“Sharply written and entertaining": Ugly Things has pretty words for Kearns’ Marlon Brando: Hollywood Rebel

Ugly Things, the jam-packed magazine that focues on the best of garage, psychedlic and blues-based rock ’n’ rol of the Sixties, features a review of Burt Kearns’ latest book, Marlon Brando: Hollywood Rebel, in its Summer 2024 issue.

The sensational 152-page collector-worthy volume features a must-read intervuiew with the very pretty cover subject, Michelle Phillips (Ugly Things  is a play on the legendary sixties rock ’n’ roll band, The Pretty Things). 

The review, written by pop culture scholar and author and Beat generation authority Alan Bisbort, calls the book “sharply written and entertaining,” full of “deep dives” that show the links between Brando and “rebel” subcultures.

Order the issue, back issues and Ugly Things merch here.

Republican-American (Waterbury CT): On centennial of his birth, Brando remembered as iconic rebel

  (The following review of Burt Kearns’s new book, Marlon Brando: Hollywood Rebel was published on January 31, 2023, in the Republican-American newspaper of Waterbury, Connecticut. The R-A site is protected by a paywall, but you can view five articles for free by registering at rp-am.com. Click the headline below to link to the original story.)

On centennial of his birth, Brando remembered as iconic rebel

By ALAN BISBORT April 8, 2024

Marlon Brando in "The Wild One"

Marlon Brando the actor died in 2004 at age 80. However, Marlon Brando the cultural icon just turned 100, on April 3, the centenary of his birth. A number of articles have appeared marking the occasion, as has a film series on Turner Classic Movies and other cable and streaming services.

The one essential book published in connection with the anniversary is “Marlon Brando: Hollywood Rebel,” by Burt Kearns. Kearns, a Stamford native and Fairfield University grad who now lives in Los Angeles, is a veteran print and broadcast journalist and Emmy-winning TV documentarian. He is also a serious film history buff, and his previous book was a biography of the boozing, brawling tough-guy actor, Lawrence Tierney.

It may come as a surprise to some readers that Kearns opens this book with “The Wild One” (1953), which isn’t one of Brando’s crowning cinematic jewels. There is a method to the author’s madness, though. Kearns is not interested in a chronological story, nor is this book a biography – though there is much fascinating biographical detail in it.

Instead he’s documenting the astonishing range of influence that Brando wielded on his own times and over succeeding generations – in acting, outlaw attitude, style of speech, manners and dress, political activism, countercultural movements and even music. And “The Wild One” was a game changer.

About this book, Kearns writes that it’s “a study of how one man’s artistic and personal decisions affected not only those around him, but all of Western society and popular culture. … The reader will find that Marlon Brando’s mark on the modern world has been indisputable and pervasive in the 77 years since he walked onstage at Broadway’s Ethel Barrymore, 20 years after his death, and 100 years after his birth.”

For example, you may not have realized, until this book, that Brando had high hopes and serious intent for “The Wild One.” It was not an exploitative biker flick in the Roger Corman-Russ Meyer mold. Brando took this role of Johnny Strabler, outlaw biker gang leader, as seriously as any of the other films that would win him fame and acclaim.

At the time, he’d already garnered two Academy Awards nominations – for “A Streetcar Named Desire” (1951) and “Viva Zapata!” (1953) – so he had no reason to slum with cheesy B movies.

Before filming even started, he immersed himself in biker culture, hung out at L.A biker bars and bought a motorcycle. He wanted this to be a serious film. But then, the Hollywood censors came calling, insisting the script had to be changed so that the “bad guys” took all the blame. Brando later said, “We started out to do something worthwhile, to explain the psychology of the hipster. But somewhere along the way we went off the track.”

As low on Brando’s totem pole as it may be, “The Wild One” had huge cultural impacts. In Memphis, where it was banned, a 19-year-old wannabe singer named Elvis Presley was determined to see it; he became a Brando fanatic. Presley signed a record contract with Sun Records and then with RCA right about the time “Rebel Without a Cause”(starring James Dean, another Brando acolyte) was released. This created a perfect storm of youth revolt, in manners, film and music. In addition to being a rock’n’ roll star, Elvis now wanted to be a “serious” actor like his idol, Marlon Brando.

A group of lads from Liverpool were also smitten with Brando and Elvis. When they were fishing around for a band name, they recalled a line from “The Wild One.” Chino, a gang leader played by Lee Marvin, tells Strabler (Brando’s character) “the Beetles miss you.” The Beetles was the name of another biker gang, and when “The Wild One” came to Liverpool, two best pals, John Lennon and Stu Sutcliffe, were there to see it. It was not too far a leap to adopt the name the Beetles, change the ‘e’ to an ‘a’ and, bingo, rock’n’ roll history was made. In homage, Brando is one of the people featured on the cover of the “Sgt. Pepper’s” album.

Kearns makes similar deep dives into Brando films in order to illustrate the actor’s equally strong influence on the Beat Generation (Jack Kerouac was a fan), Pop Art (Andy Warhol was a fan), the gay subculture and gay rights, the American Indian movement, Black power, environmentalism and even the punk movement of the 1970s and 1980s. And then there are the generations of actors who stood in Brando’s shadows, the ones who, following his example, immersed themselves in roles as outsiders and malcontents, everyone from De Niro, Depp and Nicholson to Daniel Day-Lewis and Nicole Kidman.

One of the most fascinating aspects of this book is to remind us how Brando, a product of the Midwest (like Orson Welles and Buster Keaton) had already become one of America’s great young stage actors before ever setting foot in Southern California. He really didn’t need Hollywood; Hollywood needed him. When he arrived in Hollywood in 1949, he snubbed the journalists and gossip columnists and said things like, “This town and everything in it is overrated.”

He was, in short, a “Hollywood Rebel” from the start and remained one until the end.

 

“Marlon Brando: Hollywood Rebel” by Burt Kearns

(Applause Theatre & Cinema Books, 280 pages, $29.95)

TRIVIA QUIZ

Text your knowledge of all things Brando with this 10-part quiz.

1) Brando came to the attention of Hollywood through his celebrated Broadway appearances in “A Streetcar Named Desire.” Who wrote the play on which this production was based?

2) Who played the role of Blanche Dubois in the stage production with Brando? Who portrayed Blanche Dubois in the film version?

3) What actor took over the role of Stanley Kowalski on stage after Brando left? (Hint: He would go on to have a long film career.)

4) What was the only musical Brando ever appeared in?

5) Brando was nominated six times for Academy Awards. How many did he win, and for what films?

6) What was his only film given an X rating?

7) What was the only film he directed and what famous director did he replace?

8) Who appeared in Brando’s stead at the 1973 Academy Awards ceremony when he won Best Actor for his role in “The Godfather”?

9) What was the only film in which Jack Nicholson and Brando appeared together?

10) What was the only film in which Robert De Niro and Brando appeared together?

ANSWERS:

1) Tennessee Williams. 2) Jessica Tandy, Vivien Leigh; 3) Ralph Meeker. 4) “Guys and Dolls,” with Sinatra. 5) Two, for “On the Waterfront” (1954) and “The Godfather” (1972). 6) “Last Tango in Paris” (1972). 7) “One-Eyed Jacks” (1961), Stanley Kubrick, who was hired to direct but, two weeks before production started, he dropped out and Brando volunteered to take over. 8) Sacheen Littlefeather, a Native American actress who, under instructions from Brando, refused the Oscar to protest Hollywood’s depiction of Native Americans and in solidarity with the protesters at Wounded Knee. 9) “The Missouri Breaks” (1976). 10) “The Score” (2001).

STORY LINK

Republican-American (Waterbury CT): Connecticut author pulls no punches in Lawrence Tierney bio

 (The following review of Lawrence Tierney: Hollywood's Real-Life Tough Guy was published on January 31, 2023, in the Republican-American newspaper of Waterbury, Connecticut. The R-A site is protected by a paywall, but you can view five articles for free by registering at rp-am.com.)

Connecticut author pulls no punches in Lawrence Tierney bio 

By ALAN BISBORT January 31, 2023

 

Lawrence Tierney came out of retirement and went back into acting,

 including the TV show "Hill Street Blues" as Sgt. Jenkins. He appeared in 

the NBC series from 1985-87. (NBC)

 

You know you’re in for a wild ride when a book opens with an aging tough-guy actor, Lawrence Tierney, taking a swing at his much younger director, Quentin Tarrantino, on the set of “Reservoir Dogs.”

No Hollywood trickery could hide the fact that this tough guy, Tierney, was the real deal. By the time he was taking swings at Tarrantino, he’d left in his wake decades of brawls, jails, drunk tanks and more second chances than Saul Goodman ever got. (As Tierney himself put it in a late-life interview, “I threw away about seven careers through drink”).

Tierney may be best known for his first major role, as the title character in the crime biopic “Dillinger” (1945), which made him an overnight star. The film was one of the earliest smash successes of an independent studio; with a budget of just $65,000, it took in $2.5 million on its initial box office run (and has been a cult classic since). Tierney’s face was suddenly on a billboard above Sunset Boulevard, and the star-making machinery was in full thrust.

                                                     

Meanwhile, the new star was arrested three times for public drunkenness, and jailed for 10 days on the third charge – all within weeks of the film’s release. Still, he’d made such a striking, hulking, menacing impression that he was then cast in other, similar roles – “The Devil Thumbs a Ride,” “Bodyguard,” “The Hoodlum,” “San Quentin” and as Jesse James in “Badman’s Territory” – with equally jarring reactions. Critics didn’t know what to make of him, partly because he was totally untrained as an actor and played every role on gut instinct.

Unfortunately, off the set, Tierney continued to play the same character. He was arrested 11 times in the first two years after “Dillinger” and then repeatedly for the rest of his surprisingly long life (he lived until 2002, making it to age 82). Barely out of the gate as an actor, he was already being lumped in with Hollywood “bad boys” like Robert Mitchum, Robert Walker and Errol Flynn. Unlike these other actors, however, he became an outcast and eventually an exile, living for many years in France and working odd jobs.

 

Actor Lawrence Tierney stands by his Hansom Cab horse after driving a party 

to a theater in his rig,  In New York, Oct. 8, 1974. After retiring from acting 

Tierney took up driving the carriages through Central Park. (AP Photo) 

 

Burt Kearns has the perfect credentials to get Tierney’s story on paper. The Stamford native and Fairfield University alum has lived in Los Angeles for many years, having made his name as a writer, producer and director for tabloid TV programs (and authored one of the funniest memoirs about that world, called “Tabloid Baby”). Kearns has a rollicking good time telling Tierney’s tale, bringing his deep knowledge of film history and the film industry, as well as his nose for salacious detail, to this meaty subject.

After his early troubles, Tierney may no longer have been box-office boffo but he sure was gold to the gossip columnists of the 1940s and 1950s. As Kearns tells it, Tierney’s life can be compared to a rollercoaster, with a few ups and downs at the start, a steep climb in the late 1940s and then all downhill after that. Because of his alcoholism and lack of impulse control, he spent the last decades of his career as, at best, a supporting actor in feature films with occasional forays into stage productions (including an ill-fated stab at Stanley Kowalski in “A Streetcar Named Desire”) and bit parts on TV (including as Elaine’s father in an episode of “Seinfeld,” the finale of “Hill Street Blues” and a voiceover in “The Simpsons”).

It would be nice to report that, despite his chronic legal and bottle troubles, Tierney was a colorful and well-loved man, but it’s simply not true, as hard as the fan in Kearns tries to burnish his reputation. This is one of those odd biographies where the writing is far better than the subject, who really comes off as an entitled sociopath (which could probably be said for about 75% of Hollywood). The repetitive nature of Tierney’s life is ultimately just sad. There’s never a final redemption, even as you keep hoping there will be.

Still, Kearns carries a reader along to Tierney’s late-career resurgence, when some of the best anecdotes in this biography occur. The description of filming the “Seinfeld” episode is alone worth the price of the book (“You know, that Seinfield, I don’t think he’s funny. I’ve known every comic from Jack Benny, you name it. This guy is not funny.”). But the real icing on the cake is the whole “Reservoir Dogs” episode. I refuse to spoil it here by giving away any of the details. Read it and weep (with laughter). Suffice it to say that Tarantino got way more than he bargained for in Lawrence Tierney.

Ugly Things magazine has a pretty, pretty, pretty good review of The Show Won’t Go On

Ugly Things? Pretty Cool! That’s the word from our pals Jeff Abraham and Burt Kearns, as the revered music magazine offers the latest praise for their book, The Show Won’t Go On: The Most Shocking, Bizarre, and Historic Deaths of Performers Onstage.

Noted writer, critic and editor Alan Bisbort reviewed the book from Chicago Review Press  in #52, the Winter 2019 issue of the  jam-packed rock ’n’ roll magazine that celebrates “wild sounds from past dimensions.” Bisbort wrote that the book is “touching... dramatic"... and that the authors "have combed the morgues of entertainment history to offer more than mere titillation.

“Though their book charts moments of human tragedy, the treatment does not feel cheap or exploitative. Rather, they use the death as a means by which to reexamine the careers of the fallen and set the stage, so to speak, for their swan songs... All of these performers may have fallen, but their beats will go on, thanks to Abraham and Kearns."

The issue also features an extended interview with coauthor Kearns.

From the Ugly Things interview with
The Show Won’t Go On coauthor Burt Kearns

Ugly Things was founded in 1983, is based in La Mesa, California, and edited by Mike Stax. It focuses on beat, garage rock, and psychedelic music from the 1960s. The magazine’s name? It’s a tribute to the rock and blues band, The Pretty Things.

Buy this issue 152-page issue and other Ugly Things merch by clicking this sentence!

Click here to follow Ugly Things on Facebook.

Visit The Show Won't Go On website for lots of extras.

And Abraham and Kearns’ appearance with Shut Up I Love It podcasters Steven Cohen and Sasha Feiler at Stories Books and Cafe in Los Angeles’s Echo Park is now a bonus episode of Shut Up I Love it.