Word: brando
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Anatole Doultry--known by the gender-bending nickname Annie--looks and acts a lot like the middle-age Marlon Brando. He is overweight and has a broken nose, a gift for mimicry and a taste for life in the Pacific Rim's more exotic climes. But his most important resemblance to the actor is in that "the layers of his deceptions were like the layers of an onion's skin...
That sentence is the creation of a man named Donald Cammell, who, possibly to his regret, agreed to co-write with Brando a screen treatment, and then a novel, called Fan-Tan, which is about to be published in the latter form (Knopf; 272 pages) a bit more than a year after the death of the once great actor. The book is being blurbed as a "delectable romp" and as the "last surprise from an ever-surprising legend," both claims requiring some parsing...
Thomson's style in that chapter doesn't quite match that of the rest of the book. But his afterword about the novel's creation is fascinating. The idea for the work, he says, originated with Brando. But it was Cammell--a rather louche, not untalented fellow (he wrote and co-directed the cultishly admired Mick Jagger movie Performance in 1970)--who did all the heavy lifting on both treatment and novel. Thomson says Brando chatted with Cammell about the story and scratched a few notes in the margins of the evolving manuscript. That is the not entirely surprising...
...from Over, or Saturday Night Fever III. A self-described "reluctant matador" when it comes to exercise, Travolta has developed some unaesthetic handles around his hips. "When I'm not being paid a lot of money to do a movie and to get in shape, I'm like Marlon Brando," he confesses. Says the determined Isaacson: "There's no question as to whether we can produce the shape and the look." After all, Isaacson came to fame, or more precisely to the attention of the famous, three years ago when he prepped Travolta for Staying Alive (Fever II). Isaacson...
...mostly an act of practical ritual (Jack Dempsey never shaved on the day of a fight) or of casual defiance, like the raggedness of the 1950s beats. Actors showed stubble in movies only when their characters had been through the wringer or on a bender; even rebels like Brando, Dean and Clift were smooth cheeked. But when Clint Eastwood rode through those Italian westerns in the '60s, a meaner, more maverick kind of frontier hero was born, an amusingly amoral gunslinger whose standard equipment was a Colt Peacemaker, a cheroot, a sarape and a five-day stubble. In 1975 when...