Marlon Brando, Donald Cammell And The Novel What They Wrote
The Method king and the transgressive filmmaker set out to write a story together. It could've worked out better...
Between 1979 and 1989, Marlon Brando made only one film - John G Avildsen's The Formula - and he only appeared in that because he needed the money. Otherwise, Brando kept as far away from Hollywood as was humanly possible. In large part he accomplished this feat by holing up on Tetiaroa, his Tahitian island home.
While in the South Seas, Brando wasn't completely removed from the movie industry. On the contrary, he spent much of the 1980s in the company of the Edinburgh-born writer-director Donald Cammell. Together the pair thrashed out a story designed to restore Brando to super-stardom and transform the Scot from cult artist to major Hollywood player. The project was entitled Fan-Tan after a game of chance that was popular in the gambling houses of Hong Kong and Macao. Alas the wager would ruin a relationship and all but kill-off Cammell's Hollywood career.
Marlon Brando's testicles - that’s what first brought Donald Cammell into the legendary actor's orbit in the late 1950s. Laid up in a Paris hospital after a pot of coffee scalded his balls, Brando asked fellow actor Christian Marquand whether he might visit in order to break up the boredom. Since Marquand was close friends with Donald Cammell, also then resident in the City Of Light, he thought the film-mad Scotsman would love to meet the premier actor of the age.
In such unusual circumstances began a friendship that would span the better part of 40 years. At the time of their first meeting, Cammell was a successful painter who was looking for new artistic challenges. His growing passion for cinema saw him turn his hand to screenwriting, a gambit which produced 1968's Performance, one of the greatest British films of the post-year period.
A heady cocktail of sex and drugs and violence and identity, Performance wasn't only written by Cammell; he co-directed the film with the revered cinematographer Nic Roeg. The picture that emerged so shocked the studio, it sat on a shelf for two years. When it limped into cinemas in 1970, Performance was greeted by no end of outrage and a few, but only a few, glowing notices. Among its fans was one Marlon Brando.
"Marlon saw Donald as an original - one of few." So says producer Elliott Kastner in Donald Cammell: The Ultimate Performance. A fine documentary co-directed by Kevin MacDonald - later to win the Oscar for One Day In September - The Ultimate Performance points up the fact that, at the time Donald Cammell was burning up the screen with his breakthrough film, the great Brando had all but given up on cinema. Indeed, were it not for The Godfather, it's conceivable the Method great would have sat out the whole of the 1970s.
As for the influence Cammell had upon the actor, it seems reasonable to suggest that it was the edginess and abandon of Performance that encouraged Marlon to explore the darker corners of the self in Last Tango In Paris (1972). Bernardo Bertolucci's hugely controversial drama certainly shares thematic concerns with Cammell's picture, which is rather fitting given that Cammell and Brando's obsessions were as similar as they were rather unsettling.
One thing the pair had in common was their love for a teenage girl called China Kong. To Brando, she was almost a goddaughter, the actor having enjoyed a lengthy relationship with China's mother. To Donald, on the other hand, she was the future Mrs Cammell. The sight of the young China (pronounced Chin-er) being swept off her feet by the older, madder, badder Donald Cammell very nearly saw Brando call time on the men's friendship. It was as husband-and-wife, however, that Donald and China came to Tahiti in the early 1980s to finish work on a project Cammell and Brando had begun to thrash out in 1979.
A tale of piracy on the South Seas, Fan-Tan began life as a film treatment, almost became a script, was re-envisioned as a novel, and was then shelved for 20-odd years. The story itself revolves around the antics of one Anatole 'Annie' Doultry, like Cammell a son of Edinburgh who like Brando has found a home in South-East Asia and Oceania. Our hero actually has many things in common with his creators - a passion for Asian and Polynesian women, a fascination with sex, a predilection for sadomasochism (as evidence of this shared obsession, I cite the beatings dealt out in Cammell's Performance and Wild Side and the scenes of Brando having the shit kicked out of him in One-Eyed Jacks and The Chase).
Annie Doultry is also really into guns, as was Donald who'd sometimes attend studio meetings with a Glock in his satchel. The lengthy descriptions of vessels and life at seas, meanwhile, are exactly what you'd expect from the heir to the Cammell Laird shipyard empire.
Speaking of the leading character, it's clear that Annie Doultry was created with the early 1980s Brando in mind. Around that time, the actor was letting his hair and his waistline grow and grow. Not so coincidentally, Doultry is a man with an impressive mane and a beard that he wears in the Chinese style, even painting the tips red on occasion. Annie's carriage, on the other hand, isn't just sizeable, it's the key to one of Fan-Tan's key twists, one which involves the brigand shooting himself in the flank to cover up his involvement in a hijack.
If he succeeded in fashioning a character that appealed to his co-writer, Cammell was less successful in maintaining Brando's attention. Notoriously fickle, Marlon's passion for the project began to ebb the moment Donald and China returned to the US. To his credit, Cammell understood that, if you work with Marlon Brando, nothing is ever going to be straightforward. He therefore came up with another plan for Fan-Tan. For if his collaborator couldn't be arsed to make it is a movie, how about if he, Donald Seton Cammell, took a crack at transforming it into a novel!?
Brando was receptive to the suggestion, quite possibly because his writing partner would do all the work, leaving him responsible solely for cashing the cheque. The star also liked Cammell's idea that if Fan-Tan existed as a novel, this wouldn't only help publicise any potential movie adaptation, the sales could help finance said project.
But then, as with the script, Marlon Brando cooled on the idea. Okay, so he let his collaborator keep the advance, returning the same sum to the publishers out of his, Brando's, own pocket. What couldn't be compensated was the time Donald had spent writing Fan-Tan, time he might otherwise have spent on a directorial career which, due to his eccentricities and refusal to comprise, yielded just four films over 25 years.
To make things even worse, Brando put the mockers on a second proposed Cammell collaboration, a crime thriller called Jericho. According to Brando's proposed co-star Cathy Moriarty, Jericho was a superb script, superior, even to Cammell's 1987's serial killer drama White Of The Eye.
"It was a meat and potatoes movie, Elliott Kastner confirms. "I kept saying to Donald, 'You can do all the Brecht you want; go out and make a movie that does film rentals.' But Donald just couldn't get in there and fight the rounds. It would've been worth it. Sure, you get a little bloody but just get in there and stay with it." Sadly, while the rounds were being fought, Marlon Brando was busy throwing in the towel.
And that seemed to be that both for the Brando-Cammell axis and the ill-fated Fan-Tan. At least, it would've been were it not the events that followed. In 1996, Donald Cammell - depressed over many things, not least his unstable marriage and studio-imposed changes to his latest film, Wild Side - took his own life in Los Angeles, using his favourite firearm. Six years later, worn down by the imprisonment of his son Christian and the suicide of his daughter Cheyenne, Marlon Brando died in LA from congestive heart failure.
An audit of each man's archive yielded the Fan-Tan film treatment, the aborted Fan-Tan script and the three-quarters of Fan-Tan the novel that Cammell had completed before the book was put on ice. Enlisting the help of noted critic David Thomson to bring the story to completion, Random House published Fan-Tan in 2005 to largely negative reviews and all manner of innuendo.
Read today, Fan-Tan feels less like a cheap cash-in than an interesting idea that merited more time and attention. Although credited to both Brando and Cammell, the sex scenes alone confirm that the book belongs to the latter rather than the former. Likewise the vivid characters, the central one of which would've been a fascinating addition to the Brando oeuvre; Annie Doultry comes on like a cross between Sir William Walker, the mercenary he portrayed in Gilo Pontecorvo's Burn! (1969), and Lee Clyaton, the cross-dressing, multi-accented bounty hunter he played in 1974's The Missouri Breaks.
No matter the joys and frustrations of Fan-Tan, it's hard to feel too sorry for the men who - almost - brought it into the world. Though fantastically talented people, neither Marlon Brando nor Donald Cammell were particularly likeable. In his memoir Life, Keith Richards goes to some length to describe Cammell as a pimp and a user; that the Rolling Stone and the film director had each been involved with Anita Pallenberg only served to stoke Keef's Ire.
As for Brando, he got on the wrong side of arch-diabolist Kenneth Anger. "Marlon is bad karma," Anger explains in The Ultimate Performance. "He uses his power in a way that is not good."
As he got on the wrong side of Keith Richards, it's fair to say that Donald Cammell was a wrong-un. But by striking dread into a man who practices black magic and has 'Lucifer' tattooed across his chest in vast, unfriendly letters, it's reasonable to suggest that Marlon Brando was an old devil in every sense of the word.