(2 of 2)
Brando objects, for instance, to the pressures of movie acting: "You have to get up in front of a camera and say the same lines all day long. It's like saying: 'Pass the salad, pass the salad, pass the salad,' until it gets as dull to your ear as water dripping from a faucet." He also dislikes some of the character-diluting cutting that moviemakers do. One final unkind cut in Caesar: "During the battle—I've forgotten the lines—where Octavius says something like 'Man, what's happening?' and I say 'Cool, Dick.' "
A good Hollywood movie, Brando thinks, is practically impossible to produce because U.S. moviemakers are primarily businessmen: "The Europeans are businessmen too, but they can handle art because their culture permits it. They're not in such a hurry—people take their time. They examine little things. A director will show you a guy going out his door, down a long hall, down the stairs, across the street, into a bar and into the men's room, just to let you know he's going to the men's room. Here, everything has to move fast or people won't like the movie, so it won't make any money."
He feels that most moviegoers do not even want stimulation. "Take the average guy. He looks at a Giorgione, or a Bernini, or a Masaccio, and he says, 'Ehh!' He doesn't have anything in his own life to identify it with. The same with the movies; the guys only want the rubber-stamp product. Why, what happened when you got a picture done with true sensitivity, like The Quiet One [TIME, Jan. 31,1949]? That film died, Dick, it died . . . The moviegoers just don't want to have to reach."
Brando himself is the reaching kind. Having recently finished a Stanley Kramer picture called The Wild One, he plans to "nob around" Manhattan for a few weeks digging the art galleries. Then he sails for a three-month tour of Europe. When he gets back, he hopes to direct an off-Broadway play or two, and study voice and diction on the side. That, he thinks, will be the most.
*The two previous major attempts: Warner's A Midsummer Night's Dream (1935) with Mickey Rooney, Joe E. Brown and James Cagney; MGM's Romeo and Juliet (1936) with Leslie Howard and Norma Shearer. Financially and artistically disastrous, these productions convinced Hollywood that Shakespeare was "boxoffice poison."