| When casting began for “The Godfather,” the actor Marlon Brando had two allies on his side. Mario Puzo, who was adapting the screenplay from his own best-selling novel, had written the book with Brando in mind. Francis Ford Coppola, the promising young director, was also determined to hire Brando, a five-time Oscar nominee (and a one-time winner, for “On the Waterfront”), as Don Corleone, the story’s mobster patriarch. But, as far as Paramount Pictures was concerned, the actor was an unreliable has-been, too risky to be worth the trouble. Studio executives weren’t just skeptical about Brando—they simply wouldn’t consider him. Puzo and Coppola eventually got their way, of course, and “The Godfather” became one of the landmark films in Hollywood history, a box-office hit and a winner of three Academy Awards, including Brando’s second for Best Actor. But, to get the part, Brando—who would have celebrated his hundredth birthday today—was forced to take a screen test, an indignity for a figure of his stature, and Paramount only gave him the role after its preferred candidate got sick. In 2008, the New Yorker staff writer Claudia Roth Pierpont revisited Brando’s turbulent, triumphant life: the stage and screen revolutions he inspired with the Method, at the time a new approach to acting; his infamous unwillingness to learn his lines (and the tricks he used to fake it); the murder trial of his son Christian, which became the scene of what some considered his most convincing performance. “He cost the studios a fortune,” Roth Pierpont observes. “Yet the face on the screen was so compelling that the question of what to do with his talent remained a kind of national burden.” | 
No comments:
Post a Comment