Carlo Fiore: Actor & Screenwriter's Career Revolved Around Friendship with Marlon Brando

Carlo Fiore was a relatively unsuccessful actor who now is remembered only for his friendship with cinema legend Marlon Brando, he man many cineastes feel was the greatest movie actor of all time. The two met as young men in New York City during World War II, when Fiore was a fellow student of Brando's at Erwin Piscator's acting workshop at The New School for Social Research. Born on June 19, 1919, Fiore was nearly five years older than Brando, who was born in April 1924.

Of Sicilian extraction, Fiore wore a zoot suit, sported a greasy pompadour and spoke with a redolent Brooklyn accent. Fellow New School acting student Elaine Stritch originally thought he was a hood. The working class Fiore has worked as a presser of men's pants and did a short gig in the military. He also was into drugs, a habit that the young Brando did not approve of. However, Brando had a lifelong affinity for under-dogs, likely from his unhappy childhood, and Fiore's habit did not keep them from becoming close friends.

At the New School, Marlon Brando met the aspiring writer James Baldwin, and the two became friends. Baldwin also became friends with Carlo Fiore.

Hanger-On

Carlo Fiore briefly roomed with Brando in the early, pre-fame days and became, arguably, his closest friend other than Wally Cox, a childhood friend who remained close to "Bud" Brando (so called to distinguish him from his father, Marlon Brando, Sr.). Unlike the highly intelligent and gifted Wally Cox, Carlo Fiore was minimally talented and his involvement in the industry was entirely due to his being a hanger-on of Brando's.

During the early days in New York, when Brando's mother Dorothy ("Dodie") briefly maintained an apartment in Manhattan, Fiore developed a crush on his friend's mother, which was reciprocated. The relationship never was consummated, though.

Carlo Fiore never was able to get professional acting gigs, either in the theater, or on movies or TV. He never worked as an actor as anything other than a stand-in or an extra until 1958, when he was cast in an episode of the TV show Peter Gunn. The following year, he had bit parts in the low-budget potboilers Guns, Girls, and Gangsters (starring Maryiln Monroe-wannabe Mamie Van Doren) and The Young Captives (in which he improbably played the role of "Mexican Officer"). His movie work mostly consisted of being Marlon Brando's friend, which entailed "work" as a stand-in, extra or personal assistant on Brando pictures On the Waterfront (personal assistant), Guys and Dolls (extra), The Teahhouse of the August Moon (extra), Sayonara (personal assistant), The Young Lions (personal assistant) and One-Eyed Jacks (assistant to the producer) .

As a hanger-on, his presence sometimes troubled others, notably Stanley Kubrick, who had been hired by Brando to direct a movie version of The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones, a Western novel based on the legend of Billy the Kid that became the basis for the movie One-Eyed Jacks (1961). Kubrick eventually was fired from the movie after alienating Brando, either by telling the producer that they had to discourage their star from rewriting the script or because he insulted Brando's girlfriend France Nuyen. Reportedly, the then-married Brando wanted the screenplay changed so his mistress Nuyen could have a part. "But she can't act," Kubrick told his employer, which many believe led to his being fired.)

Marlon Brando directed the film himself, and Carlo Fiore was given the credit "assistant to the producer." Though he managed movie gigs until the mid-1960s, it never really got any better than that for Fiore, career-wise.

Because of what he thought were his substantial contributions to the One-Eyed Jacks script, Fiore filed a petition with the Screen Writers Guild requesting a writing credit. The Guild rejected his request.

Life Without Brando

It was announced by Pennebaker Productions, Marlon Brando's vanity production company, that Stanley Kubrick had left the Brando film as he had acquired the rights to Vladimir Nabokov's best-seller Lolita, which Kubrick intended to be his next film. In actuality, Kubrick directed the swords & sandals blockbuster Spartacus for Kirk Douglas before getting around to helming Lolita, as the censorship problems attached to Nabokov's story of pedophilia caused some scripting problems.

Despite any anxiety over Carlo Fiore's relationship with Brando, once freed of the superstar, Kubrick and his producing partner James Harris, in the period during which they were developing Lolita, hired Fiore to write a screenplay of Nabokov's 1932 novel Kamera obskura, which Fiore had optioned himself. (Written originally in Russian, Kamera obskura was first translated into English circa 1938 as Camera Obscura and again circa 1960 as Laughter in the Dark.)

Kamera obskura had elements in common with Lolita, and Kubrick -- who was worried he was being hustled when Fiore approached him with the rights to the novel -- tied up the production of a potential rival film by hiring Brando's friend. Nothing came of Fiore's foray into film development: It eventually came to the screen in 1960, in a version directed by Oscar-winning director Tony Richardson and starring Nicol Williamson.)

Carlo Fiore's only credit as a screenwriter was on the low-budget grindhouse stinker The Movie Finger (1963), an amalgamation of Jack Kerouac's The Subterraneans and film noir bank robber flick. He remained friends with James Baldwin, and the two made an attempt to adapt Ice Berg Slim's novel Pimp into a script. They didn't succeed.

"Bud: The Brando I Knew"

What Carlo Fiore essentially did was hang-out on film sets with Marlon Brando and carouse with him after-hours. Fiore claimed credit for inspiring the great actor in one of cinema's most famous scenes. In Bud: The Brando I Knew, Fiore's 1974 memoir of his friendship with America's greatest actor, he claimed that he was on the set of On the Waterfront (1954) when Brando was troubled with the "I coulda been a contender" dialog between his character Terry Malloy, and his brother, Charley (Rod Steiger, who was nominated for a Best Supporting Oscar for his performance).

Brando, who would win the first of his two Best Actor Academy Awards playing the dim-witted longshoreman Terry Malloy, was dissatisfied with the scene as written by Budd Schulberg. (Schulberg won his own Oscar for his On the Waterfront screenplay, and based the "contender" part of the speech on a conversation he had with former boxer Roger Donoghue, who had been hired to teach Brando how to box like a pro). Brando felt that the idea that one brother would pull a gun on another was bogus. (Brando, one of three children, grew up in a household with two sisters, so he allegedly did not understand the conflicts between brothers, according to Fiore. Actually, Bud Brando had been close to Wally Cox since childhood and considered him his brother.)

Fiore claims that it was he himself who came up with the key idea behind the scene, which is that Terry feels disbelief and disappointment with his brother rather than fear. (That this is a natural projection of Brando's own disbelief and disappointment with the scene is not glossed on.) No other source, not Brando's autobiography or that by director Elia Kazan, mentions any input by Fiore. Most likely, it was an intuition of Brando's that Kazan helped develop.

By the time this dubious claim appeared, after America's greatest actor had rocketed back to superstar status after 10 years as "box office poison" in the greatest comeback in Hollywood history, Carlo Fiore and Marlon Brando had been out of touch for over half a decade, having talked but once on the telephone in that period. Their friendship was ended by Brando due to his battles with his ex-wife Anna Kashfi over the custody of his son, the very troubled Christian Brando.

Kashfi was one of those people who distrusted Fiore, who was a substance abuser. Fiore was an on-and-off again heroin addict, and it was felt by Brando's lawyers that continuing the friendship with Fiore would give Kashfi legal grounds to bolster her ongoing attempts to sever Brando's visitation rights to his son Christian. Like Fiore, Kashfi's psychic world revolved around Brando, even after the bonds holding them together were broken.

The last conversation that the two friends had came in the late 1960s. They discussed their mutual friend James Baldwin. Brando, who had become involved with the Black Panthers, expressed the Panthers' view of Baldwin, that he was an "Uncle Tom." Fiore objected to Brando's characterization of their old friend, known for his passionate denouncement of racism. They never spoke again.

When asked about Carlo Fiore in the late 1970s, Marlon Brando replied that his friends don't write books about him. Brando said that Fiore probably wrote his book because that's all he had left. Most of Fiore's stories as recounted in Bud: The Brando I Knew have been ignored by subsequent biographers, either because they are under the impression that Fiore was an unreliable source and had juiced up his "memories" for the sake of his 30 pieces of silver, or because the stories he recounted were just too salacious. Many of Fiore's anecdotes have a sexual angle and some contain a homo-erotic sub-context. One is left with the impression that Fiore operated as a procurer for Brando as many of the women Fiore associated with were prostitutes.

The lack of decency and the preponderance of bad taste the book is likely one reason that Fiore's memoir has never been reissued. It is best forgotten, just as Carlo Fiore has been forgotten, by posterity and - while he was still alive - by the man who knew him best, Marlon Brando.

Carlo Fiore died August 11, 1978 in Los Angeles, California. He was 49 years old.

Sources:

An earlier version of this biography appeared on the Internet Movie Database