Chock Full o' Nuts

Lying For a Living with Marlon Brando

I worry that I’ve already written this story somewhere. I’m of a certain age. Humor me, won’t you? Let’s pretend I haven’t ever told this tale in writing before. Or that this is a redux. Let’s pretend memory is a polite guest who knows when to sit down and shut up.

This one probably belongs in a folder called Chock Full o’ Nuts, and you’ll understand why in a minute.

Back in the early 2000s, I was living in Los Angeles, a city that promises reinvention but mostly delivers bumper to bumper traffic on the 405 at 2AM.

I had stumbled into a couple of small roles in Bruce Willis movies because he was a pal. It always felt like cheating. I didn’t know a damn thing about acting and there I’d be in some exotic location breathing the rarified air of a feature film movie set. I’d never had acting aspirations. Hadn’t even dawned on me. I’d never worn make up or a costume that wasn’t purchased ironically. I was a music kid thru and thru. Always had been. New York, drums, jazz, RnB, Woodstock nation and the loud freedom of being young and convinced early on, this was all I ever wanted to do.

So I did what any guilty imposter, LA resident who’d never had to do an audition would do : I enrolled in an acting class.

Emily and I were just friends then and we signed up for a Meisner course taught by Martin Barter, Sanford Meisner’s longtime assistant. The class met in a tiny, slightly peeling theater on either Cahuenga or Lankershim—one of those LA intersections that seems to exist mostly to confuse the people attending acting school. There were about twenty of us: models, model offspring, actor offspring, offspring of people who probably owned the buildings, guy’s with chiseled jaws. Andy Garcia’s kid. Edward James Olmos’s kids. You know. A very casual-cross-section-of-LA bunch.

The Meisner method, as far as my beginner brain could comprehend it, went something like this: listen carefully, respond honestly for this imaginary circumstance you were in. Which, come to think of it, is not far from being in a band.

One day, Edward James Olmos comes to class and mentions he was producing this private, week-long master class called Lying for a Living (the polar opposite of Meisner), taught by none other than Marlon Brando. The Marlon Brando. Emily chimed in before the air even settled around the sentence. “That sounds amazing, can we come”?

To everyone’s surprise, he said yes. Or something close enough to yes that it wasn’t a no.

Well, if she’s going, I’m weaseling my way in too. I’d learned from the best about sneaking backstage at concerts so crashing a taping is easy right?

The next day, we arrived at the small movie production space where the workshop was filming. All lit and nice. I was literally the last person through the door before security took one look at me and announced emphatically, “that’s it… sign in now and no one else gets in this week”, which is how I ended up—by the skin of my displaced New York teeth—in the most absurd, star-studded, intimate, unrepeatable room of my life.

And then Brando entered.

He walked in with a bull mastiff the size of a compromised horse and climbed like a fat king, onto what looked suspiciously like a throne. Cameras framed him like he was a rare animal sighting. The room went silent, as if sound itself had a crush on him.

Marlon fucking Brando began to talk. No notes. No outline. Just the free-form jazz of an incredibly brilliant, feral mind. He was funny and furious and cosmic and petty. He talked about acting, the world, the abuse of Native Americans, the idiocy of executives, the stupidity and dishonest structure of Hollywood, buffaloes, and the way truth hides inside the smallest possible detail. He was wound tight like a Stradivarius violin—yet somehow loose enough to wander anywhere.

Completely uninhibited and honestly, deeply self-aware.

I looked around and realized my classmates for the week included Michael Jackson (much taller than expected), Robin Williams (exactly as kind as you’d hope), Whoopi Goldberg, Sean Penn, Jon Lovitz, Mick Fleetwood, two dwarfs and a more than a few I can’t remember. The whole thing had the surreal logic of a fever dream or a celebrity charity PSA. Brando would speak for hours, we’d take smoke breaks like we were in a cartoon, and then we’d return to the throne chamber for more gospel.

I remember Sean Penn being asked to speak— like Brando was Miles looking at Wayne Shorter with a glance that says “it’s your turn to blow”. Sean, relaxed but piqued, spoke this bit about each character he played having its own specific walk. One particular character, he remembered, always moved as if he were trying to see over a fence. The neck leads, the body follows, the soul improvises. Sure, why not.

Brando explained what actors should do when they “go up”—fall out of the moment. He said to focus on the smallest thing in the room. The six on a rotary phone. Then the letter P beside it. Devote yourself to it completely until you re-enter your body, the moment, the truth.

You can almost see him doing it. The great Marlon Brando staring at a rotary phone or a bug, like it held the secrets of the cosmos.

Later that week, we were told to prepare scenes that Brando would critique.

During a break, I found myself in the alley with Robin Williams. I’d met him a couple times before, and he was, as always, disarmingly human and approachable. I asked if he’d do a scene with me. He said yes without hesitation. On the spot, I made up some scenario about a friend who was a music supervisor and me pitching him an impossibly expensive song for a movie.

But the next day, Robin wasn’t there. So Emily stepped in. We improvised a five-minute scene that felt like maybe—maybe—I’d been let into the cool part of life for once.

Then Brando began the critique.

He addressed Emily first, offering precise, surgical insights. His accurate read on people was breathtaking. Then he turned to me. He looked directly at me for what felt like a week, though it was probably like five seconds. And then he looked away. No notes. No critique. Nothing.

I sat there, frozen, feeling like a man who’d shown up to the Olympics with a kazoo. I just assumed he’d looked straight through me and decided, “Not an actor. He’s not committed. Not interesting”.

Obviously, that was my projection and I’ve been wrong about my projections more often than I’ve been right. Half the drum takes I’ve hated end up being the ones producers love.

Still: what if it was true? The image is priceless.

Marlon Brando—massive, mystical, perched with his giant dog on a throne—staring at me after my little acting attempt… and thinking, Nope. Nothing here. Next.

Or not. His mind was famous for moving on and not giving a shit. Either way, it remains one of the funniest, most humbling, most wonderfully absurd moments of my life. A cosmic joke delivered by a deity of cinema.

And honestly? I deserved it.

Because deep down, I was still the music kid from New York who wandered into Hollywood by accident. And sometimes accidents land you in front of Marlon Brando, who looks at you, says absolutely nothing, and in doing so gives you the most unforgettable review you’ll ever receive.