Early one morning in January 1971, a young film director sat waiting nervously with a skeleton film crew in a sitting room on Mulholland Drive.
Everyone was silent – the target of their mission, they had been told, did not like noise. A camera had been set up, a few bits of prosciutto and cheese placed on a table.
Finally, the owner of the house entered, wearing a long Japanese robe. Without acknowledging anyone, he sat down. As the camera began to whirr, he tied his long, blond hair up in a pigtail, applied black shoe polish to it and filled his cheeks with cotton wool.
‘This man is a bulldog,’ he murmured to himself, with a strange, hoarse rasp. Muttering wordlessly, he picked at the food, stared up at the ceiling, scratched his cheek, gestured at imaginary people. The phone rang. He answered. He wheezed incoherently for a few seconds, then hung up. Whoever was at the other end, puzzled as they no doubt were, was a small part of film history.
The director, Francis Ford Coppola, had just recorded the. By the end of the year, Coppola would have created one of the most acclaimed and influential films ever made; and Brando, after a lost decade of self-indulgence both off and on the screen, would have restored his shattered reputation and once again be called the greatest actor in the world.
