Marlon and Elizabeth Taylor

Marlon was pursued by Elizabeth Taylor, but Marlon was reportedly not interested because her ass was supposedly "too small." 

Marlon with family in Tahiti

Marlon tried to escape the excesses and trappings of Western civilization by moving to Tahiti, but those trappings and excesses followed him to the tropical paradise.

"Apocalypse of Marlon Brando"

Coming soon!! "THE APOCALYPSE OF MARLON BRANDO", a book chronicling the on-set conversations between Marlon Brando and Francis Ford Coppola during the filming of Apocalypse Now.

Telluride: Francis Ford Coppola Spills 'Apocalypse Now' Secrets on 35th Anniversary

The following article is from "The Hollywood Reporter" 8/30/14:

Apocalypse Now star Marlon Brando was "like a kid, very irresponsible," said director Francis Ford Coppola at an Aug. 29 Telluride Film Festival panel celebrating the 35th anniversary of his Vietnam War classic, whose $31 million budget — $110 million in 2014 dollars — Coppola had to finance himself at 17 percent interest, which meant that Brando's behavior could have bankrupted him. The panel, hosted by Scott Foundas, featured winners of a dozen Oscars: producer Fred Roos, editor Walter Murch, cinematographer Vittorio Storaro and writer John Milius.

Since Brando — like co-star Dennis Hopper, who shunned showers and reeked from cocaine abuse — couldn't memorize a single line (yet gave an immortal performance), Coppola recorded Brando improvising for five days, typed up Brando's insightful ramblings along with snatches of Heart of Darkness, put the lines on tape and gave the 300-pound actor an earphone, so he could press a button and recite what he heard. "He didn't have a good memory, that's why he'd say, 'Uh... uh...' and push the button," said Coppola.

Like Brando's finale, the film's famous opening was also a desperate improvisation. "I was hanging out with the four or five editors, just goofing off," said Coppola. Another eyewitness (not on the Telluride panel) tells The Hollywood Reporter, "Francis was drunk, desperate, and rummaging around in garbage cans of film saying, 'I've gotta find an opening scene for my movie!' " Said Coppola, "The 'trim' barrels were filled with film you threw away. Garbage, basically, thrown-away film turned upside down and used to space out the sound on the sound track. I reached into a barrel of this film and at random pulled out a piece of film and put it on the Moviola. It was a lot of smoke, occasionally you'd see a helicopter skid go by, just very abstract. For the hell of it, I looked at another bin of trim and one said 'The End,' The Doors music. I said, 'Oh, wouldn't it be funny if we started the movie with 'This is the end' at the beginning?' So that's a case of destiny or just chance that helped make the beginning of the movie."

The opening scene was punctuated with an explosion in the jungle. "That was the biggest practical explosion ever done on film," said editor Murch. "It was the largest, most expensive military film that was made without any cooperation from the government." Added Coppola, "[Then] Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld [who later ignited the Vietnam-like Iraq debacle] categorically refused to allow us [military equipment and personnel]." However, said Murch, "A lot of ex-soldiers [from Vietnam] came to advise us, so in a sense it had a different point of view, rather than the POV of the established military."

Coppola praised Murch for the brilliant segue from the opening explosion scene to one of Martin Sheen drunk in a Saigon hotel room whose ceiling fan rhymed with the helicopter blades in the first scene. "I just made it a fan; Walter ingeniously made it a helicopter," said Coppola. "Francis said, 'The film needs to get crazier and crazier as it goes along, and if you work on it for any time, you become crazier,' " said Murch. "So you have the most normal scene, the beginning, because you haven't worked on it yet. The irony is that the beginning is arguably more crazy than anything else in the film."

To make Sheen's character vivid, Coppola relied on a dream. "I had a dream that somehow the key to getting the actor to disclose all that was in him was his vanity. Because Martin was a low-key person, such a good person, a handsome guy, very open, but you sensed that maybe there was a lot more to him. So I started goading him on his vanity. 'Look at yourself in the mirror, you're so handsome, look at your face, look at how beautiful you are,' " said Coppola. "He started to get really weird. He punched his own image in the mirror, and all this poured out of him."

"Including his blood," said Foundas.

But the gory scene was needed, said Coppola, because Sheen spends the rest of the movie passively watching horrors of war, and the audience had to be inside his mind at the start. "This isn't just an ordinary guy, this is a complicated man who's seen things, has stuff in his soul and heart that isn't easy to understand."

Storaro said he was reluctant to shoot the film, because he made philosophical, psychological films like The Conformist, not war movies. "I said, 'Don't worry, this is not a war movie,' " said Coppola. Storaro realized Apocalypse Now was about the imposition of one civilization on another, which he expressed by using light and darkness, unnatural artificial colors imposed on natural colors. "It was supposed to be like The Guns of Navarone, but all of a sudden it was about colored smoke and all this weirdness," said Coppola. "I knew it was my chance to take all my principles and put it in this incredible fresco that was Apocalypse Now, good and evil, darkness and light, one culture imposing itself on another."

Telluride Film Festival co-founder Tom Luddy noted that it was appropriate that the Apocalypse Now panel and 35th anniversary screening was in the fest's Werner Herzog Theater. "In 1974, I brought Herzog's Aguirre: The Wrath of God to the Pacific Film Archive at Berkeley and screened it for Francis, who used two citations from it in Apocalypse Now." Coppola used homages to Herzog's scenes of a mysterious boat in a tree and a native's spear that goes through a startled conquistador's chest. "I would like to say where this movie came from," said Coppola. "I saw Eugene Jones' 1967 A Face of War, a 16 mm documentary about Vietnam, and that had a profound effect on me. Werner Herzog made Aguirre, and that had a tremendous effect on me."

Marlon on the set of Apocalypse Now

Marlon Brando spent a lot of time with the Ifugao extras on the set of Apocalypse Now, and the indigenous people of the Philippines.  Marlon loved and appreciated their non-Western, simplistic way of life.  They loved Marlon because he was a warm and kind human being, and not necessarily because he was a big Hollywood star.

Anal sex in Last Tango

Last Tango in Paris stars Marlon Brando as a grieving window who loses himself in a passionate anonymous affair with a young French woman - played by Maria Schneider - who is engaged to another man.

There is much nudity in the film but the one scene that caused the most controversy was the one in which Marlon Brando used butter as a lubricant prior to anal sex.

Schneider at the time of the film gave many frank interviews about her colourful sex life and appeared to be unconcerned by the uproar the film created but later on she was to change her stance.

Of the butter scene she is quoted as saying in a Daily Mail interview: "I should have called my agent or had my lawyer come to the set because you can't force someone to do something that isn't in the script, but at the time, I didn't know that. Marlon said to me: 'Maria, don't worry, it's just a movie,' but during the scene, even though what Marlon was doing wasn't real, I was crying real tears. I felt humiliated and to be honest, I felt a little raped, both by Marlon and by Bertolucci [the director]. After the scene, Marlon didn't console me or apologise. Thankfully, there was just one take."

She remained friends with Brando after the film although she admitted they did not speak of the film as Brando too sought to disassociate himself from the movie.

After her death Bertolucci said: "Her death came too soon, before I could hold her again tenderly, and tell her that I felt connected to her as on the first day, and for once, to ask her to forgive me. Maria accused me of having robbed her of her youth and only today am I wondering whether there wasn't some truth to that.”

Brando, Coppola, and the Apocalypse that wasn't

Susan L. Mizruchi

Huffington Post 7/15/14

 It was the late 1970s and one of Hollywood's hottest directors had undertaken an incredible challenge: to make cinematic sense of America's devastating war in Vietnam. The film shoot was wildly out of control: typhoons and cost overruns, a death from an accident on set, and a heart attack suffered by lead actor Martin Sheen. As some tell it, the biggest of all the problems on the terribly vexed set of Apocalypse Now was Marlon Brando.

According to director Francis Ford Coppola, Brando showed up entirely unprepared: he was grossly overweight, had not read Joseph Conrad's The Heart of Darkness (the novel upon which the film was based), and was eager to stall the production to increase his already inflated salary.

Except this is not what happened. Letters between Brando and Coppola, audios of the two discussing the film's conception on a houseboat while filming was suspended, and Brando's personal script, notes, and the many books he read and annotated for the film -- reveal that Brando not only was well prepared for the production, but also contributed ideas and script revisions that shaped the entire film.

Marlon Brando died on July 1, 2004. Now in the aftermath of the tenth anniversary of his death, it is time to acknowledge what has been overlooked: that our foremost American actor had a mind. His curiosity about the world around him was even greater than his more legendary appetites for women and food.

Contrary to Coppola's claim, Brando read Conrad's Heart of Darkness (his 4,000 book library contained multiple editions of the novel). He shaved his head, deliberately, to suit Conrad's description of Colonel Kurtz, Brando's character, as "impressively bald."

Brando's reading to prepare for the film included numerous other books and materials: The Pentagon Papers, writings by anthropologist James Frazer and philosopher Hannah Arendt, T.S. Eliot's "Hollow Men," first-person accounts of the U.S. Vietnam mission, and more.

Coppola recognized how crucial Brando's knowledge was to his film. Writing the actor just before he arrived on set, Coppola admitted that directing the film had become a "nightmare" that he would rely on Brando to get through. "Together we can accomplish anything," he wrote -- "even make a movie about Vietnam."

In fact, Coppola relied on Brando so much that Brando himself -- who had famously remarked that the only people who could write better acting lines were Tennessee Williams and Shakespeare -- became uncomfortable with the authority he was granted. As he wrote to Coppola in a letter, "It's not really my job to be involved in the overall concept of the script."

Regardless of Brando's discomfort, audiotapes of discussions between the two confirm that Coppola drew heavily on Brando's vision of Kurtz, and of the whole film.

Michael Herr, the Vietnam War novelist who revised the screenplay on set, recalled that Brando "wrote a stream of brilliant lines for his character." Even Coppola's biographer, Peter Cowie, notes that Kurtz's domain "houses the core of the film's meaning, and Kurtz's scenes alight unerringly on the reasons for the American predicament in Vietnam."

If Coppola in fact relied heavily on Brando, then why have we been told otherwise? Coppola needed a scapegoat. By then a world-famous director who had won two Academy Awards, Coppola this time was in over his head. As the director later admitted, the film production was akin to its subject -- Vietnam. Instead of focusing on his inability to control the fiasco, Coppola turned on Brando.

The actor was an easy target: deeply idiosyncratic and ambivalent toward fame, he made a point of rejecting his celebrity and exploiting it on behalf of causes he believed in. In 1973, just after Coppola had won an Academy Award for the adapted screenplay of The Godfather, Brando had refused to accept the Best Actor Oscar for his role in the same film. Instead, he sent an Indian emissary -- Apache tribe member Sacheen Littlefeather -- to decline the award to protest Hollywood's denigration of American Indians in film. It was an act that won him praise among activists and aroused contempt in Hollywood.

What better way for Coppola to absolve himself, then, than to focus on Brando? He knew that Hollywood, with its resentments toward Brando, would jump on the story, and he also knew that Brando would not offer a counterargument. In typical fashion, Brando avoided a public slugfest and instead wrote to Coppola privately to express his dismay about the betrayal.

This is not to say that Brando was perfect: as he himself acknowledged, he had many flaws. He did not weigh 300 pounds in Apocalypse Now as some rumors suggested, but at 210 pounds he was still 30 pounds overweight, the result of an overeating habit akin to his family's propensity for alcoholism (his parents and sisters were all alcoholics). More generally, his self-indulgent lifestyle harmed his children and created untold misery for himself and the many women in his life.

But these personal qualities should not detract from Brando's legacy. His success was due not only to looks and talent, but to his extensive preparations for his roles. He was a genius in the minds of those who directed him (Elia Kazan), those who wrote for him (Tennessee Williams), and those in a position to know (Laurence Olivier).

With Brando's 4000-book library, his personal film scripts, his letters, his audio archive -- all available since his death -- we now have the documents to debunk the myths surrounding him, and give America's greatest actor credit for his contribution to the history of film.