Brando_ Songs My Mother Taught Me - Marlon Brando [161]
After the highest level that actors were able to negotiate reached 10 percent of the producers’ gross receipts—against a minimum, generally $1 million or more—I said to myself, Marlon, you should ask for 11.3 percent of the gross. I had pulled the number out of a hat.
The producers asked, “Why eleven point three?”
“Never mind,” I said, “I have my reasons.”
Usually they paid it, though sometimes they promised to pay and then reneged. When this happened it was necessary to be forceful.
My first picture after Last Tango in Paris was a western, The Missouri Breaks. At the time I was still giving money to the American Indians and spending heavily on Teti’aroa, so I needed the money. It wasn’t a good movie, but I had fun making it. There was a lot of pot smoking and partying, my friend and neighbor Jack Nicholson was in it, and much of the picture was filmed on the Crow Reservation in Montana, where I discovered a beautiful river and a lovely way to relax by floating down the river on an inner tube. At night, when most of the other people went to town, I liked to stay by myself and read in my trailer under a grove of cottonwood trees. One evening I heard a storm approaching in the distance. The clouds overhead were butting heads and putting on a spectacular sound-and-light show. As the horizon darkened, the thunder got louder and the lightning flashes closer. I began counting the seconds between each flash of lightning and clap of thunder, and as the interval shortened, I knew the storm was marching rapidly in my direction. I was tempted to stand outside and watch, but went inside the trailer to avoid being hit by lightning. The intervals got so short that the sound of the thunder and the flash of lightning were almost simultaneous, and then I heard a tremendous explosion right above me. When I got up in the morning, a huge, charred cottonwood branch was lying on the ground near the trailer, looking as if it had been severed by a blowtorch. Another few feet and it would have crushed the trailer with me in it.
Arthur Penn was the director of The Missouri Breaks and he encouraged us to improvise. I rewrote my part and made up a lot of nonsense. I was supposed to play what the script called a “regulator,” a hired gun who went around the West assassinating people, and it was so boring that I decided to make changes. First I played the part as an Englishman, then changed his name and made him an Irishman. I also played him as a gunman disguised as a woman, and invented a wonderful weapon by sharpening the ends of a four-spoked tire-lug wrench: when I threw it, it sailed like a Frisbee and stuck in anything; if I missed with one prong, another would hit the target. In one scene I had to chase a rabbit on a cutting horse, and I kept thinking that if the horse went down I would probably fall on this weapon I was so proud of inventing.
The producers had agreed to pay me my usual fee, but several weeks into the filming, they still hadn’t signed a formal contract. I complained, but they kept making excuses. I knew they were trying to wait me out; after they had enough footage, they’d say their financing had fallen through and that they couldn’t pay me what they’d promised. In situations like this, you can’t always simply walk off a movie. You might not be paid for the work you’ve already done, and a studio can tie you up in court for years while cranking out publicity blaming you for its larceny. But as noted earlier, once filming begins, actors gain an edge over producers, who don’t want to stop because if they do they’ll lose whatever money they’ve already spent and still have no picture. Producers also hate delays because it can cost over $100,000 a day to keep a crew on location. Actors can use these circumstances to their advantage when others try to cheat them, as my experience on The Missouri Breaks demonstrated. After the producers repeatedly broke promises to sign the contract, I started slurring my speech and blowing my lines. If your technique is effective, nobody can prove