Brando_ Songs My Mother Taught Me - Marlon Brando [162]
“I don’t know what’s wrong,” I told Arthur Penn. “I’m having a lot of problems with this part. Be patient with me. I know I’ll get it right sooner or later.”
After a week or so, one of the producers flew to Montana and we had a big scene in my trailer about the unsigned contract. I threw a can of Coke at him and it smashed against a wall a few inches from his head. I missed purposely, pretending to be outraged. He was a fastidious man who couldn’t stand a mess, and he immediately started wiping up the Coke, but when he finished he assured me that there had been a misunderstanding and that the contract would be signed shortly. It was, and suddenly I started remembering my lines again.
In The Freshman a few years later, I played the character who resembled Don Corleone, and Matthew Broderick played a college freshman whom I hired to make some unusual deliveries. I thought it was a funny picture, though it could have been even more comic. When I read the script, I laughed and laughed and couldn’t wait to do it. It was a wonderful satire by Andrew Bergman, who had written an extremely funny movie I liked called The In-Laws, but he decided to direct it, which I think was unfortunate because his inexperience was evident in the way The Freshman was edited; a lot of potential was lost in the cutting room.
About the time we were finishing the picture and I was getting tired after weeks of working long hours, I spoke to a reporter in Toronto, where most of the filming was done, and happened to mention that this might be my last picture and that I was disappointed with it. As it happened, TriStar Pictures at the time owed me about $100,000 for some extra work on the picture. As soon as the story appeared, the studio apologized and paid the money I was owed, and I then issued a press release saying I hadn’t meant what I’d said because I was exhausted after working so hard on the film.
I didn’t always win, however. When Paula Weinstein, a producer, asked me in 1988 to play a lawyer who defends a wrongly accused black man in South Africa in A Dry White Season, I hadn’t made a picture in nine years. Jay Kantor told her that my fee was $3.3 million, plus 11.3 percent of the gross, but she said she had to make the picture on a low budget because studio executives were leery about movies with political themes. The script by Robert Bolt, usually a first-rate screenwriter, wasn’t special, but Paula promised to revise it to satisfy me, and so I volunteered to be in the picture for nothing. I thought the story was effective not only because it demonstrated how blacks were treated under apartheid, but because it gave a white audience an opportunity to experience through the eyes of a white South African how inhumane the policy was.
After I offered to work for nothing, MGM gave the go-ahead and the script was reworked, but never satisfactorily, in my opinion, and I had to rewrite my own scenes. When I went to London for filming, I discovered that the director, Euzhan Palcy, was a headstrong neophyte who was out of her depth, an amateur trying to play hardball. I felt that she offered nothing in the way of direction—no scene conception, no plan of execution—but I did everything I could to get it right.
A couple of months before the film was released, MGM showed me a rough cut of the picture and invited me to propose changes. Donald Sutherland was very good as the South African who discovers the corruption of his country’s judicial system when it is applied to blacks. He is a man caught in a conflict between the traditions and values of his culture and his own sense of morality; he refuses to turn his back on the injustice directed against one of his employees, and becomes ensnared in tragic circumstances that culminate in his losing everything, including his life. But Euzhan Palcy had cut the picture so poorly, I thought, that the inherent drama of this conflict was vague at best. She had also made parts of the picture too transparently polemical; subtlety and sensitivity were needed, not preaching. The result