The ‘Apocalypse Now’ actor who cost Marlon Brando a $100,000 ‘Godfather’ payday
Everybody knows how great The Godfather is by now and everybody knows the wonders it did for the career of Marlon Brando. Prior to Francis Ford Coppola’s gangster epic, Brando’s star had completely burnt out and he was a shadow of the titanic figure he had once been. However, following his performance as Vito Corleone, Brando was back. He won an Oscar and cemented himself as a screen icon, with his oft-imitated rendition of the crime family patriarch going down as one of cinema’s finest triumphs.
This wasn’t the only time Brando and Coppola worked together, as the pair famously reunited seven years later on Apocalypse Now. Another titanic production, Brando’s performance as Colonel Kurtz is probably less famous than Don Corleone, but it’s still a masterstroke. Unfortunately, working on this project inadvertently cost Brando a boatload of money in the strangest way possible.
In 2003, Robert Duvall, who played Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore in the movie, spoke to Neil Young’s Film Lounge about his time working on the legendarily troubled picture. He spoke to Young (not that one) about a seemingly innocent incident that had a massive knock-on effect on his co-star’s bank account. “There was a young actor called Jimmy Keane,” he recalled. “He had a small part in the movie, had to stay there ten months because they wouldn’t pay his way back and forth when they had the forced hiatus because of the typhoons. He stayed the whole time. And he was there when we did the final dress rehearsal, before the cameras rolled I did Brando, I did smells like victoryyyy! I did Brando, and we all started imitating Brando.”
This all seems fair enough. Brando has one of the most unique voices in cinema, and it must be a lot of fun, especially since he has met the man himself. Unfortunately, Keane was rather good at being Brando – too good. “When Brando wanted a hundred thousand dollars for the censored version of The Godfather for TV,” Duvall continued. “They got Jimmy Keane from Buffalo New York to do it for two hundred dollars, he did Brando and that was because we started imitating Brando right then on the set. That’s what I remember about filming that scene most of all.”
Keane had been a jobbing actor prior to Apocalypse Now, his most notable role being a background scientist in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. He met Coppola whilst he was working as an elevator operator in a New York hotel and landed the part of one of Kilgore’s gunners, who ended up being involved in the famous ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ scene.
In 1977, the first two ‘Godfather’ movies were recut into a four-part miniseries for NBC. The so-called ‘Godfather Saga’ needed cleaning up for TV, as scenes like Sonny’s murder and the famous ‘horse head in the bed’ moment were too violent and bloody for network television. This is why Brando needed to redub some of his lines and why Keane got the gig instead.
After his turn impersonating the Don, Keane had a regular part in the TV legal drama The Paper Chase. He also appeared in the Nick Nolte-Eddie Murphy buddy cop film 48 Hrs. and alongside Warren Beatty in his 1990 adaptation of Dick Tracy. According to his filmography, his most recent film role was in another Beatty project, the romantic comedy Rules Don’t Apply.
