Word: brandos
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...long time the city of Dallas has been like Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront. It wants to be a contender, a world-class city. It already has a few of the prerequisites - a skyline, an NFL franchise and a serious traffic problem. But until you have the full panoply of major cultural venues, you're Palookaville...
...your main characters, Perkus Tooth, is this oddball recluse, a pop-culture savant obsessed with Marlon Brando and cult movies. What is it about American pop culture that makes it so easy for us to become obsessed with it? I guess for me, it stands in for the information surrounding us that we're trying to make sense of, including our own behavior, our own culture, other people's lives. With people like Perkus - the most exaggerated collectors or self-appointed experts - there's a poignancy to it. I love that kind of behavior, and I guess I'm guilty...
...Abneg.Chase and Tooth shortly develop a fast, if strange friendship defined by Perkus’ love for marijuana, cheeseburgers, coffee, and esoterica. Their daily smoke sessions serve an indoctrinatory function as well: Tooth enmeshes both Chase and the reader in the interconnections between things as seemingly disparate as Marlon Brando, “Gnuppets” (cf. Muppets), and the redemption of New York City at large. The level of associations starts small at first, focusing on relations between obscure film directors and their actors. As the plot progresses, however, the associations link one into another until they ensnare...
...Following his military service, Schulberg wrote the fight-racket novel The Harder They Fall and had no more movie credits until he and Kazan teamed up for On the Waterfront, for which John Garfield, Frank Sinatra and the young Paul Newman were touted for the Terry Malloy role that Brando made his own. The project brought out the best in Schulberg's muckraking temperament, and served as an apologia for informing on fellow (Daily) workers. On naming names, Schulberg later said: "I felt that what the Party was doing secretively was very wrong; it could have been the Ku Klux...
...death, he attended a staged reading of On the Waterfront in Hoboken, N.J., where it was set and filmed. Among the players were Vincent Pastore (Big Pussy on The Sopranos) as the mob boss Johnny Friendly and Jason Cerbone (Jackie Aprile, Jr., also a Sopranos alumni) in the Brando role. The 55-year-old script still had the fresh stench of local corruption. Hoboken's new mayor, Peter Cammarano, had recently been arrested in the sweeping federal indictment of Jersey politicians; he would resign two days after the reading. A part of Schulberg must have been pleased at this latest...