Marlon Brando Was a Secret Tech Geek and Photoshop Ace (2015) | Hacker News Reader

Marlon Brando Was a Secret Tech Geek and Photoshop Ace (2015)

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171 pointsthunderbong63 comments

I heard that Brando was an early AoL user, already engaged in internet arguments in the 90:s [1].

1: https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/why-marlon-brando-hung-around-a...

Given one of his handles - BrainFlakes - can we find any conversations that he had? I need to search Google Groups for this, as well.

TIL. Grew up seeing Brando in Superman and Apocalypse Now, and didn’t really get why people treated him with such reverence. Was fine in those roles of course.

Wasn’t until I saw Streetcar Named Desire recently that I said wow out loud and understood why. Glad to hear he was a geek as well.

Have you not seen the Godfather?

very relevant question as its one of his best roles

Some of it. It was less than mediocre for me. I don't understand the love for that movie.

GF is one of those films that are so drenched in critical acclaim and hype that it's not possible to simply stumble across it without preconception. For that reason, when you watch it, it doesn't seem spectacular because people have praised it right into the ground.

It’s also been so copied that the original impact is a bit lost. It was the first or one of the first movies to treat the Mafia as an organisation.

And in fact it made the Mafia look so good that Mafiosi started emulating the film.

It insists upon itself, Lois.

I love The Money Pit.

I have on cable as a child—didn’t affect me enough to even comment on. Have it in my mile long queue to revisit.

He's considered the pioneer of realism in cinema. He was also beyond conventionally attractive in his younger years, so much so that it's been memed on a few times. Look up "sexy eye roll".

The Contender: The Story of Marlon Brando is a great read. He was also highly acclaimed as a stage actor before all this.

I have to say though as a huge Brando fan that comparing Superman to Apocalypse Now is utter blasphemy.

They are two films I saw as a child, and I preferred Superman. Though twenty-five years later I would ROFL at “Charlie don’t surf!”

“The actor was even an early user of CoSa After Effects, the post-production program used for green screen and other effects work, which was eventually sold to Adobe.”

As a longtime After Effects user this blew my mind. Very cool, thanks for sharing this!

Recalls Dick Van Dyke (still alive, by the way) being a VFX and 3D modeling hobbyist in the Video Toaster/LightWave Amiga days.

Dick's only on number two on this year's list https://deathlist.net/

This site is morbid and weird, would judge anyone contributing or viewing this pretty harshly

I didn't realize how old Roberta Flack and Sonny Rollins are and that they might be close to dying. They both made important contributions to our culture. I wonder how easy it is to contact them and share my appreciation for everything they've done musically...?

Is that weird or morbid?

I wouldn’t mention the death list.

One would assume you viewed it

One would assume that one would understand one's context of one's link and that one meant taking one's link seriously instead of one looking at one's link to see what one's link was.

The list was created before the web by a bunch of English students. Who else? https://deathlist.net/lists/1987

Wow...that list can be pretty harsh. They included Yoko Ono last year and her description was "Mrs Lennon".

That's the title of her first single from her second album. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mrs._Lennon

And?

Well, considering it's a title of one of her songs, it's like saying "Shake It Off" for Taylor Swift, or "Single Ladies" for Beyoncé.

Working at an interactive museum design firm in the mid 90's we had freelancer named Claudio who insisted we buy Company of Science and Art's After Effects.

I believe the only payment terms we could work out was a Money Order or Cashier's check. The software was very expensive and he required a loaded Mac probably had Daystar Cards in it...

Interesting. Claudio definitely sounds like an identity Brando would choose. Any other details on this? Can you divulge roughly where the design firm was based?

He was not Brando but every bit as out of his mind as I had met as young and eager person trying to be useful with computers and a design background.

The design firm was Edwin Schlossberg Inc. based in NYC. We were revamping a public space in the AT&T building.

https://apops.mas.org/pops/m050018/

ESI was the best job I ever had but since it was also my first job I had no idea:)

And ham radio operator https://www.qrz.com/db/FO5GJ

I didn't know a Software movie had been planned. I can't decide if I'm happy or sad it never got made. :)

I’m sad, but not too surprised. The Ware tetralogy, much like the better known Neuromancer and its offspring, is almost unfilmable.

Accelerando would have a good chance as a miniseries though.

(2015)

He was a unique talent but also apparently really lazy. Wouldn't study his lines & insisted on them being fed to him via earplug. I liked this story though, he seemed like an interesting guy.

> Due to Marlon Brando's infamous large appetite and dislike of Val Kilmer on set, he would request and eat large amounts of cabbage an hour before a scene started and would silently fart on purpose numerous times to leave what was described a "foul stench" that would annoy Kilmer.

Combining those two in a movie would kill the most patient directors

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0116654/trivia/?ref_=tt_trv_trv

> Combining those two in a movie would kill the most patient directors

It killed Richard Stanley's career for 20 years. After which he got the make the fairly well-received Color Out of Space, just in time for his career to get re-killed by a domestic abuse allegation.

Whoopie Goldberg's first name (stage name obviously) is due to her infamous gas.

I heard something like this about Guys And Dolls, too.

> Brando, knowing how much Sinatra hated cheesecake, had purposely flubbed each take so that Sinatra would have to eat piece after piece of cheesecake. The next day, they came back and shot the scene perfectly on the first take.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0048140/trivia/

To be honest, after what you just described, I like Brando even more.

would say that about many tech geeks. What's the saying goes:

'laziness is the mother of all tech invention'...

Other actors held cue cards while their backs were to the camera. https://i.imgur.com/LjnNgoA.jpeg

If he really was that lazy and that successful, that just proves to me that laziness is indeed a virtue :)

Laziness is only a virtue when you have enough genius for it to be effortless.

But genius is the hare that will always be beaten by the persistent tortoise if it stands still long enough.

Luckily it's not a competition, everyone can win one way or another. But just being lazy is not enough for sure.

>But genius is the hare that will always be beaten by the persistent tortoise if it stands still long enough.

Definitely not always. That's survivorship bias. There's no guarantee that if you're a hard working tortoise you'll ever beat a hare. Like there's no guarantee that if I'll practice my soccer moves 24/7 for 10 years I'll ever be able to beat Ronaldo.

> Like there's no guarantee that if I'll practice my soccer moves 24/7 for 10 years I'll ever be able to beat Ronaldo.

Because Ronaldo keeps practicing and improving, as any professional athlete would.

But the hare is the person who never bothers to train or improve beyond their natural talents, who thinks they've already won the race, so there's no point in even running. The "smart kid" who coasts through school and never leaves their comfort zone but winds up in a dead end job with only wasted potential and unfulfilled dreams, while the people who actually applied themselves blew past them in college and got better jobs and achieved their goals.

>But the hare is the person who never bothers to train or improve beyond their natural talents

That wasn't may point. My point was that if everyone applied themselves, not everyone would even reach Ronaldo's level. Otherwise every hardworking person in Namibia or Zimbabwe would be Elon Musk wealthy by now.

But they aren't. Why is that? is it because they didn't apply themselves as hard as Musk? Or is it because opportunities in life are limited, no matter how hard you work, and getting them is a lottery of birth and of chance.

Time, chance and place

Conclusions from a single data point are the most correct

I have 2 actually, I'm lazy as well.

To be honest, in hollywood, you do everything a million times. The first three takes going to waste on warming up and learning the lines do not slow the production down much. The perfectionism of some directors, the disinterests by some actors and the size of the endavour do the most damage.

His "laziness" could be attributed to having ADHD.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/355022506_Marlon_Br...

This wasn't laziness, it was part of his method acting. He wanted the dialogue to appear to occur naturally to him, so he'd place some of his lines on the back of a coffee mug, for example. When he'd look over at the mug, it would appear that his eyes were diverting as though recalling a memory. Recitation often results in wooden performances.

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