Marlon didn’t get off so lightly when he tangled with Fox. The studio pushed Edmond Purdom into The Egyptian, which was a great mistake, and sued Brando for two million dollars. He settled by agreeing to play Napoleon in a turgid flop called Desirée.
The studio bosses are proof positive that you can fool yourself most of the time over stars who, when the fancy strikes them, delight in doing in the people who put up the money. The producers ignore any flop these highly prized players make and hypnotize themselves by repeating over and over: “We can’t go wrong this time; it’s our turn to be lucky.” They blind themselves to the fact that these stars jeer at the money men, make fools of them, regard them deep down as their sworn enemies with the I.Q. of idiots.
Marlon got into stride when he made One-Eyed Jacks, a simple Western that was going to cost no more than $1,800,000 and a few months to complete. First casualty was the director, Stanley Kubrick, who retreated in the early stages of production and abandoned the field to Brando. On his first day as director, Marlon threw away the script and announced: “We’re going to improvise.” For the next half year, he and his crew ran up production bills of $42,000 a day.
He had them spending hours on the shores of the Pacific waiting for the water to “look more dramatic.” He’d start the cameras, then sit with his head between his knees for twenty minutes or more until he got in the mood. As a good democrat, he let his actors vote for the last reel they liked best, and that was the ending he used, though he didn’t care for it himself.
When the front office at Paramount got uneasy and costs passed the $6,000,000 mark, Marlon turned surly: “I’m shooting a movie, not a schedule.” There were days, I’m sure, when Y. Frank Freeman, head of Paramount, would have liked to clobber him, while Marlon went on playing his favorite mumbling, lurching, behind-scratching character—himself. Paramount has long since given up hope of getting its money back, much less of making a profit.
But when Mutiny came around, Metro recited the old mumbo jumbo: “We can’t go wrong on this.” Sol Siegel, who ran the studio, would settle for nobody but Marlon as top star. That little decision, along with several other lulus along the way, cost well over $20,000,000 before the picture was wound up. Marlon enjoyed $1,250,000 for his contributions, along with ten per cent of the gross and an incredible contract giving him the final word on scenes taken on Tahiti.
Screen rights to the original novel by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall were bought by the late Frank Lloyd, a fine, free-lance director, for only $12,000. In order to make the picture and gather the cast he’d set his heart on, he was compelled to sell those rights back to Irving Thalberg at Metro for precisely what they had cost.
Metro’s first flash of creative genius called for Wallace Beery to play Captain Bligh in the breath-catching tale of eighteenth-century mutiny on the high seas aboard the British merchantman Bounty. They envisaged the sadistic captain as a comical old coot pursued by his wife and twelve children. Talked out of that, Thalberg signed Charles Laughton, who for weeks had to be rowed slowly around Catalina Island, flat on his back on the floorboards, to teach his protesting digestion that seasickness was not permissible during working hours.
Louis B. Mayer didn’t think much of the script: “Where’s the romance?” he demanded. Gable didn’t like the idea of playing Fletcher Christian, leader of the mutineers and his finest role up to that date. Eddie Mannix talked him around: “You’re the only guy in the picture who gets anything to do with a dame.” I’ll never know why they didn’t reissue the old Mutiny after Clark’s death—it would have made $5,000,000 and saved Metro a truckload of ulcers.
Frank Lloyd’s picture was ten months in the making, from his first background shooting on Tahiti to its presentation in November 1935. The bills amounted to $1,700,000, the most expensive MGM production of those days. Front-office opposition grew stronger month by month. To satisfy Nick Schenck, a rough cut was sent to New York with the strict understanding that it would be run only for him to see. He had it screened before an audience of four hundred people and afterward delivered himself of this undying judgment: “Tell Thalberg it’s the worst picture MGM ever made.”