the best thing you could do was offer her a television job. Beginning with the talk show “Hollywood on Television” in 1949, White made the small screen and America’s living rooms his home through sitcoms, game shows and appearances on late-night shows such as “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson”. White was a charming presence with killer comedic timing, his secret weapon being that kooky personality that often brimmed with surprisingly fiery wit. You never knew what was going to come out of White’s mouth, and that made her one of the most unlikely stars in the medium (although her presence was once poison for “Bones” ratings).

This is not to say that White didn’t make movies. Her first credited appearance didn’t come until 1962, when she played a U.S. senator from Kansas in Otto Preminger’s fantastic film “Advise and Consent.” He would not return to on-screen filmmaking until the 1998 action film “Hard Rain,” at which point he began working more frequently in feature films, usually in smaller supporting roles.

Interestingly, there was an offer on the table for her to return to film earlier in a high-profile Jack Nicholson comedy, but she turned it down for a rather confusing reason.

During one of his many appearances on “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno,” White revealed that he had been offered a role in James L. Brooks’ Oscar-winning film “As Good as It Gets.” This would have brought her back to the movies two years before “Hard Rain,” but it was not due to White’s objection to a mean-spirited joke in the script. As White told Leno, “They had a cute dog, but in one scene the guy goes down the hallway and throws the dog down the garbage chute.”

What was White’s specific problem with this joke? “Of course it falls on some cushions and it’s fine,” he said. “But I didn’t want to set that example, because you never know what crazy people or kids will see it and think I can do that. The director said, ‘The dog is fine, the dog is fine!’ But I said, ‘I just don’t I can do that.'”

White acknowledged that he might have made a professional mistake by turning down a hit, but he had no regrets. And this shouldn’t be a surprise because White was a well-known supporter of the Los Angeles Zoo and the American Humane Society. Even a silly, seemingly harmless part like the garbage dump scene in “As Good as It Gets” was rejected by White.