How Marlon Brando came to despise the only movie he made for free: “I felt betrayed”
As Heath Ledger’s Joker famously said, “If you’re good at something, never do it for free.” Considering that his peers regularly celebrate him as the single greatest actor in the history of cinema, it was only natural that Marlon Brando would charge a pretty penny for his services.
After establishing himself as the most transformative performer Hollywood had ever seen when he burst onto the scene and inadvertently reshaped the entire profession in his image, Brando quickly became one of Hollywood’s highest-paid and most in-demand stars.
Even when he fell out of love with acting and decided that being a nuisance on set was more important than doing great work, he still commanded a hefty salary. He earned a fortune for Richard Donner’s Superman despite trying his hardest to weasel his way out of appearing onscreen, and even late-stage Brando commanded a fee of millions.
When he announced his so-called retirement after being left devastated by how 1980’s The Formula turned out, it was generally assumed that it would take a truckload of cash to lure the legend back onto the silver screen. That was the case for a while, until he did a complete about-turn and agreed to make director Euzhan Palcy’s A Dry White Season for free.
Producer Paula Weinstein reached out to see if he’d be interested in ending his decade-long sabbatical, only for Brando’s agent to respond by demanding $3.3 million upfront and then 11.3% of the total box office earnings. That was over a third of the production budget before a frame of footage had been shot, but it was the storyline that made the Godfather icon change his mind.
He abandoned his monetary aspirations after realising the apartheid drama “gave a white audience the chance to experience through the eyes of a white South African how inhumane the policy was,” but it wasn’t long until the problems began once Brando became convinced Palcy wasn’t up to the task.
In his memoir Songs My Mother Taught Me, he called her “an amateur who tried to play hardball,” with Brando offering his own suggestions to the studio about rewrites and re-edits that would, from his perspective, “improve the picture without reshooting it,” which ultimately fell on deaf ears.
“I resented having extended myself on behalf of the picture and a good cause, working hard at no charge, and not having been allowed to recut at least part of my picture the way it should have been done,” he recalled. He even offered to pay for the post-production changes, and was once again shut down.
It was incredibly un-Brando-like for an actor who’d been blasted for his laziness and apathy to shoot an entire picture for free and then offer to foot the bill for refining it to improve the final cut, which explains why he was so dejected: “I felt betrayed, and the picture was a terrible flop.”
He did manage to earn an Academy Award nomination for ‘Best Supporting Actor’, but in typical Brando fashion, he didn’t care in the slightest.
