Easy Street (The Hard Way) A Memoir

by Ron Perlman

  “Oh, dos,” shot back the little guy, proudly holding up two tiny little fingers.

  And before I could restrain myself I blurted out, “Yeah, and both of ’em were this one!” Another sad look from Brando. This was not going well for the Perl.

  From that moment on Marlon became so fascinated with this character that he elevated him to being a kind of mini-me. He became Dr. Moreau’s alter ego. And every time you saw Dr. Moreau on the screen, Nelson was there, dressed in the exact same outfit as him, only tinier. There’s even a scene that Marlon created in which Moreau is playing a baby grand piano, and he had the art department build a tiny baby grand to sit on top of the real one while they ferociously played duets.

  At any rate, from the moment Marlon laid eyes on little Nelson, Marlon saw an opportunity to build his entire world using this device as a lynchpin to unearth the experimental nature of Moreau’s obsession with creating the ultimate subculture. And we all saw it happening right in front of our eyes. Marlon Brando! Like him or not, he was flat-fucking fascinating.

  (CHAPTER 20)

  The Doctor Will See You Now

  The only real scene I originally had in the film was a big trial scene. In it, one of the members of Moreau’s merry band of freaks crosses the line of civility and must be dealt with summarily. The Sayer of the Law had the task of reciting the litany of laws in a ritualistic form to remind everyone of the limits of their little society. The speech was lifted straight out of the H. G. Wells novel, thus maintaining purity to the storytelling that was sacrosanct. “Do not slurp but sip. Do not go on all fours”—weird shit like that. The Sayer’s job is to remind the villagers of unyielding absolutism of these laws, that there is a corporeal implication for any behavior that falls short of human. The scene I was essentially there to do involved one of our members’ brutal taking down of prey. By slipping back into the feral, he had broken one of Moreau’s most sacred trusts. The individual is put on a trial conducted by the Sayer. Moreau is the judge of the trial, and the entire community is present. It was a huge, complicated scene, with a lot of moving parts.

  It was during those days I was acting with the great one, because he’s sitting there on his makeshift bench like you see in courtrooms, but in an outdoor amphitheater of sorts. I was standing by his side with a rod, as if I’m some sort of symbol of justice. I was saying these incantations, and when I get to the incantation, “Thou shalt not kill,” Moreau stops me and says, “That law has been broken.” And the trial ensues. So this scene was scheduled to take a day and a half to shoot; it ended up taking five and a half because it was a hot mess. There were 250 extras and a lot of disorganization. There was a lot of reinterpretation taking place when Frankenheimer saw what Marlon wanted to do and how he wanted to fold little Nelson into the scenario. There was a lot of planning and replanning and then throwing everything away and replanning anew.

  But luckily for me, that meant I was enabled to do multiple takes with Marlon, shooting from a number of different angles and in a number of different ways. Five days is five days—you really get a chance to spend quality time with a guy when he’s two feet away from you on a stage and you are depending upon each other to conduct the shape of what transpires.

  Because this was a day scene and we needed to catch as much light as the winter months would yield, each day we were in the makeup chair at three in the morning in order to be shoot-ready at seven. Whoever had picked this location thought that because we were in the South Pacific, the days would be really long, when in fact we only had daylight from around 6:30 in the morning till 4:30 in the afternoon, which was a major snafu for a film company that’s depending on fourteen hours of sunlight a day to keep anywhere near budget. For the first couple of days Marlon arrived at 8:30 or 9, and it took him a while to get up to speed as to what was going down. Once he got up to speed, he was terrific. He was fantastic. And he was very much like a kid in a carnival, especially in this scene. He was surrounded by these incredibly exotic, truly imaginative creations that Stan Winston had spent so much of his time and artistry to develop. You could sense Marlon really appreciated this creativity and was wide-eyed and enthusiastic about being a part of this incredibly well imagined world. He would turn around and say, “Look at that guy! That’s some weird shit right there.”

  He was this beautiful, innocent, very fun, very loving guy who really, really just wanted to fit in. Just wanted to entertain himself. He just wanted to entertain others. He was very curious about who you were, how you got here, what you were doing later: Where do you eat around here? Where does a guy get a drink? Blah blah blah. Don’t get me wrong—Marlon had developed a series of little tests he put people through, but I came to understand that it was just his way of separating the people he could trust from the sycophants. But once you passed through his little ritual and were given the seal of approval, the man let down his guard and became as accessible and wonderfully human as anybody I’d ever met. And so after a bit of test specially designed by Marlon himself, suddenly the mystique of him melted away, and what replaced it was sweetness, kindness, and a childlike obsession to spend as much of the day as possible just laughing and cutting up. He hated pretense and despised anyone who treated him like anything other than just one of the boys.

  This was the first movie he had done since the incident when his son Christian shot his son-in-law Dag Drollet, a wretched affair that had unfortunately played out in front of the eyes of the world. The family had been through a horrific trial in Los Angeles, in which Christian ultimately ended up being found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to five years in prison. As a result, the people of Terraria turned on Brando, making it clear that he was unwelcome back in the community. What made this even more tragic than it already was, was that the island of Terraria, which he had bought while filming Mutiny on the Bounty, was the one place on this Earth where he could go to find true peace and contentment. It was a place where he could just be Marlon, or Pops, as he liked to be called, without the ugly glare of the public eye invading his precious desire to just be normal. He lost his safe haven, and his son was in jail. And on top of that, in the aftermath of this incident and as a result of this emotional sorrow, his daughter Cheyenne, who was the apple of his eye, killed herself. So we were getting Marlon in a state in which he was trying to put on as good a face as possible, trying to be as professional as possible, but you could tell he was profoundly wounded emotionally and had suffered a really horrific blow. At the end of the day, even though he wasn’t a traditional parent—he had probably eight kids who he actually took care of—he truly loved his family and truly took care of anybody in his orbit, so this was a blow to him.

  So for Marlon to be in the South Pacific, on the one hand, the rainforest was soothing him somehow by reminding him of his beloved Tahiti, and yet, on the other hand, it was causing him to feel a longing and sorrow. In my obsession to observe him, I was really seeing a man who was actually holding on for dear life, trying to find some sense to it all and some equilibrium. He did his very best to remain positive. I learned that if you had a joke to tell him or a funny story to tell him, he would completely just drop everything he was doing to hear it. And then he would return with two or three other funny stories of his own. So he was a guy who was very, very happy to be entertained and to be around entertaining people. There was this kind of adolescent, wide-eyed innocence to him that was infectious, and that was quite beautiful. He had the capacity to be very generous and very kind.

  One of the first things that happened on day two of the filming of this trial scene was that Frankenheimer decided to do Marlon’s close-ups. He wanted to do a medium shot and a close-up of Marlon so that the crowd that we’re playing to, the community for this trial, is behind him. So Marlon said, “Okay, so if you’re setting up to do coverage on me, I want you to take these two hundred people and put them in the shade—we don’t need them now.”

  But Frankenheimer said, “Well, Marlon, I’m going to keep them here. I need th
em here for reaction.”

  “John,” Marlon said, “I don’t think you heard me. We’re in Northern Australia. There’s no fucking ozone layer. The sun is beating down on these people in masks and heavy clothing, and you’re asking them to stand out there in this field, uncovered and unprotected, while you’re shooting through them onto me. So I want you to put them in a shady place. I want you to get every one of them a Coca-Cola, and if I gotta pay for it, just put it on my bill. I want you to take care of that right now, ’cuz I’m not going to do anything until you do. And by the way, get rid of this guy, because he’s bothering me.” The “this guy” he was referring to was me. Then he said, “And then I’ll be ready to do my close-up.”

  “Marlon,” Frankenheimer said, “you don’t understand. The crowd must stay because I need to feel free to move the camera and maybe get a glimpse of them.”

  And, shrewdly, Marlon said, “You mean you think you might see a reflection of the crowd through my sunglasses?”

  John answered, “I’m actually going to try to get that.”

  To which Marlon said, “You’re never gonna be able to get that.”

  “What do you mean I’m never going to be able to get that?”

  “Because I’m gonna play the whole fuckin’ scene like this,” and Marlon put his head up so he was facing the sky, so the only thing you could see reflected in his glasses was clouds. Marlon said, “So fuck you, you’re not getting the crowd. Put them in the shade and give them a soda because you’re a fucking Nazi, John.”

  “I am not a Nazi, Marlon,” Frankenheimer said. I’m standing there looking at this thing. These guys might actually be getting ready to start throwin’ fists!

  “You’re a fucking Nazi, John,” Marlon said. “A fucking Nazi wouldn’t want to put these people in the shade. You’re a Nazi.”

  “How could you call me that? That’s a horrible thing to call a person.”

  Then Marlon said—and this was my favorite part—“Have you ever seen a movie called Young Lions?”

  “Of course I did,” Frankenheimer said. “It was directed by Edward Dmytryk. It was you, it was Montgomery Clift, it was Maximilian Schell, it was Dean Martin. You played a German officer. You were great in that movie!”

  “That’s right I did,” Marlon said. “I know Nazis. And you’re a fucking Nazi, John!”

  So Frankenheimer said, “Okay, I’ll tell you what. I’ll make a deal with you. We’ll put the crowd in the shade. They don’t have to be here, but Ron Perlman stays.”

  “Why, John?” Brando asked. “Why does he gotta stay?”

  “What is it about him that’s bothering you?”

  “He’s saying these fucking words that are so fucking weird that I don’t think I can concentrate. Every time he speaks, he throws me off.”

  “Well, those are the words, the incantations that are in the script,” Frankenheimer said.

  “Well I don’t give a shit, it’s bothering me,” Marlon said. “We gotta cut ’em or something.”

  Finally I chimed in: “H. G. Wells himself wrote those words. I’ll do anything ya want, but it’d sure be nice if we could figure out a way to keep ’em.”

  So Marlon said, “Okay, okay, you can stay, but fer Chistsakes, can you say ’em a little quieter, like almost so I can’t hear you?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Whatever you need, Pops. Whatever you need.” So that was my really true first working exchange with Marlon. What started out as awkward is goin’ downhill fast!

  I realized, okay, I’m in some sort of game here that I’m not quite sure how to play. But he just kind of singled me out. He doesn’t really know me. He’s kind of thrown down some sort of gauntlet, and I actually feel like I’m being challenged in some sort of way. I’ve got these goat horns on, and I look like a fucking idiot. I got to say these stupid words that were written in 1896 that are really tough to say without sounding like a putz, but hey, that’s how H. G. wanted ’em. So as much as I don’t like being here anymore, clearly Marlon likes it even less. The whole thing is fucked up, but we’re going to have to do this, like it or not, for the next however many hours—shit, days—’cuz we gotta get this muthafucka in the can.

  So, sure enough, they broke for lunch to light the scene so that they could start shooting Marlon’s coverage. I walked away from set, but I didn’t go to lunch. I went straight to my trailer to throw up. Thank God for the makeup, so no one could really see my face, but I was an inch away from ballin’ my eyes out. Here I’ve come 16 gazillion hundred fuckin’ miles, put fuckin’ horns on my head, studied my ass off so I could finally, finally be in the glow of the greatest of all time, and as soon as it’s showtime, he decides to obliterate me.

  It took me the whole lunch hour to pull my shit together, but as work time was approaching, I started saying to myself, I’m a professional actor. I’ve been hired to do a job. I have not only a right but also an obligation to be here. I sure wish my hero hadn’t broken my heart, but he did, so that’s that. Fuck what he thinks of me. Let’s do this!

  We took our places on set; Billy Fraker, one of the greatest cinematographers of all time, finished tweaking the lights; and the first AD rolled camera. Frankenheimer yelled, “Action!” and it was fucking on. I said a line, and he said a line back, and then I said another line, and he said another line back. And suddenly it was startin’ to cook. And I’m feeling so proud of myself that I start celebrating in my head. And then there was this long, awkward silence. I was looking around, thinking, Hmmm, somebody done fucked up here. I heard Marlon say, “It’s your line.”

  Now you have to understand, I had these lenses in so I was completely blind. I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face. I could only hear Marlon. I didn’t even know that he was physically there because I couldn’t see anything. I was wondering who he was talking to. He was saying, “Hey! You with the horns! It’s your line.” It was the first time in my entire career that I had gone up on my lines because I was so caught up in the coolness of this. For all I know, they’ll be comparing this to the taxi scene between him and Rod Steiger.

  So when I finally realized that it’s just him and me in the scene and that I’m the only one wearing horns, it hit me: Oh shit, he’s talking to me! And I said, “Oh, I’m sorry, that’s my line, isn’t it?”

  And Marlon said, “That’s okay, let’s go back. Let’s start again. Let me know when you’re ready.” Little by little I could see he was beginning to become sympathetic toward me because he was seeing that I was really standing my ground, driving the scene, proving myself to him, just like he designed it when he was giving me shit earlier. Then he said, “Let me know when you’re ready.” I had him. He was on my wavelength. We were gonna fucking act this scene—together!

  He let me kind of run that scene from that point on, and we ended up doing about two or three takes from each angle. With each take I could feel him coming with me deeper into dialogue. Without saying a word to each other, he figured out exactly what I needed to drive the scene, and I got more and more specific the more he gave me. And it didn’t take too long before he said, “I like that one. How did you feel?”

  “I’m good too,” I said.

  “Yeah, I think we got it,” he said. “Let’s move on.”

  By the end of all the coverage, despite a little bit of a rocky start, we were two guys that had been on the same wavelength for a little while. That’s a feeling I just can’t describe. But it’s beautiful. It’s why I love this thing that I do, that I’ve done for forty years. Except this time I got to do it with Zeus! So for the next three and a half days, till we finished this thing, it was clear sailing with me and Pops. In fact, I’m so loose that the jokes start flowin’. That’s when I realized for myself what I had heard from people for years: that if you could make Marlon laugh, you owned him.

  Anyway, for the next four days we were shooting this same scene. And for four days, after we finished a shot, Pops would split back to his trailer and wait for the team to change set-ups. B
ut because I kinda got nauseated every time they popped my lenses in or out, I decided to just keep them in. So instead of leaving the set, I just sat there and waited. Which meant that every time Marlon got called back to set, he’d have to move his 320-pound frame around me on the tiny platform to get back to his throne. And I’d hear him mumble shit, stuff like, “Jesus, you’re not a small guy, and I’m not a small guy. You could at least gimme a little room to maneuver here.” And I’d throw out some little barbs that got him to chuckle, and we’d go back to work.

  Finally, on the fifth day of shooting this scene I was sitting on my little stool, waiting, when I felt these two hands violently grab my shoulders. I mean, I jumped out of my fucking skin! I jumped up and turned to figure out who the fuck just did that, even though I couldn’t see shit. After a few seconds I heard Marlon say, “Holy shit, what’s that in your eyes?”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Wait a minute,” he said. “Holy shit, are you . . . are you playing this character blind?”

  “Marlon, yer fuckin’ with me, right?” I said.

  “No man,” he said. “I’m asking you if you’re playing him blind?!”

  “Marlon,” I said, “we’ve been doing this fucking scene for five and a half days, and you’re asking me now if I’m playin’ the fuckin’ guy blind? You’re kidding, right?”

  Then Marlon said, “Hey John! He’s playing the guy blind! Oh man, we’ve gotta start again.”

  “What are you talking about, Marlon?” Frankenheimer said.

  “If I knew that he was playing the guy blind,” Marlon said, “I would have played it completely differently. We gotta go back and start again!”

  “Fuck you, Marlon,” Frankenheimer said. “We’re not starting again.”

  “I was just kidding, John.” And then Marlon turned back to me and said, “And by the way, are you the guy that sent me all that Afro-Cuban music when I first got here?”