Trevor Howard, playing Captain Bligh, left for home swearing: “Never again will I take part in an epic,” and to prove his point he turned down Cleopatra. He thought it was “the greatest travesty in the world to allow Brando to snap and snarl at me.”
In their steamy tents the sweating writers invented a game to preserve their sanity. They made up imaginary labels to hang on the cast. Trevor Howard: “a deafening answer to no question.” Aaron Rosenberg: “the persistent marshmallow.” For Brando, they had a tag so obscene that he brooded for days, trying in vain to think of some way to strike back at them.
At work, on a typical morning, he’d stand on the Bounty deck, draw his cutlass, and yell at the ship’s company: “I now take command of this....” At that second, his memory would falter. The crew and other cast members filled in for him. “Train?” somebody suggested. Marlon nodded his thanks and take eighteen began. This time he got it right ... “command of this ship.”
Charles Lederer insisted: “Brando is responsible for a great deal of whatever brilliance the picture has. But neither he nor anybody else I know can improvise and be better in five minutes on the set than a writer with three weeks at a typewriter.”
Marlon’s enthusiasm touched rock bottom when it came to playing scenes supposedly on Pitcairn Island, where the Bounty mutineers landed. Rosenberg ordered him to perform. Richard Harris related the rest of the story: “Brando fouled it up good. He came to work for a few days, but I thought he was acting as though he wanted to scuttle it. So I finally told him: ‘When you’re willing to perform like a pro, I’ll be in my dressing room.’ The picture was suspended for three days, while they tried to get him to resume, but not a word about it got into print—it was all suppressed.”
The cast didn’t know what they were doing most of the time because the next scene usually contradicted whatever they were trying to play. Harris had another clash with Brando. He told me: “Brando said: ‘This is the final script. I want nothing changed, not a line, not a comma.’ On the strength of that, I memorized eight pages. We rehearsed it in the morning, went to lunch, and prepared to shoot in the afternoon.”
The company returned after the break, and the cameras rolled. Then “Cut!” Harris related: “They told me I was wrong. When I asked why, I found out they’d changed the script during lunch. I demanded that the producer be brought to the set.”
Aaron Rosenberg didn’t know that changes had been made. “Actors,” said Brando to Harris, “are paid to do their jobs without opinion.”
Harris exploded. “You like to pull the strings as though others are puppets. This scene was changed because you demanded it.” At that point Lewis Milestone walked off the set. So did Harris, who’s an outspoken Irishman. “When Mr. Brando is ready to perform, I’m available,” he said once more.
“It was a long way to my dressing room. You’d have thought I was radioactive the way everybody backed away from me. I lay down on my couch and closed my eyes. Presently the director stuck his head in the door to say sotto voce: ‘Everybody in the company wants to applaud. You were great.’ But still no one came in until Rosenberg shook my hand, said he was sorry this had happened, and added: ‘Thank you.’”