The Don
Marlon Brando had a film career that put him at the top of the male lead actor charts for fully fifty years. It is hard to pick a best among Brando’s many films. He started in the 50’s with such greats as A Streetcar Named Desire, Viva Zapata, The Wild One, On the Waterfront and Guys and Dolls. These were all iconic roles and iconic films. In the 60’s he expanded his repertoire with Mutiny on the Bounty, The Ugly American and The Appaloosa. By the time the 70’s rolled around, Brando had wandered off the reservation and gotten a bit weird. The Godfather was Brando’s bread and butter and his less mainstream efforts like Last tango in Paris, The Missouri Breaks, Superman and Apocalypse Now. He carried on into the 80’s with a few films like A Dry White Season and did his last films in the 90’s with the strange Don Juan Demarco. The Academy kept wanting to nominate him long after he was leading man material, but Brando eschewed the Oscars and quite famously tried to use them for political statement, further solidifying his role as as much a maverick in his seventies as he was in his twenties.
I thought of Brando tonight because I’m watching a movie of his I had never seen, The Missouri Breaks. The other star was Jack Nicholson, one of the other iconic and iconoclastic actors of the same age. Both Brando and Nicholson were hot off the victories of Best actor Oscar awards when this movie was cast, so it was destined to be as big a hit as Hollywood could conjure in 1976. It’s a story of the late-stage Wild West of Montana with horse thieves, sadistic rich ranchers and looney gunslingers. Whatever Arthur Penn, who directed The Miracle Worker, Bonnie & Clyde and Little Big Man, intended, the irreverent styles of both Nicholson and Brando drove the film bus in whatever direction they chose. In fact, Brando made Nicholson look mainstream by comparison since he pretty much designed his own role and wardrobe and even put himself into an Irish accent all of his own choosing. It is said almost all his dialogue in the movie is ad libed.
While the film truly bombed in its day, it has gained added appreciation as it has aged, not just because of the star status of the two leading men, but also because what was an off-the-wall depiction of the death throes of the American frontier, became an acknowledged version of reality. Brando exits the film very unceremoniously by getting his throat cut at night by Nicholson. The nasty rich rancher goes non-compos-mentis through a stroke or some such affliction only to have faked all that to try to kill Nicholson. And Jack, well, he gets the girl (at least to the extent he wants her) while rediscovering the pleasures of gardening and moves further up into the wilderness away from civilization even though he proves to be the most civilized man in that part of the frontier, his horse-thieving ways notwithstanding.
Watching this movie made me realize how hard it must be to bring together the elements needed for a successful movie. You can get great actors and a great director, but if the fundamental script isn’t there to motivate everyone to stay in some orderly configuration, there will only be pandemonium. Sometimes the script comes from a popular theme like the Mafia and a respectable and predictable author like Mario Puzo and his creation of both the novel and screenplay for The Godfather. Other times it comes from an unlikely subject like mental health and a relatively obscure author like Ken Kesey, who wrote One Flew Over the Cukoo’s Nest after working as a night guard at a Veterans Hospital. Where Puzo became a very wealthy man on the back of the extended Godfather franchise, Kesey was paid only $20k for the film rights to his book. He disagreed with the choice of Nicholson in the starring role of Randle McMurphy, preferring Gene Hackman, and is supposed to have never viewed the movie in protest. Nevertheless, the film based on his novel swept the Oscars in 1975, taking all of the “Big Five” of Best Film, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay. That was almost as impressive as The Godfather winning eleven Oscars in 1973, though they missed out on Best Actress to Liza Minelli’s role in Cabaret, mostly because there were no major female roles in Puzo’s work.
I am thinking of all of this not only because I watched these two great stars mess about in The Missouri Breaks, but also because my youngest son, Thomas, who is a video producer for a living has joined forces with a friend and made a short film, written and directed by his friend. It has a decidedly au current theme of gender fluidity and has about as banal a treatment of sexuality as you can imagine. They have received some private accolades for the film, which I think is well made but hard for someone of my generation to completely embrace. That has caused them to decide to submit it to several festivals, the first of which is Sundance. Having had a house in Park City, Utah for fifteen years, I have attended the Sundance Festival many times, as has my son. It would not surprise me, but it would greatly lease me to see him get his film into Sundance and receive some recognition for his work and investment. Technically, I am credited as a Producer of the film since I put tome money into it, so I am rooting for it in many ways.
As part of the process of finalizing the film with credits and titles, Thomas and his partner have decided to form a production company of their own. Today he and I texted back and forth with me about the choice of a name. I gave him my honest views and even suggested a few names. He and I actually work together on such things quite well. He is respectful of what I bring to the process and I am respectful that this is his baby and he needs to make the decisions based on his own views. As city kids who grew up on the streets of Manhattan and now live in Brooklyn, he and his partner wanted the name to reflect who they are as well as being clever and thought-provoking. I suggested Outerborough Productions and he countered with Sixth Borough Films. After iterating some alternative spellings (Six and Boro), he settled on it and went right to the NYS LLC filing website to lock it in. We went through the pros and cons of using a comma in between the name and the LLC, and he decided on the more formal use of the comma.
So now he is on his way. Whether great things come to him via Sixth Borough Films or it becomes a mere stepping stone in his career development doesn’t really matter. I would love for him to be a great commercial and professional success, but I think the fulfillment of his ambitions are what matter the most. He is creatively driven more than commercially driven and that makes him more like Brando and Nicholson than not. Either way, today he became the Don of the family and I hope the Sixth Borough brings him all the kudos he deserves.