The “piece of shit” movie Marlon Brando only made for the money: “I did it for the bucks”
While there are undoubtedly a handful of big-name actors who choose their roles based entirely on their love of the profession, most of Hollywood’s most famous faces leverage their status and star power to ensure they get paid the maximum amount of money, something Marlon Brando turned into an art form.
He spent at least the last two decades of his career phoning it in, but because he was Marlon Brando, arguably the greatest actor of all time and definitely the most influential, producers would fork out millions to have him on board, even if he clearly couldn’t be arsed being anything more than apathetic.
The two-time Academy Award-winning icon earned millions upon millions of dollars, and repaid the people who footed the bill by being a lazy and uncooperative shit most of the time. That was late-stage Brando in a nutshell, though, and the folks who hired him would have surely known that he wasn’t going to repay their investment with a Godfather-level turn.
Still, it would have been nice had Brando accepted their lucrative offers, done the work, and then left it at that. Instead, despite almost always being the highest-paid member of any ensemble that he worked with, the wayward icon developed the unfortunate habit of slating his own movies before, during, and after they’d been released.
In his first post-Apocalypse Now outing, he starred opposite George C Scott in Rocky director John G Avildsen’s literary adaptation, The Formula. A Cold War-era mystery thriller with a Nazi twist, it wasn’t a very good movie, bombing at the box office and landing Brando on the Razzies shortlist for ‘Worst Supporting Actor’, an accolade worthy of him sleepwalking through the picture.
Even though he’d recently been paid $2 million for his contributions to Francis Ford Coppola’s seminal war epic, Brando claimed he was teetering on the verge of financial ruin, explaining to Lawrence Grobel that he never wanted to be in The Formula, but fiscal necessities pushed him towards the production.
When asked for his thoughts on the end product, the erstwhile Vito Corleone succinctly described it as “a terrible piece of shit.” He suggested that there was another version of the film that was vastly superior, but his best scenes were all removed during post-production, or at least that’s the story he told.
“They cut that all to pieces,” he lamented. “They took out all my humour. But I didn’t have any money, and I did it for the bucks. Ten days for three million bucks; I didn’t care.” You’d think that getting paid $5 million for two movies, which required him to spend a couple of weeks on set at the most, would convince Brando that he should get his finger out of his arse.
Evidently, it didn’t, and it would be another decade before he returned to the silver screen in A Dry White Season, and he hated that one, too.
