1/13/2024 0 Comments Marty schwartz![]() “He was looking to generate money, but the products he came up with weren’t viable. “He called me to discuss products he could sell on QVC,” recalls his longtime secretary, Alice Marchak. Robin Williams attended all 10 days, at one point doing a 30-minute improv routine about haggling with a used-car salesman. He always had a reason.”) While a jazz musician played Brando’s favorite tunes on a rented piano, Philippe Petit, the French tightrope walker who had crossed the Twin Towers, did stunts on a high-wire. (“The girls were shaking, like, ‘What the f- am I doing here?’ ” recalls Olmos. He had students strip naked in front of the entire class. Another time, Brando plucked a homeless man from a dumpster and brought him in for acting lessons. ![]() It also featured some of the strangest, and some would say finest, performances of Brando’s later years.ĭuring one of the sessions, a troupe of little people and a team of Samoan wrestlers - Brando somehow had wrangled all of them to the warehouse on the same day - did improvisation exercises together on the stage. The event is little recalled today - and even back then it slipped mostly under the radar - but those daylong classes, where movie stars mingled with midgets, Madonna‘s ex-boyfriend nearly caused a riot and an Osama bin Laden lookalike almost gave Jon Voight a coronary, was a never-to-be-repeated moment of Hollywood letting its freak flag fly. “I am furious! Furious!” Brando told the group in a matronly English accent, launching into an improvised monologue that ended, 10 minutes later, with the actor turning around, lifting his gown and mooning the crowd.Īnd that, it turned out, would be one of the more decorous moments of “Lying for a Living,” the wild 10-day symposium - as much a 1960s– style “happening” as it was an acting course - that Brando organized and led in November 2001, less than three years before his death. Waving a single rose in one hand, he sashayed through the warehouse, plunked his 300-pound frame onto a thronelike chair on a makeshift stage and began fussily applying lipstick. When the doors flung open, the 78-year-old Brando appeared wearing a blond wig, blue mascara, a black gown with an orange scarf and a bodice stuffed with gigantic falsies. ![]() But nobody who was part of that extraordinary 10-day acting workshop ever will forget a single detail about Marlon Brando‘s entrance.Ībout 20 young acting students and a dozen established stars - including Sean Penn, Nick Nolte, Edward James Olmos, Whoopi Goldberg and Harry Dean Stanton - had gathered to learn at the feet of the greatest thespian of the 20th century. Some memories of the event - like the exact address of the warehouse in Hollywood where it took place - are a little hazy. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe. This story first appeared in the June 19 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine.
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