The “false and idiotic” movie Marlon Brando tried to disown: “He received $5 million in cash”
An actor happily pocketing millions of dollars for a supporting role in a movie and then trying their hardest to disown it before it had seen the inside of a cinema once is bad enough, but Marlon Brando managed to turn it into an art form, which was perfectly in keeping with his reputation.
He’d been paid a hefty sum for his contributions to 1989’s The Freshman, only to abruptly decide that he wanted to shit all over it in public. Funnily enough, he changed his tune immediately until he was handed the seven-figure sum he’d demanded for agreeing to work for a week longer than initially agreed.
The icon didn’t distance himself from Richard Donner’s Superman, but he did try his hardest to weasel his way out of appearing onscreen, despite signing a deal that paid him $3.7million upfront to spend 12 days on set, during which time Cary Elwes had to lure him out of his trailer with food, plus 11.75% of the profits. He made almost $20m in total and still tried to state his case for Jor-El being a bagel.
While people meeting in dimly-lit rooms to hand over briefcases full of cash is more synonymous with cinema than real life, that’s basically what happened when Brando was convinced to board John Glen’s Christopher Columbus: The Discovery, requesting that his entire salary be deposited in cold, hard cash.
Even though he wasn’t playing the main character, he was nonetheless awarded top billing as Tomás de Torquemada because he was the biggest name in the cast by far. He’d requested that changes be made to the script after he’d already taken the money, and when those requests were denied, he repeatedly demanded that his name be removed from the credits as a compromise.
“Marlon, oh Marlon,” producer Alexander Salking sighed to The New York Times. “He received $5 million in cash, all cash. He didn’t complain about that. How long did he work? Let’s call it two weeks.” That’s probably pushing it when he was known to be the industry’s laziest and most work-shy superstar, and his issues with the screenplay had nothing to do with the character he played, other than his pitch to wear long nails so that he would “look horrible.”
He wanted The Discovery to depict “Columbus not as the insipid, bland, false, and idiotic person as he was portrayed in the script, but as the true villain he was.” Having already paid him $5 million, Ilya Salkind, who produced the film and had already dealt with Brando on Superman, completely ignored him and opted instead to show Georges Corraface’s title character as an all-around good egg.
Brando was paid ridiculously handsomely for his troubles, and all he had to show for it at the end of the day was a Razzie nomination for ‘Worst Supporting Actor’, his name in the credits of a historical epic that sank at the box office, and an “embarrassingly bad” performance that he considered the worst he’d ever given.
