Marlon Brando’s abandoned dream of selling earthquake-proof houses on QVC: “The products weren’t viable”
He might have been one of Hollywood’s most famous eccentrics, but Marlon Brando wasn’t an idiot. He was known to be a highly intelligent man, an inquisitive chap, and a voracious reader, none of which meant anything when he devised a hare-brained scheme to earn money without having to act.
His final performance came in Frank Oz’s 2001 heist caper, The Score, where he co-starred with Robert De Niro for the one and only time, making history when the two versions of Vito Corleone shared the screen. This being the oldest and unruliest version of Brando in Hollywood, he proved to be a nightmare.
He continually belittled the filmmaker, frequently referring to him as ‘Miss Piggy’, and things got so fraught that he refused to be directed by Oz, instead getting De Niro to oversee his scenes, some of which he opted to shoot without wearing trousers, because he’s Marlon Brando and that’s the kind of thing that he does.
The two-time Academy Award winner was also said to be in serious financial trouble, with his home falling into disrepair as funds began to run low. The easiest way to make money was to do the thing he was good at, and many people say the best ever at, but apart from his bizarre commitment to the unreleased animated feature, Big Bug Man, Brando showed no inclination to contribute to cinema.
Instead, he decided to put his inventor’s hat on. “He called me to discuss products he could sell on QVC,” his secretary, Alice Marchak, told The Hollywood Reporter. “He was looking to generate money, but the products he came up with weren’t viable. He had an idea for an earthquake-proof house, and a way to air-condition homes that involved drilling. Things that couldn’t be sold on QVC.”
That might sound nuts, but it wasn’t Brando’s first brush with the world of invention. He held several patents, including one for a prototype conga drum equipped with the drumhead tensioner he’d devised himself, and what lawyer Kevin Costanza called “shoes that you wear in the pool, that would increase friction as you walked to the bottom to give you a better workout.”
Neither of them was mass-produced, but he wouldn’t be deterred. The iconic actor and face of the method had set aside $50,000 toward his latest batch of inventions, but after being convinced that nobody wanted to buy a house, never mind an earthquake-proof one, on QVC, he opted to use the cash to front an acting class that he would teach himself and release the entire thing on DVD.
He did at least follow through on his pledge, even if the sessions have never been made publicly available. Which is a shame, because they sound about as batshit insane as you’d expect acting classes taught by Marlon Brando in his late 70s to be. In the end, it was a pointless endeavour, but it’s hard to imagine anyone forking out whatever it would cost to purchase one of his seismically sound abodes after seeing it on TV, even with his name attached.
