Marlon Brando

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That excellent Wesley Morris writes for Grantland about the new Brando documentary, Listen to Me Marlon, which uses a digital version of the actor’s head–a decapitation of sorts, as the writer notes–which is an apt metaphor for an actor who spent his later years trying to tear his flesh from fame and the burden of his own talent–a self-induced sparagmos in Greek-tragedy terms, and one that seemed to rob him of his sanity.

Brando created his 3-D doppelganger because he dreamed of completely detaching himself from his work. He was often barely there in his later performances, even great ones–reading cue cards from Robert Duvall’s chest in The Godfather, clearly showing up solely for the paycheck in Superman. As Morris notes, the performer was making a mockery of the process and himself. Was that because his excellence hadn’t made him happy? Or was he a deconstructionist child, breaking to pieces a formerly favorite toy to understand what it had been? Maybe both.

Morris’ opening:

Maybe you’ve already heard, but in the future, actors will all just be holograms that directors will use as they see fit. That’s what Marlon Brando thought, anyway. In the 1980s, he went ahead and made a digital version of his face and head at a place called Cyberware. At the time, it was a state-of-the-art rendering. That 3-D heads haunts Listen to Me Marlon, a documentary by Stevan Riley that opens Wednesday in New York. The film is guided by Brando’s ruminative regret — about his fame, his talent, his worth as a father, about a life he felt he wasted.1 It combines news and on-set footage with material from Brando’s private archive, including the many hours of audio recordings Brando made before he died in 2004. The recordings were attempts at therapy. More than once the movie cuts to the spinning gears of cassette tapes with titles like “Self-Hypnosis #7” and so on.

Listen to Me’s wacky, spiritual power seems to emanate from that floating, rotating, mathematical arrangement of digital lasers that form Brando’s visage, which an effects team has re-created from the Cyberware scans. It’s a ghostly effect, intentionally incomplete — dated but hypnotically so.•

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Only Marlon Brando could lure little people, Samoan wrestlers, Philippe Petit, Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, Whoopi Goldberg, Robin Williams and Michael Jackson to the same acting workshop, and that’s what what he did near the end of his life, presiding over a Fellini-esque 10-day symposium displaying the type of leadership John E. du Pont utilized when coaching wrestlers–though thankfully there were no casualties at the Hollywood warehouse rented for the gathering. Brando agreed to teach the class to make money after abandoning a get-rich-quick scheme earthquake-proofing houses.

Benjamin Svetkey has an eye-popping piece in the Hollywood Reporter about the mad scene. An excerpt:

About 20 young acting students and a dozen established stars — including Sean Penn, Nick Nolte, Edward James Olmos, Whoopi Goldberg and Harry Dean Stanton — had gathered to learn at the feet of the greatest thespian of the 20th century. He didn’t disappoint. When the doors flung open, the 78-year-old Brando appeared wearing a blond wig, blue mascara, a black gown with an orange scarf and a bodice stuffed with gigantic falsies. Waving a single rose in one hand, he sashayed through the warehouse, plunked his 300-pound frame onto a thronelike chair on a makeshift stage and began fussily applying lipstick.

“I am furious! Furious!” Brando told the group in a matronly English accent, launching into an improvised monologue that ended, 10 minutes later, with the actor turning around, lifting his gown and mooning the crowd.

And that, it turned out, would be one of the more decorous moments of “Lying for a Living,” the wild 10-day symposium — as much a 1960s- style “happening” as it was an acting course — that Brando organized and led in November 2002, less than two years before his death. The event is little recalled today — and even back then it slipped mostly under the radar — but those daylong classes, where movie stars mingled with midgets, Madonna’s ex-boyfriend nearly caused a riot and an Osama bin Laden look­alike almost gave Jon Voight a coronary, was a never-to-be-repeated moment of Hollywood letting its freak flag fly.

It also featured some of the strangest, and some would say finest, performances of Brando’s later years.•

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Marlon Brando at a NYC press conference in 1965. Already hating the game but still playing to some extent.

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"Have you ever been analyzed? I was afraid of it at first." (Image by Carl Van Vechten.)

Longform made an incredible find with “The Duke In His Domain,” a 1957 New Yorker profile of Marlon Brando by Truman Capote. The former was already an icon thanks to Streetcar, The Wild One and On the Waterfront; the latter was still roughly a decade from publishing his masterpiece, In Cold Blood. Capote traveled to the set of Sayonara in Tokyo to interview Brando, who was at the start of a long personal decline, still somewhat accessible but increasingly less so. An excerpt:

“The maid had reëntered the star’s room, and Murray, on his way out, almost tripped over the train of her kimono. She put down a bowl of ice and, with a glow, a giggle, an elation that made her little feet, hooflike in their split-toed white socks, lift and lower like a prancing pony’s, announced, ‘Appapie! Tonight on menu appapie.’

Brando groaned. ‘Apple pie. That’s all I need.’ He stretched out on the floor and unbuckled his belt, which dug too deeply into the swell of his stomach. ‘I’m supposed to be on a diet. But the only things I want to eat are apple pie and stuff like that.’ Six weeks earlier, in California, Logan had told him he must trim off ten pounds for his role in Sayonara, and before arriving in Kyoto he had managed to get rid of seven. Since reaching Japan, however, abetted not only by American-type apple pie but by the Japanese cuisine, with its delicious emphasis on the sweetened, the starchy, the fried, he’d regained, then doubled this poundage. Now, loosening his belt still more and thoughtfully massaging his midriff, he scanned the menu, which offered, in English, a wide choice of Western-style dishes, and, after reminding himself ‘I’ve got to lose weight,’ ordered soup, beefsteak with French-fried potatoes, three supplementary vegetables, a side dish of spaghetti, rolls and butter, a bottle of sake, salad, and cheese and crackers.

‘And appapie, Marron?’

He sighed. ‘With ice cream, honey.’

Capote, world-weary in 1959. (Image by Roger Higgins.)

Though Brando is not a teetotaller, his appetite is more frugal when it comes to alcohol. While we were awaiting the dinner, which was to be served to us in the room, he supplied me with a large vodka on the rocks and poured himself the merest courtesy sip. Resuming his position on the floor, he lolled his head against a pillow, drooped his eyelids, then shut them. It was as though he’d dozed off into a disturbing dream; his eyelids twitched, and when he spoke, his voice—an unemotional voice, in a way cultivated and genteel, yet surprisingly adolescent, a voice with a probing, asking, boyish quality—seemed to come from sleepy distances.

‘The last eight, nine years of my life have been a mess,’ he said. ‘Maybe the last two have been a little better. Less rolling in the trough of the wave. Have you ever been analyzed? I was afraid of it at first. Afraid it might destroy the impulses that made me creative, an artist. A sensitive person receives fifty impressions where somebody else may only get seven. Sensitive people are so vulnerable; they’re so easily brutalized and hurt just because they are sensitive. The more sensitive you are, the more certain you are to be brutalized, develop scabs. Never evolve. Never allow yourself to feel anything, because you always feel too much. Analysis helps. It helped me. But still, the last eight, nine years I’ve been pretty mixed up, a mess pretty much.'”

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Dick Cavett interviews a reluctant Brando in 1973. After the show, Brando took Cavett to dinner in Chinatown, and the actor famously punched paparazzo Ron Galella, breaking his jaw. The photographer sued and ultimately agreed to a $40,000 settlement.

Watch the rest of interview here.

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Not a single woman, sadly, but James Baldwin, Marlon Brando, Harry Belafonte, Charlton Heston, Joseph L. Mankiewicz and Sidney Poitier!!! (Thanks Open Culture.)

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Eyebrow gets arched, Brando gets impersonated.

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Marlon Brando refused his Best Actor Oscar for The Godfather at the 1973 awards show, via Sacheen Littlefeather, as some sort of protest in the name of Native Americans. The Academy Awards meant nothing back then, too, but the show was much more fun when there was stuff like this and Cher rocking otherworldly Bob Mackie get-ups.

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Iowa native Carl Van Vechten (1880-1964) was a cultural critic, novelist and photographer, who used his trusty 35mm Leica camera to create portraits of an astounding number of artists. Look at a few below and see more here.

Cab Calloway, 1933.

Agnes de Mille, 1941.

Marlon Brando, 1948.

Harry Belafonte, 1954.

Carson McCullers, 1959.

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