Thursday, 19 November 2020

Special Guest Blogger: Marlon Brando

Film-making is such a chaotic, haphazard process with scenes filmed out of order, much of what you shoot is going to get cut, and you have to learn pages and pages of script but i always viewed scripts as optional and came up with an ingenious way to avoid them by lining my cat's litter tray with them and getting someone to hold up my lines for me when we did the filming.
For Superman, in the scene where i put an infant Superman in an escape pod, i wrote his lines on the baby’s nappy so i could read them as the scene where i send him off in the pod was shot, i almost said 'I have sent them you my only son, Pamper's Super Absorbent'.
I did try and get out of it altogether by saying Jor-El should be played as an disembodied voice but they said as i was being paid $3.7 million, they weren't buying that and made me turn up on set.
After a bad start to my career where i turned down the James Dean role in Rebel Without A Cause, my career was in two parts, the fit youthful athletic Brando from A Streetcar Named Desire and On The Waterfront to the 300lb monster that had to be filmed in shadow in Apocolyse Now to hide the man mountain of blubber i had become and for nerds of a certain age i will always be Superman's dad but for most my defining role was Don Vito Corleone in The Godfather.
The role was going to either me or Burt Reynolds but when i got it they offered the role of Michael Corleone to Reynolds and i hated him so i said it they get him they don't get me so he missed out.
To be fair i fell out with most actors, me and Frank Sinatra never got on as i snatched the role of Terry Malloy on The Waterfront from him and boy he held a grudge and said i was an awful actor so when we made Guys and Dolls together, i made sure he knew how bad i was by intentionally messing up the scene where he had to eat cheesecake so he had to keep redoing it, he ate so much he must have had nightmares about cheesecake for the rest of his life.
My eating did get out of hand though, it go so bad my wife put locks on our refrigerator but you can't be 300lb's and not expect your body to protest which it did by becoming diabetic, my liver surrendered, my lungs refused to work and my heart gave out but i died as i lived, my last job was recording lines for The Godfather: The Game, but i only recorded one line and then they had to hire an impersonator to finish my lines and then i died, see, i really never did like doing scripts.

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