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.
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