Oliver Portillo retuiteado
Brando was paid $250,000 for this performance. Won Best Actor. Refused the Oscar. Then six years later, he used the exact same cue card technique on Superman and walked away with $19 million.
Paramount didn't even want him for the role. By 1971, his last few movies had bombed. The studio said no. So director Francis Ford Coppola had to trick him into a screen test. He showed up at Brando's house with a camera, told him it was to "test equipment." Brando grabbed some cotton balls, stuffed them in his cheeks to look like a bulldog, put shoe polish in his hair to darken it, and just started acting. Coppola put that tape in with other auditions. The executives loved it. But they made Brando take a pay cut (he'd been charging $1.25 million per film since the early 1960s) and put up his own money as a guarantee he wouldn't cause problems on set.
Now the cue card thing. Brando trained in something called the Stanislavski Method, which is an acting technique where you try to react as naturally as possible on camera instead of reciting rehearsed lines. His argument was that in normal conversation, nobody knows what they're about to say next. So when an actor memorizes dialogue and performs it, even if they're talented, it sounds slightly off. Brando said memorized lines had the rhythm of a nursery rhyme. So he'd read them fresh, every take. And you can actually see it in his face in The Godfather. He looks like he's thinking, choosing his words carefully. Because he was.
That $6.5 million movie made over $250 million at the box office. Highest-grossing film ever made at the time. Paramount's parent company quadrupled its yearly profit off one movie. When Brando refused the Oscar, he sent an activist named Sacheen Littlefeather to the ceremony instead, to protest Hollywood's treatment of Native Americans.
Then Superman happened, and the numbers get absurd. Brando's own agent described him to director Richard Donner in two sentences: "He hates to work and he loves money." So Brando got $3.7 million upfront plus a cut of every ticket sold, for 12 days of work. Twelve days. He appears on screen for less than 20 minutes in the finished movie. When the ticket money came in, Brando's total take was $19 million. Same cue card setup, just on a bigger budget.
In one scene where his character sends baby Superman away from a dying planet, Brando's lines were taped to the baby's diaper. He looked down at the kid with what seemed like fatherly love. He was reading his dialogue off a prop infant. He even pitched that his character should appear as "a green bagel" with just his voice, so he wouldn't have to show up on camera at all. Meanwhile Christopher Reeve, the guy who played Superman and carried the whole movie, was paid $250,000 for both films combined.
I love that Brando turned not memorizing his lines into the most profitable acting decision in Hollywood history. And both performances still hold up as some of the greatest ever put on film.
Best Movie Moments 🍿@BestMovieMom
Marlon Brando didn't memorize his lines for The Godfather (1972). He insisted that reading them made his performance more natural. The crew taped cue cards all over the set, even on Robert Duvall’s chest during their scenes
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