How Marlon Brando’s $100,000 demand to say six lines earned a jobbing Buffalo actor $200
As much as he abhorred the concept of being known as one of the greatest actors of all time and someone who was held in the utmost reverence by his peers, Marlon Brando still knew his worth.
He was a man of contradictions, which goes without saying, and even though the two-time Academy Award-winning icon held the acting profession in increasing contempt as he got older, any time he was convinced to step back in front of the cameras, he made sure he was well-paid for doing it.
Brando earned almost $20million from Richard Donner’s Superman despite spending less than two weeks on set, phoning in his performance, and trying his best not to appear onscreen, and he was said to have pocketed as much as $3.5m from Apocalypse Now, where he was an absolute nightmare.
As his career progressed, his legend grew, and his film appearances became more sporadic, Brando became an even tougher negotiator. Usually, he’d want a few million dollars and a percentage of the profits to play a role, no matter how large or small it was, and because he was Marlon Brando, he’d usually get it.
However, when he demanded an upfront payment of $100,000 to recite six lines of dialogue from the privacy and comfort of a recording booth, the offer was quickly rescinded and offered to a jobbing character actor from Buffalo instead, who agreed to step in for Brando at the princely cost of $200.
It was Robert Duvall who revealed the story, regaling Fresh Air with a behind-the-scenes anecdote from Apocalypse Now that saw him shooting the shit with James Keene. The Buffalo-born character man has been in a few classics, with Three Days of the Condor, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, 48 Hrs, and Falling Down among his other credits, although he’s almost always cast as a face in the crowd.
When rehearsing the iconic scene where he revealed that he loves the smell of napalm in the morning, Duvall and Keene started tossing Brando impressions back and forth for shits and giggles. “Mr Brando, he couldn’t believe I would do that, you know?” the former recalled, with the latter accidentally finding a new calling. “So then he began doing Brando impressions.”
“So then, Brando wanted $100,000 to do six lines of the censored stuff for the censored version, the TV version of The Godfather, and they wouldn’t pay him,” Duvall explained. “They got Jimmy Keene from Buffalo for $200 to do Brando, of course. Jimmy got, because of those imitations, blossomed into the guy that would do the censored version for Brando.”
There was no chance Brando would be handed a six-figure sum to re-record half a dozen lines so The Godfather could air on mainstream TV, but his loss was Keene’s professional gain, if not a financial one, since he agreed to do the exact same job for $99,800 less.
