One-Eyed Jacks Cut An Entire Scene Because Of A Too-Drunk Marlon Brando
We hear a lot of stories about method actors going so far with their process that they become a total pain on set, ranging from Dustin Hoffman on "Marathon Man" to Jared Leto on "Morbius" and "Suicide Squad." Of course, there are plenty of method actors who aren't an irritant or a menace on set. Most of them are like that. We just don't hear about them because the stories aren't as weird as sending a rat to your co-star.
But then you have the grandaddy of them all, the man responsible for changing what film acting is: Marlon Brando. For as dynamic and groundbreaking an actor as he was, few actors have garnered as big of a reputation as him for being a really unpleasant co-worker. You have the truly horrific stuff that occurred on set for "Last Tango in Paris," but you also have things like not wanting to take direction from Frank Oz on "The Score" because he was Miss Piggy. To put it mildly, Brando was not an easy fellow to work with.
So, when he ended up directing a film, that would mean he would get his act together, right? Being a director means a lot of responsibility, especially if you are also starring in the film as well. Things got off rough in pre-production when his behavior in story meetings drove Stanley Kubrick to leave the project, leaving the vacancy for Brando to fill.
But once "One-Eyed Jacks" started shooting, he still couldn't leave all of his shenanigans behind. One particular bit of "method" acting led to an entire scene getting scrapped because he felt getting completely plastered was the best way to do it. Obviously, it wasn't.
Hitting the bottle too hard
Every movie has deleted scenes. Usually, this is because of judicious editing and a filmmaker's understanding of how their movie should flow. Rarer are the deleted scenes where the star and director cannot physically perform them due to a warped sense of good performance. In his autobiography "Brando: Songs My Mother Taught Me," Marlon Brando recalled why a "One-Eyed Jacks" scene, where his character was to sexually assault a woman being played by Lisa Lu, ultimately went nowhere:
"I was supposed to get drunk, come in out of the rain and rape a Chinese girl. You can't fake drunkenness in a movie. You can in a play, but not in a close-up, so I figured the scene would work better if I really got drunk ... It has never taken much alcohol to put me over the edge, so in no time at all I was staggering around, grabbing hold of the girl. Unfortunately, I was too drunk to finish the scene, so a few days later I got drunk again and reshot it. It still wasn't right, and I had to do it on a number of afternoons until it was right."
Obviously, it was never right, as the scene didn't make the final film. While I'm glad we were spared seeing a drunk Brando assaulting a woman on screen, Lu and the entire crew had to put up with that multiple times over the course of the production. Nobody should have to deal with that, especially in a professional setting. The making of "One-Eyed Jacks" was a long and arduous process that put Brando off from directing ever again. This instance is a good example of why he wasn't really cut out for the gig, even if the finished film is actually pretty good.