Easy Street (the Hard Way): A Memoir (35 page)

Everybody just stood there, waiting around to see what happened next. Marlon was up on his perched platformy throne-like thingy, atop this moving vehicle. People were whispering things at him, and he was saying things to them, and we were really too far away to know what was going down. But apparently he said, “I would like to meet the rest of the cast,” because he spent the entire day in a private rehearsal with David Thewlis, Val Kilmer, Fairuza Balk, and then the makeup emissary from Stan Winston. Oh, and the director, John Frankenheimer.
That’s what was happening all day; that’s what brought us to four o’clock in the afternoon.

So they paraded us out to meet Marlon, and the first person Frankenheimer thought to introduce to him was me. He said, “Ron Perlman, come over here and meet Mr. Brando.”

I saw Brando saying, like for the eightieth time, “John, I told you. I’m not Mr. Brando. I’m Marlon.” So he started this mini-argument with Frankenheimer, and he was looking around as I was walking up to him, and he was saying, “Jesus Christ, these makeups are amazing. Who did the makeup?”

Just as he asked that question, Frankenheimer said, “Marlon Brando, meet Ron Perlman.”

Now, I was dressed as a goat with ram horns in a Dashiki, and he said to me, “Oh, you did the makeup. Wow, that’s fantastic. Can you tell me what your process is?”

“Sorry to disappoint you, sir,” I said, “but no, I didn’t do the makeup.”

“Well, who the hell are you?” he asked.

“I’m just playing a character in the movie, sir,” I said, “named the Sayer of the Law.”

“Oh, okay,” he said. “So you didn’t do the makeup.”

“No sir,” I said. “Stan Winston did the makeup, sir.” And suddenly Marlon was looking really sad that I had the balls to not be the makeup man. And that was my first exchange with Marlon Brando . . . not exactly like I drew it up.

So anyway, once he got over the disappointment that I was not who I said I was, they kept introducing him to the rest of the cast one at a time, and there continue to be these rather awkward exchanges while he was taking in the marvels of the world that Stan Winston had created. Finally the last person who got introduced to him was a little guy named Nelson de la Rosa from the Dominican Republic. I say little guy: Nelson de la Rosa was the smallest mobile human being on record, standing tall at twenty-seven inches. (There’s another guy who was twenty-six inches, but he couldn’t move, so we couldn’t use him.)
Now, Nelson, who was in the Guinness Book of Records, had a bit of a following in the Dominican Republic. He was sort of a celebrity down there because he was a regular on one of the more watched variety shows. When they were about to introduce him, Marlon leaned forward and seemed to be in shock.

Yes, Nelson was able to move about, but with some difficulty, so, as much as possible, one of his handlers carried him around. He had these two very young, very sexy girls who he’d brought with him from the Dominican Republic to take care of his every need. They were kind of cute and personable, and Nelson spent all of his time just tweaking their nipples because Nelson was a sexaholic. Like totally out of control. So as they were carrying him over to meet Marlon, Nelson was actually trying to remove this girl’s breast from her blouse and her bra. He didn’t have a clue who the fuck Marlon Brando was; he was just looking for someplace to stick his little boner. When Marlon finally focused in on this thing that he was about to meet, his eyes got so big they nearly fell out of his fuckin’ head, just like one of those cartoons in which the eyeballs are on springs. He looked like a kid who was watching Santa opening his favorite toy. Originally Nelson was basically just hired to be a background player: I mean here we are doing this exposé on this uniquely freakish subsociety, and . . . you get the picture. But as soon as Brando got a gander at this little dude,
BOOM
, a star was born. Brando said to him, “How many movies have you been in?”

There’s nuthin’ from the little guy. Somebody yelled out, “He only speaks Spanish Mr. B.”

Brando segued, “Oh. Uh . . . como day peliculas a tu uh, been in?”

“Oh, dos,” shot back the little guy, proudly holding up two tiny little fingers.

And before I could restrain myself I blurted out, “Yeah, and both of ’em were this one!” Another sad look from Brando. This was not going well for the Perl.

From that moment on Marlon became so fascinated with this character that he elevated him to being a kind of mini-me. He became Dr.
Moreau’s alter ego. And every time you saw Dr. Moreau on the screen, Nelson was there, dressed in the exact same outfit as him, only tinier. There’s even a scene that Marlon created in which Moreau is playing a baby grand piano, and he had the art department build a tiny baby grand to sit on top of the real one while they ferociously played duets.

At any rate, from the moment Marlon laid eyes on little Nelson, Marlon saw an opportunity to build his entire world using this device as a lynchpin to unearth the experimental nature of Moreau’s obsession with creating the ultimate subculture. And we all saw it happening right in front of our eyes. Marlon Brando! Like him or not, he was flat-fucking fascinating.

(CHAPTER 20)

The Doctor Will See You Now

The only real scene I originally had in the film was a big trial scene. In it, one of the members of Moreau’s merry band of freaks crosses the line of civility and must be dealt with summarily. The Sayer of the Law had the task of reciting the litany of laws in a ritualistic form to remind everyone of the limits of their little society. The speech was lifted straight out of the H. G. Wells novel, thus maintaining purity to the storytelling that was sacrosanct. “Do not slurp but sip. Do not go on all fours”—weird shit like that. The Sayer’s job is to remind the villagers of unyielding absolutism of these laws, that there is a corporeal implication for any behavior that falls short of human. The scene I was essentially there to do involved one of our members’ brutal taking down of prey. By slipping back into the feral, he had broken one of Moreau’s most sacred trusts. The individual is put on a trial conducted by the Sayer. Moreau is the judge of the trial, and the entire community is present. It was a huge, complicated scene, with a lot of moving parts.

It was during those days I was acting with the great one, because he’s sitting there on his makeshift bench like you see in courtrooms, but in an outdoor amphitheater of sorts. I was standing by his side
with a rod, as if I’m some sort of symbol of justice. I was saying these incantations, and when I get to the incantation, “Thou shalt not kill,” Moreau stops me and says, “That law has been broken.” And the trial ensues. So this scene was scheduled to take a day and a half to shoot; it ended up taking five and a half because it was a hot mess. There were 250 extras and a lot of disorganization. There was a lot of reinterpretation taking place when Frankenheimer saw what Marlon wanted to do and how he wanted to fold little Nelson into the scenario. There was a lot of planning and replanning and then throwing everything away and replanning anew.

But luckily for me, that meant I was enabled to do multiple takes with Marlon, shooting from a number of different angles and in a number of different ways. Five days is five days—you really get a chance to spend quality time with a guy when he’s two feet away from you on a stage and you are depending upon each other to conduct the shape of what transpires.

Because this was a day scene and we needed to catch as much light as the winter months would yield, each day we were in the makeup chair at three in the morning in order to be shoot-ready at seven. Whoever had picked this location thought that because we were in the South Pacific, the days would be really long, when in fact we only had daylight from around 6:30 in the morning till 4:30 in the afternoon, which was a major snafu for a film company that’s depending on fourteen hours of sunlight a day to keep anywhere near budget. For the first couple of days Marlon arrived at 8:30 or 9, and it took him a while to get up to speed as to what was going down. Once he got up to speed, he was terrific. He was fantastic. And he was very much like a kid in a carnival, especially in this scene. He was surrounded by these incredibly exotic, truly imaginative creations that Stan Winston had spent so much of his time and artistry to develop. You could sense Marlon really appreciated this creativity and was wide-eyed and enthusiastic about being a part of this incredibly well imagined world. He would turn around and say, “Look at that guy! That’s some weird shit right there.”

He was this beautiful, innocent, very fun, very loving guy who really, really just wanted to fit in. Just wanted to entertain himself. He just wanted to entertain others. He was very curious about who you were, how you got here, what you were doing later: Where do you eat around here? Where does a guy get a drink? Blah blah blah. Don’t get me wrong—Marlon had developed a series of little tests he put people through, but I came to understand that it was just his way of separating the people he could trust from the sycophants. But once you passed through his little ritual and were given the seal of approval, the man let down his guard and became as accessible and wonderfully human as anybody I’d ever met. And so after a bit of test specially designed by Marlon himself, suddenly the mystique of him melted away, and what replaced it was sweetness, kindness, and a childlike obsession to spend as much of the day as possible just laughing and cutting up. He hated pretense and despised anyone who treated him like anything other than just one of the boys.

This was the first movie he had done since the incident when his son Christian shot his son-in-law Dag Drollet, a wretched affair that had unfortunately played out in front of the eyes of the world. The family had been through a horrific trial in Los Angeles, in which Christian ultimately ended up being found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to five years in prison. As a result, the people of Terraria turned on Brando, making it clear that he was unwelcome back in the community. What made this even more tragic than it already was, was that the island of Terraria, which he had bought while filming
Mutiny on the Bounty
, was the one place on this Earth where he could go to find true peace and contentment. It was a place where he could just be Marlon, or Pops, as he liked to be called, without the ugly glare of the public eye invading his precious desire to just be normal. He lost his safe haven, and his son was in jail. And on top of that, in the aftermath of this incident and as a result of this emotional sorrow, his daughter Cheyenne, who was the apple of his eye, killed herself. So we were getting Marlon in a state in which he was trying to put on as good a face as possible, trying to be as professional as possible, but you
could tell he was profoundly wounded emotionally and had suffered a really horrific blow. At the end of the day, even though he wasn’t a traditional parent—he had probably eight kids who he actually took care of—he truly loved his family and truly took care of anybody in his orbit, so this was a blow to him.

So for Marlon to be in the South Pacific, on the one hand, the rainforest was soothing him somehow by reminding him of his beloved Tahiti, and yet, on the other hand, it was causing him to feel a longing and sorrow. In my obsession to observe him, I was really seeing a man who was actually holding on for dear life, trying to find some sense to it all and some equilibrium. He did his very best to remain positive. I learned that if you had a joke to tell him or a funny story to tell him, he would completely just drop everything he was doing to hear it. And then he would return with two or three other funny stories of his own. So he was a guy who was very, very happy to be entertained and to be around entertaining people. There was this kind of adolescent, wide-eyed innocence to him that was infectious, and that was quite beautiful. He had the capacity to be very generous and very kind.

One of the first things that happened on day two of the filming of this trial scene was that Frankenheimer decided to do Marlon’s close-ups. He wanted to do a medium shot and a close-up of Marlon so that the crowd that we’re playing to, the community for this trial, is behind him. So Marlon said, “Okay, so if you’re setting up to do coverage on me, I want you to take these two hundred people and put them in the shade—we don’t need them now.”

But Frankenheimer said, “Well, Marlon, I’m going to keep them here. I need them here for reaction.”

“John,” Marlon said, “I don’t think you heard me. We’re in Northern Australia. There’s no fucking ozone layer. The sun is beating down on these people in masks and heavy clothing, and you’re asking them to stand out there in this field, uncovered and unprotected, while you’re shooting through them onto me. So I want you to put them in a shady place. I want you to get every one of them a Coca-Cola, and if I gotta pay for it, just put it on my bill. I want you to take care of that
right now, ’cuz I’m not going to do anything until you do. And by the way, get rid of this guy, because he’s bothering me.” The “this guy” he was referring to was me. Then he said, “And then I’ll be ready to do my close-up.”

“Marlon,” Frankenheimer said, “you don’t understand. The crowd must stay because I need to feel free to move the camera and maybe get a glimpse of them.”

And, shrewdly, Marlon said, “You mean you think you might see a reflection of the crowd through my sunglasses?”

John answered, “I’m actually going to try to get that.”

To which Marlon said, “You’re never gonna be able to get that.”

“What do you mean I’m never going to be able to get that?”

“Because I’m gonna play the whole fuckin’ scene like this,” and Marlon put his head up so he was facing the sky, so the only thing you could see reflected in his glasses was clouds. Marlon said, “So fuck you, you’re not getting the crowd. Put them in the shade and give them a soda because you’re a fucking Nazi, John.”