ACTORS




Brando's Comments Draw Fire, Support; Jews Should Lead the Call for Diversity
By Jordan Elgrably. Counterpunch. Los Angeles Times  Apr 22, 1996. pg. 3

Morning Report (Calendar, April 8) referred to Marlon Brando's now-familiar remarks on "Larry King Live" about Jewish filmmakers in Hollywood. Apparently Brando was referring to ethnic stereotyping and a lack of diversity for nonwhite film roles. His remarks offended the Jewish Defense League and other sectors of the Jewish community.

As a Sephardic Jew who is in fact a minority within the larger Jewish community itself, I tend to agree with Brando's criticism. During our recent Passover celebrations, Jews were reminded of our ancient slavery in Egypt, and we were urged to fight for social justice and equality for all peoples. While it's difficult to expect modern-day Jews to feel much outrage at the fact that we were slaves more than 3,000 years ago, our experience with pogroms, the Holocaust and anti-Semitism is fresh enough that you would expect Jews to take a leadership role in fighting for multicultural equality.

But the fact remains that Jewish power brokers in Hollywood have paid scant attention to the history of other minorities. And when you look at films that have focused on the Jewish people themselves, rarely do you encounter stories about the Sephardim — Jews from southern Europe, Latin America, North Africa and the Middle East.

Indeed, Jews in the entertainment industry have displayed a remarkable lack of awareness of their own Semitic origins. One result of this narrow, Eurocentric worldview is their conspicuous insensitivity to Arabs, who have almost always been stereotyped as fedayeen, sheiks or terrorists, leaving by the wayside the great contributions Arab culture has made to world history.

That Jewish filmmakers have ignored much of their own history in part explains why they have not explored with greater intellectual integrity the stories of other non-Europeans.

Much of the history of Jews in Hollywood has been one of assimilation and embarrassment. That is, in an effort not to bring attention to themselves, Jews have traditionally changed their names and kept their religious and cultural activities to themselves.

Hollywood has followed a similar pattern in the casting of films.

Cecil B. DeMille hired the fair-skinned Charlton Heston to portray Moses. That Moses lived in the Middle East and was likely swarthy didn't seem to play into DeMille's concern for historical veracity. This kind of racial, religious and cultural dishonesty continues to this day, which is why we recently saw Richard Harris play Abraham in a TV movie and why Ben Kingsley appeared as Moses.

It's time that Jews in Hollywood started taking responsibility for portraying the lives and history of all peoples with greater integrity and respect for the truth. It's also time to end racial and cultural stereotyping. Because of their own experience with oppression and discrimination, Jews are well qualified to lead the fight for social and economic justice.

Those in positions of power in the entertainment industry can start by looking further than the bottom line. And besides, as screenwriter William Goldman famously observed, no one in Hollywood knows anything. Who's to say that films with a non-Eurocentric point of view won't make money at the box office?

BRANDO ON BRANDO
By Jordan Elgrably. EGM. Nov. 1, 1994

Marlon Brando has been famous since 1947, when he first starred in "A Streetcar Named Desire" on Broadway. More books have been written about him than anyone of his generation. An actor who influenced all who came after him, from James Dean to Jack Nicholson to Robert De Niro, Brando's screen heroes have been called "tragically inarticulate," yet it was precisely this inability to articulate what was wrong with the world that has endeared Brando to the millions who watched him over the years.

Never a great talker but a mumbler, a brooder, an emotional rebel, it came as a surprise to some when Brando was finally persuaded, after five decades in show business, to produce a book about himself. His new autobiography, written with New York Times reporter Robert Lindsey, is called Brando, Songs My Mother Taught Me and appeared this autumn just when Peter Manso's new book, Brando: The Biography was published by a rival New York house. At the age of 70, Brando looks back at the things that have been said about him, and writes with vitriol: "I have heard so many lies told about myself that I no longer believe what people say about others." About his agreement to write about himself, he reveals in all honesty: "I'm writing this book for the money because Harry Evans of Random House offered it to me. He said that if his company published a book about a movie star, the profits would enable him to publish books by talented unpublished authors that might not make money...Harry is a hooker just like me."

In the land of artifice that is Hollywood, many actors and even writers, directors and producers change their names to make themselves more commercially appealing. Thus Marion Morrison became John Wayne, Issur Danielovitch became Kirk Douglas, Margarita Carmen Cansino became Rita Hayworth and Allen Konigsberg became Woody Allen. But Marlon Brando's name––which has a fake yet lucky ring to it––is real and unchanged. Brando has inhabited our consciousness for so long in various incarnations that we have difficulty imagining him as a simple Mid-West farmboy of Irish extraction.

He grew up on farms and suburban homes in Nebraska and Illinois. Both his parents were alcholics. While they were alive, Brando spent his life trying to win their love. Of his father, Marlon Brando, Sr., he writes, "He insisted on controlling people, which––who knows?––may have something to do with why I've spent much of my life trying to control other people...He was a frightening, silent, brooding, angry, hard-drinking, rude man, a bully who loved to give orders and issue ultimatums––and he was just as tough as he talked. Perhaps that's why I've had a lifelong aversion to authority."

Brando remembers his mother being drunk throughout his childhood and adolescence. When he was six years old he grew deeply attached to his governess, a young woman of Indonesian descent named Ermi. Ermi abandoned the young Brando to run off and get married. Writes Brando, "My mother had long ago deserted me for her bottle; now Ermi was gone, too. That's why in life I would always find women who were going to desert me; I had to repeat the process. From that day forward, I became estranged from this world."

Brando's romantic liasons are legion. Apart from his first wife, Anna Kashfi, his second, Mexican actress Movita Castenada, and his Tahitian common-law wife, Tarita, he has been linked with Rita Moreno, Eva Marie Saint and Marilyn Monroe. But the complete list of Brando paramours would require more space than this article provides, up to and including his most recent affair with his Guatemalan housekeeper, Cristina Ruiz, with whom he had a little girl, Ninna Priscilla Brando, born 13 May 1989, when Brando was 65.

"I have always been lucky with women," Brando concedes. "There have been many of them in my life, though I hardly ever spent more than a couple of minutes with any of them. I've had far too many affairs to think of myself as a normal, rational man. But somehow I always thought there must be something––someone––out there. There was something: huge alimony payments, and if not that, enough trouble for fifty men." He adds that after losing Ermi he always wanted "several women in my life at the same time as an emotional insurance policy to protect myself from being hurt again," and he reveals that "most of the women in my life have been women of color, like Ermi: Latin American, Carribean, Indian, Pakistani, Chinese, Japanese...Because I didn't want to be hurt again, I found it difficult to love and to trust. So, like a vaudeville juggler spinning a half-dozen plates at once, I always tried to keep several romances going at the same time; that way, if one women left me there would still be four or five others...

"I don't think I was constructed to be monogamous. I don't think it's the nature of any man to be monogamous."

He recalls Marilyn Monroe, whom he met at a New York party, with more affection than he reserves for either of his ex-wives. "Marilyn was a sensitive, misunderstood person, much more perceptive than was generally assumed. She had been beaten down, but had a strong emotional intelligence––a keen intuition for the feelings of others, the most refined type of intelligence...We had an affair and saw each other intermittently until she died in 1962...It's been speculated that she had a secret rendezvous with Robert Kennedy that week and was distraught because he wanted to end an affair between them. But she didn't seem depressed to me, and I don't think that if she was sleeping with him at the time she would have invited me over for dinner...

"I'm sure she didn't commit suicide...I have always believed that she was murdered."

At the outset of his autobiography, however, Brando warns readers of the treachery of memory. "I have learned," he writes, "that it is easy to convince yourself that an event occured a certain way when it did not––to think you know exactly what happened...We all invent things in our minds and can be astounded to learn that they really didn't happen the way that they are recalled. So as I reflect on my life in these pages, I advise the reader of my limitations and the fallibility of my brain."

Early in his career, Brando made a remark that he does not now retract. "Hollywood," he said, "has never made an honest picture and it never will." His comments on acting over the years have been conflicted and ambivalent. In Brando he insists that, "Acting is the least mysterious of all crafts. Everybody acts...The difference is that most people act unconsciously and automatically, while stage and movie actors do it to tell a story. In fact, most actors give their best performances after the camera stops rolling." Brando contends that he never had the "acting bug. I took acting seriously because it was my job; I almost always worked hard at it, but it was simply a way to make a living." Yet he contradicts himself with the statement that "acting has always been only a means to an end, a source of money for which I didn't have to work very hard. The hours are short, the pay good, and when you're done, you're as free as a bird." And Brando reminds the reader of how shallow he considers acting and moviemaking: "I laugh at people who call moviemaking an 'art' and actors 'artists.' Rembrandt, Beethoven, Shakespeare and Rodin were artists; actors are worker ants in a business and they toil for money. That's why it's always been called 'the movie business.'"

Writing at length of his fame and its intolerable burden on his private life––what little privacy he has had––Brando advises that, "With fame comes the predatory prowl of a carrion press that has an insatiable appetite for salaciousness and abhors being denied access to anyone, from pimps to presidents (a journey that becomes shorter every year), and, confused and resentful because it can't get what it wants, resorts to inventing stories about you because it is part of a culture whose most pressing moral imperative is that anything is acceptable if it makes money...If given the choice between Kenneth Branaugh's production of "Henry V" or Arnold Schwarzenneger's "The Terminator," there's a hardly a question of where most television dials would be turned. If the expenditure of money for entertainment in America is any indication of taste, clearly the majority of us are addicted to trash."

Brando minces no words about what it means to be in the American film industry––an industry that, despite his many disagreements with producers, studios and directors over the years, has richly rewarded him. "In the movie business," he reveals, "there is a crude but amusing saying: 'The way to say fuck you in Hollywood is trust me.' But Brando has always insisted in living on the edge of Hollywood, whether it be on his Tahitian island of Teti'aroa or in his secluded Mulholland home. His desperate need for privacy prevents him from discussing his marriages or his children in Brando. If you want to read about how his son Christian shot and killed his daughter Cheyenne's Tahitian lover, Dag Drollet, in 1990, or about Cheyenne's suicide attempt the following year, you'll have to turn to Peter Manso's lengthy account of Brando's life.

But if you want to read about Brando's love of animals, or his lifelong drive to accomplish something more worthwhile, in his view, than acting, Brando is the right book. "With so much prejudice, racial discrimination, injustice, hatred, poverty, starvation and suffering in the world, making movies seemed increasingly irrelevant, and I felt I had to do what I could to make things better," Brando writes. Over the years he visited many Third World countries for UNICEF, he marched for civil rights in the South, he went on television for Native Americans, and he rubbed elbows with people like Martin Luther King, Jr, Dag Hammarskjöld, Indira Ghandi and John F. Kennedy.

In the concluding chapter of Brando: Songs My Mother Taught Me, the venerable actor breathes a weary sigh for a world he feels he's never been able to master, despite all his wealth and fame. "Frustrated in my attempts to take care of my mother, I suppose that instead I tried to help Indians, blacks and Jews. I thought love, good intentions and positive action could alter injustice, prejudice, aggression and genocide...I felt a responsbility to create a better world, propelled by the certainty that compassion and love could solve its problems. I am no longer persuaded that any significant change through a course of behavior will make any difference of lasting importance."

Seeking relief for his troubled spirit, Marlon Brando has been in analysis for as many years as he's been appearing in films. In his latest endeavor, in which he acts with Johnny Depp in "Don Juan de Marco," Brando plays a psychiatrist.

Marlon Brando, Grand Inquisitor
but role of Columbus Remains A Mystery
By Jordan Elgrably. El País. Oct. 20, 1991

LOS ANGELES––A Paris-based spokesperson for Alexander and Ilya Salkind, the father and son production team behind "Christopher Columbus: The Discovery", confirmed Thursday in an exclusive interview with EL PAIS that Marlon Brando has signed on to play Tomas de Torquemada. Brando will begin work in Malta on 25 November, the first day of principal photography on the historical extravaganza, which is to be directed by John Glenn ("License to Kill"). The 12-week shoot will take Brando and his co-stars from Malta to the Canary Islands, Spain and finally to the Virgin Islands. This marks Brando's second collaboration with the Salkinds, following his 1978 appearance as Jor-El in "Superman."

An American-Spanish co-production with headquarters in Madrid, the estimated budget for "Christopher Columbus: The Discovery," said the Salkind confidant, remains stable at $45 million. Marlon Brando is to receive $5 million for 15 days of work in his role as Grand Inquisitor. The contract was signed quietly last 15 November in the office of the Salkinds' lawyer, in Paris. "Mr. Brando's only condition," said the source, who withheld his name for publication, "is that the Indians be given generous treatment. He reiterated that he considers the Indians his friends and was very concerned that they be portrayed accurately."

The source stressed that actor Matt Dillon has not been cast in the role of Columbus, as was revealed earlier this week. Calling the announcement a "rumor which has nothing to do with reality," he said Salkind père et fils would like it to be known that their choice for the sought-after role of Christopher Columbus will be formally announced to the world press on 25 November.

Meanwhile, Isabella Rosellini has been cast as Queen Isabel, and Tom Selleck will play her husband, King Ferdinand. "They are on the verge of signing," the source revealed, although no information on their fees was available at press time.

"Alexander and Ilya Salkind wish to publicly express their thanks for the generous assistance provided them by Spain's Office of the Quincentennial (Quinto Centenario), and to King Juan Carlos II," the source added. Sponsored by King Juan Carlos II and the government of President Felipe Gonzalez, the Office of the Quincentennial, which organizes international festivities marking the 500th anniversary of Columbus' voyage to the Americas, arranged for the building of scale replicas of Columbus' original caravel, the Santa María, the Niña and the Pinta. The three ships are on loan for use in the film and sailed from their 1492 point of origin last 12 October, headed for the Canary Islands. As they sailed from Palos de la Frontera, at the base of the Guadalquivir River, near Cadiz, a second unit followed the caravel, and has already shot three hours of footage which will be edited for "The Discovery." The film is scheduled for release on July 4, 1992.

The film's executive producer is Jane Chaplin, daughter of the late Charlie Chaplin and wife of Ilya Salkind, with whom Chaplin has a young son. Producer Ilya Salkind is the third generation in a family of filmmakers that goes back to his grandfather, Mikhail Salkind, a Russian emigré whose first major film as producer was "Joyless Street" (1925), directed by G.W. Pabst and starring Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich. Alexander Salkind, born in Danzig in 1921, followed in his father's footsteps when, at the age of 23, he produced "El Moderno Barba Azul" (1945), starring Buster Keaton. Ilya joined the Salkind legacy when he produced "The Light at the Edge of the World" in 1970, which starred Kirk Douglas.
The Salkinds are polyglot citizens of the world who divide their time between Switzerland, France, Mexico, England and the United States. "We're not tied to any country or any major studio," Alexander Salkind recently told Film Comment. "We're the only big independent producers who finance and own their films."

In addition to the "Superman" series, the Salkinds have produced Orson Welles' "The Trial" (1962), "The Three" and "The Four Musketeers" (1974/75), "Santa Claus" (1984), and are now in the process of putting together a fifth Superman picture, tentatively titled "The New Superman Movie."

Salkind alumnus John Williams will compose the score for "Christopher Columbus: The Discovery", while John Bloomfield ("Superman IV: The Quest for Peace") has come on costume designer, and John Graysmark joins the film fresh from his work as production designer on the recent Kevin Costner epic, "Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves."

"Mr. Brando and the Salkinds and everyone else involved in this picture," said the source in Paris, "have expressed their hope that this will be a grand film in the Salkind tradition."

The $45 million production will be competing with Ridley Scott's "Columbus," which proposes to be a biography of the explorer rather than an account of his historic journey to the Americas. Starring Gérard Depardieu as Columbus, with Armand Assante ("Mambo Kings") in the role of Sanchez, Ridley Scott starts principal photography on 2 December in Spain and will complete his film in Costa Rica for a fall, 1992 release.
     

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