Easy Street (the Hard Way): A Memoir (34 page)

When filming began I was still in Los Angeles and we started hearing rumors, because this is obviously the movie that we’re all getting ready to go do. (The wheels of Hollywood, by the way, are greased with rumors!) So these rumors are filtering down, and I became quite caught up in hearing them but was having trouble discerning which parts of them were true, ’cuz they’re all really fuckin’ weird! Apparently the first day of filming was a disaster. They got nothing in the can. There was supposed to be all the stuff on the water with Val Kilmer en route to the mainland to pick up a shipment of things Moreau needed for his experiments. Val Kilmer was playing his right-hand man, his facilitator. Then the rumor came down that day two was even worse than day one. Then by day three they had about 6 percent of everything they needed for the first three days in the can, but it was basically a disaster as well. By day four, the rumors said, every time Richard Stanley said “Action!” Val walked out of frame and refused to walk back in. So Val had created a stonewall situation, and it was clear that he did not feel confident with Stanley at the helm.

Now, this was a big movie with a lot of moving parts, not the least of which is that Brando was due to come over around the same time as I was, and the budget . . . well, it ain’t small! So they shut down production, and the takeaway is that they relieve Richard Stanley of his duties as the director. For the next week there were just a
shitload
of crazy rumors flying all around town, stuff like questions of whether the movie is going to get completely shelved or whether they’re going to figure out a way to salvage it. Then the rumors started coming that there’s a parade of filmmakers going up and down Mulholland Drive being interviewed by Brando himself because they’re allowing “the man” to decide whether there’s somebody else he’s even remotely willing to do this picture with, as Richard Stanley was the guy who attracted him to the project to begin with.

I was actually getting calls from filmmakers I knew who were being interviewed, asking me, “What should I expect?”

“Well, I don’t know,” I told them. “I’ve not met Marlon yet. All I’m hearing are the same rumors you are. So I don’t know what to
tell you, but I know for a fact that he signed on for a movie that was a personal vision of a highly invested filmmaker, Stanley.” You don’t do
The Island of Dr. Moreau
unless you have a really specific vision of why the fuck to do a third retelling of it when there’s already been two movies of it already. So it’s not the kind of movie where you just get a director-for-hire to come in and pick up the pieces. Richard Stanley was obviously walking around with his concept of
The Island of Dr. Moreau
for a long time and had an interesting enough take on the story to get a whole lotta heavyweights on board. So replacing Stanley was gonna be really tricky.

At the end of the day there was a world-class director who was just reemerging from a twelve-year exile due to problems in the middle of his career with alcohol, which had benched him. But he was one of the greatest filmmakers of the second half of the twentieth century. He created some amazing movies. And then he started making these great MOWs (movies of the week), epic movies for television. His name was John Frankenheimer, and he started winning awards because these huge epic movies for television he was making were phenomenal. So he was clearly sending the signal that he was sober, he was back, and he was ready to play. They were going to give Frankenheimer a shot at a feature film, something he hadn’t had in twelve years. And it was gonna be
The Island of Dr. Moreau
.

Apparently Marlon signed off on Frankenheimer and the studio agreed. They weren’t sure exactly when I should be getting on a plane, but I was told to stand by because it could be any day. Sure enough, about a week later they said, “Okay, Ron, you go over there now. We need you for preproduction; makeup test, wardrobe, creature orientation, the works. John is reconfiguring the movie; he would like all his cast around him.” So I went over there and got on phenomenally well with John. We hit it off immediately. There’s a huge amount of warmth and mutual respect between the two of us. So one day, because I’m to play the Sayer of the Law, which is kind of a classic character, I have an epiphany. The role of the Sayer was kind of pivotal because in order for Moreau, in his obsession to civilize the beast, to
create a subsociety with the constraint of law and order, there needed to be a figure in that society who represented those conditions—ergo the Sayer of the Law. It was one of H. G. Wells’s most compelling creations and had always been given due treatment in all the other adaptations. Bela Lugosi played him in the Charles Laughton version, and Richard Basehart played him in the Burt Lancaster one. When we see the character most heavily featured it is in the mock trial Moreau would preside over for whenever one of his flock crossed back over to primal, animal behavior. The Sayer was almost like the court clerk who, in incantation form, reads off a litany of laws, values, and mores of the community, thus identifying which of the laws had been broken.

Anyway, getting back to me, so I had this epiphany shortly after arriving in Australia: what if I were to play the character blind? Know what I’m sayin’?
Blind
, muthafucka! Ya know, like justice is? Anyways, while you digest that for a moment, lemme say that the moment I let the genie out of the bottle with that one, I couldn’t get it back in. I became obsessed with the idea: justice—blind, blind justice. So I went to Frankenheimer with it, who judiciously asked for a day or two to slosh it around his brain. The following day he came to me and asked what it would take to pull it off. I told him I already had a chat with the makeup boys, who said they could supply me with milky, opaque contact lenses that would not only make me
look
blind but would actually
make
me blind. Worst fucking idea I ever had in my whole life. Which, of course, I didn’t realize until it was way too late. Obviously, Frankenheimer said, “Ron, I love it. The Sayer is blind!”

Meanwhile every night we have a welcoming party for Brando ’cuz every day he was expected to arrive. The only problem is, with each passing day, no Brando. We say
fuck it
and keep the parties going just in case; we knew we were gonna get lucky eventually. Rumors are abounding as to when and also from where the man will be flying in. First we think he’s coming from his house in LA, so a PA is stationed at the local airport greeting every flight from there. Then we hear, no, actually Marlon went to Japan, so then this poor girl is meeting every
flight from LA and from Tokyo. Next thing we know the big B decided to stop off at his island near Tahiti. So now this poor girl is meeting every flight from LA, Tokyo, and Tahiti. Finally the producers pull her from her airport detail and, whuddya know, fuckin’ Brando shows up on the next fuckin’ plane from LA and there’s nobody at the airport to greet him. So he charms his way through customs as only Marlon could do and ends up takin’ a fuckin’ cab to a hotel. I still have the
Cairns Tribune
newspaper from the next day that said, NO ONE TO MEET MARLON!

Meanwhile, Frankenheimer had been falling all over himself trying to figure out what the fuck to shoot ’cuz Marlon wasn’t there. So he was making shit up; he was vamping. He was shooting this and shooting that. While the cast and crew were starting to bond, all of us tickled with excitement—we all knew we were about to meet a living legend, a god, somebody who occupies a space that’s never been occupied before on the highest mountain in all of filmmaking. That’s what was sustaining us.

Marlon’s entire entourage consisted of three people: a woman by the name of Caroline, who does everything for him (yeah, everything!), a makeup artist named Fred, and Fred’s wife, who does his hair. But she doesn’t really do his hair; she’s just Fred’s wife, so she’s on the payroll. Oh, and by the way, Fred doesn’t really do his makeup; he’s just a dude who used to be an actor. They met on the set of
On the Waterfront
and had been buds ever since. Fred’s acting career never got into gear, so Marlon found a way to keep him in his life. What Fred really did was hold up a mirror while Marlon did his own makeup. Damn good at it too. And that was the entirety of Marlon’s entourage.

And I’ve seen entourages. One ex–movie star, who shall remain anonymous, traveled with a dozen people, three trailers—a gym, a kitchen to make him designer food, and a mini–country club to hang out in. The entourage had twelve actual people, including bodyguards, accountants, stand-ins and doubles, chefs, and the PCBJ, otherwise known as the Person who Coordinates . . . you can figure out the rest. But Marlon’s got this chick whose main gig is to sit there on the
sidelines saying his lines into a microphone so Marlon can hear them in his earpiece. That was his new way of working. He used to have cue cards; now he has an earpiece. And this makeup artist who doesn’t do makeup and his wife who’s a hairdresser who doesn’t do hair.

By the time Marlon got there, the budget for the “Welcoming Marlon” parties had already dried up, so the night he arrived there was no party—indeed, no fanfare whatsoever. I, however, having done my homework and knowing all things Brando, knew what a freak he was for Afro-Cuban music, and I happen to own quite a good and obscure collection of it myself. So I put together my five favorite CDs and sent them to Marlon’s room as a welcoming present. Anyway, the next morning, the morning when he was supposed to come to work, I had a three o’clock call because I have a four-hour makeup session, and they wanted me ready by seven. All of us, all the creatures are in the makeup chair. Marlon was supposed to be arriving at eight. We all kind of have our ear to the window, waiting to hear his motorcade pull onto the set because we were all dying for our first glimpse of the man, the myth, the legend. Everyone was kind of on the edge of their seats because we knew he was on his way to base camp. This was like you’re an eight-year-old kid and Santa is about to come down the chimney for real and you’re going to finally find out whether he is indeed a myth or there’s actually blood flowing through his veins. And whatever the fuck else you can get.

We all got finished with our makeup as we were ordered to be, by 7:30 to 8 o’clock in the morning. But we really can’t shoot anything without the man himself ’cuz we ran outta shit days ago, so the whole schedule for that day is based around his scenes. Eight o’clock, no Brando. They tell us, “Have breakfast.” We finished breakfast by 8:30, and then we sat around: 9:30, 10:30, 11 o’clock—nuthin’. You could hear your own hair growing. Then suddenly, around 11:30, we saw this energy field kinda materialize, like a twister is coming through town, and a whole bunch of people were mobilizing. Sure enough, this retinue of vehicles came bursting up the road, and the word is that the man was in one of those cars. So everybody suddenly wanted to look
casual. But they couldn’t help themselves. They got as close to the road as possible to get a glimpse of him getting out of the car. But all we got was a cloud of dust and gas fumes as his car blew right through base camp and kept going for another mile down the road. What the fuck just happened? Everybody was like, “Isn’t this base camp? This is where his trailer is, no?”

We came to find out that he had his trailer stationed half a mile away from everybody else’s, so he was gunning it right through base camp on his way to his little Marlon village. From that moment on, everything was communicated via rumor, with little tidbits of information funneling on down through the grapevine.

So by now, a half-hour, hour went by, and it was around 12:30. We weren’t hearing very much. We did hear that, yes, in fact, that was Marlon’s car. And yes, in fact, he was in his trailer, but nobody was ready to shoot anything and it was going to be a while before anybody would be. So they break us for lunch. Lunch was really the first thing that happened since breakfast. So at least we’d all be well fed on this particular day. Lunch came and went, people started breaking out in chit-chat clubs, and folks were running into town for decks of cards. Some of the Chinese people were playing Mahjong. It was just like, let’s kill the fucking afternoon. At around four o’clock we were all kind of in our bathrobes and underwear and shit. We still had our makeup on. All of these exotic makeups needed to be touched up every few minutes, certainly once an hour because they tend to move and evolve, and compromise, and so forth. And it was fucking hot ’cuz we’re in Australia and there’s no fuckin’ ozone layer. It’s now nine hours since we got finished getting made up when all of a sudden the word came down: “Everybody get dressed and get in a vehicle immediately. We’re going for a shot!”

So there was panic in River City. And sure enough, everybody was runnin’ around like idiots and was just grabbing whatever vehicle, whatever van they could get into, going where, no one the fuck knows. The location they were going to shoot the shot in is half a mile down the road, right near where Marlonville’s little trailer park is,
the irony of which didn’t escape me. I piled in a van with a bunch of other creatures, but nobody knew any more than anybody else. One thing was for sure, though: there was a lot of high-pitched yelling and screaming. We saw way off in the distance that there was an entourage of vehicles, one of which was like a Popemobile. It was a jeep that had a platform on top of a vehicle, upon which sat a throne-like chair. Off in the distance we saw a large figure, all in white, being helped onto the top of this Popemobile, and then we heard a lot of ADs over the radio saying, “Everybody get ready for the take.”

Meanwhile nobody knew what the fuck we were shooting. No one had told us anything. We were all just assembled and gathered, and we knew that this thing is about seven hundred feet away, this vehicle with what we can only assume is Marlon atop. And it’s going to be coming toward us, and they’re going to be shooting something. Sure enough, we heard, “Action!” We saw this caravan of vehicles beginning to move forward. By the time the shot got done, it was about five minutes to five. You lose the light in far north Queensland that time of year at around 4:45, so it was almost dark when we got done with the shot. Then the first AD yelled, “Great day, everybody. That’s a wrap.” Everybody knew the shot was completely unusable, but they were shooting something because, if they didn’t shoot something, they would have had to put another wasted day on the production report. That would mean that somebody else’s head was going to roll along with the dozen or so that had preceded it. We had already lost a director, two or three production managers, and three of the stars, and we hadn’t even really started yet.