The movie sabotaged by a spiteful Marlon Brando: “Idiotic and self-destructive on his part”
Even though he hated being called one of the greatest actors in cinema history, despite the obvious fact that he was, the adulation that followed Marlon Brando everywhere he went became increasingly handy the longer his career wore on.
In most cases, anyone who had a reputation for being lazy, unprofessional, and constantly late to the set, never mind one who never bothered to learn their lines and demanded exorbitant amounts of money for doing the bare minimum, would struggle to find work.
However, because he was Marlon Brando, with so many of his peers on both sides of the camera worshipping the ground he walked on, he was constantly inundated with offers. He wasn’t an easy guy to work with, but based entirely on who he was and what he meant to cinema, everyone wanted to work with him anyway.
Sometimes, that came back to bite a director on the arse. It wasn’t the first or last time the two-time Academy Award winner went out of his way to sabotage one of his own films, but the case of The Freshman was arguably the most unusual, when Brando almost instantly changed his mind after destroying the picture.
Ending a decade-long exile from Hollywood to play the crime boss Carmine Sabatini, a self-referential parody of his iconic Vito Corleone, Brando gave his best performance in his years, and earned his first Oscar nomination since Apocalypse Now for what was also his best-reviewed movie since Francis Ford Coppola’s war epic.
Before The Freshman had even been released, the star called it “the biggest turkey of all time” and announced that the experience had made him so miserable that he was permanently retiring, lamenting that he wished he “hadn’t finished with a stinker.” He also predicted it was “going to be a flop,” which completely blindsided writer and director Andrew Bergman.
“The whole thing was idiotic and self-destructive on his part,” the filmmaker told Uproxx. “Every interview we did after the movie was, ‘How come Marlon said that?’ Our feeling was, ‘Ask Marlon why he said that. Don’t ask me.’ Being that it was so negative, it got picked up by every paper in the universe.”
As was often the case with Brando, he decided to trash The Freshman because he didn’t think he was being paid enough. When the production ran over by a week, he demanded a million dollars to stick around. When his request was denied, he shit all over the movie in the press. Funnily enough, he got his seven figures shortly after that and magically decided that it wasn’t so bad after all.
Bergman was understandably pissed, but co-star Jon Polito was impressed at how much power and influence he wielded. “He said, ‘If you don’t give it, I can ruin your film within three days,'” the actor recalled. “They gave him the money, three days later, he said, ‘I love this film. I can’t wait to do the sequel.'”
The Freshman was ultimately profitable, but not massively. Some viewers may have been encouraged to see it after Brando’s public bashing, while others may have been convinced to stay away for the same reason. As tends to be the case in Hollywood, his issues were swiftly resolved by a fat stack of cash.
