How Leonardo DiCaprio’s “love letter to our friends” became his biggest nightmare
Although it’s been a long time since the film industry has seen a movie star worthy of being named in the company of all-time greats like Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Marlon Brando, Laurence Olivier, and James Stewart, it’s hard to argue that Leonardo DiCaprio hasn’t been etched in history alongside them.
DiCaprio may have started at a young age, but he’s managed to amass a legendary run of successes that is unmatched by any of his contemporaries, with titles like Titanic, The Departed, The Wolf of Wall Street, Catch Me If You Can, The Revenant, One Battle After Another, and Django Unchained that seem guaranteed to be future classics, and some aready are.
One of the primary reasons that he has been so successful is how frugal he has been in choosing his roles, as he hasn’t run the risk of being overexposed, tending to reserve his talents for collaborations with established auteur directors, and as a result has had very few misses in his career. That being said, he has also grown up over the course of his over 30 years of experience in Hollywood, and has certainly made a few mistakes that he’s been keen to keep under wraps.
It was shortly after the release of The Beach, one of the few DiCaprio films that got negative reviews, that he joined his friends Tobey Maguire and Kevin Connolly in making the black-and-white independent drama Don’s Plum. Unlike some of the mass-scale productions that he had starred in at the time, Don’s Plum was a slice-of-life film about a group of young actors hanging out over the course of a single night.
“Don’s Plum was a group of friends saying, ‘Let’s all make a movie…’,” said producer Dale Wheatley in an interview with The New York Post, “In many ways, [it] was a love letter to our friends”.
The all in one night format has resulted in great films like Before Sunset and My Dinner With Andre, but DiCaprio would later dispute that he never believed Don’s Plum would be seen, for it was shortly after the film’s completion that he and Maguire blocked it’s release, arguing that they had signed up to be in a short film that had been re-edited without their consent.
Although director RD Robb and producer David Stutman tried to ensure Don’s Plum would see the light of day, it was only ever released as an edited-down version outside of North America, and while he briefly tried to make it available to watch for free on his personal website, an infringement claim by DiCaprio and Maguire forced him to take it down.
So why was the actor so keen to erase Don’s Plum from existence? It may be because the improvisatory nature of the film got a little too real and threatened to colour the audience’s perception of what DiCaprio and his friends were really like. At a time when wild tabloid stories circulated about him, he may not have been too keen about releasing a film in which he spoke crass language and acted like a spoiled, womanising brat.
DiCaprio doesn’t have a perfect track record, but even his relatively weaker films, such as Celebrity or J Edgar, still allowed him to turn in interesting performances, and given how vast DiCaprio’s filmography is, Don’s Plum is likely to remain obscure, which is probably what he wants to happen anyway.
