A script of The Godfather annotated by Marlon Brando sold for a record US$312,800 at an auction of the late screen legend's personal effects at Christie's in New York.
The script of the 1972 classic, which won Brando a second best-actor Oscar for his portrayal of mafia kingpin Don Corleone, was the highlight of the sale, and attracted heavy bidding from the outset.
The lot was finally snapped up by a telephone bidder for more than 20 times its high estimate of US$15,000, setting a new world auction record for a script.
PHOTO: AP
The previous best was the US$244,000 paid for Clark Gable's Gone With the Wind script in 1996.
A handwritten letter from the creator of The Godfather, Mario Puzo, urging Brando to take the role of Don Corleone, also attracted strong bidding and finally sold for US$132,000, way above the Christie's high estimate of US$1,200.
"Dear Mr Brando, I wrote a book called The Godfather which has had some success and I think you're the only actor who can play the part," the signed letter began.
"I know this was presumptuous of me but the best I can do by the book is try. I really think you'd be tremendous," Puzo wrote.
The property going under the hammer Thursday comprised nearly 330 lots, most of them from the Los Angeles home where the increasingly reclusive actor lived from 1960 until his death in July 2004.
Christie's had promoted the auction as providing an intimate insight into the lifestyle of "an extremely private and elusive individual."
As well as souvenirs from Brando's lengthy screen career, many lots featured Brando's correspondence, both letters and telegrams, with fellow 20th-century icons like Marilyn Monroe and civil-rights leader Martin Luther King Jr, who wrote in 1959 asking for Brando's support in the fight to integrate US schools.
The King letter sold for US$13,200. Among the stranger items was a table football set that brought in US$5,400.
The run up to the auction had not been a smooth one with Brando's son Christian, 47, reportedly furious at the way Brando's estate has handled the sale.
Christian's lawyer, Theresa Bingham, said her client believed many of the lots in the auction were items that the actor would never have wanted sold.
Bingham specifically demanded that Christie's pull lot 150 -- a 14 carat gold Saint Christopher's medallion that Christian's mother, Anna Kashfi, had given her son.
The auction house confirmed before the sale that the heirloom had been returned.
Brando, who was married and divorced three times, had 11 children with his three wives and several other women, including his Guatemalan housekeeper.
Brando, who died last year of pulmonary fibrosis at the age of 80, revolutionized post World War II acting with his "method" portrayals of moody and raw but touching characters in films like Streetcar Named Desire (1951) and The Wild One (1953).
Despite his huge talent and global acclaim, many felt Brando never achieved his potential as an actor, preferring in his later life to dodge the spotlight and work only when he needed the cash, whatever the artistic merit of the film.
It is barely 10am and the queue outside Onigiri Bongo already stretches around the block. Some of the 30 or so early-bird diners sit on stools, sipping green tea and poring over laminated menus. Further back it is standing-room only. “It’s always like this,” says Yumiko Ukon, who has run this modest rice ball shop and restaurant in the Otsuka neighbourhood of Tokyo for almost half a century. “But we never run out of rice,” she adds, seated in her office near a wall clock in the shape of a rice ball with a bite taken out. Bongo, opened in 1960 by
Common sense is not that common: a recent study from the University of Pennsylvania concludes the concept is “somewhat illusory.” Researchers collected statements from various sources that had been described as “common sense” and put them to test subjects. The mixed bag of results suggested there was “little evidence that more than a small fraction of beliefs is common to more than a small fraction of people.” It’s no surprise that there are few universally shared notions of what stands to reason. People took a horse worming drug to cure COVID! They think low-traffic neighborhoods are a communist plot and call
Over the years, whole libraries of pro-People’s Republic of China (PRC) texts have been issued by commentators on “the Taiwan problem,” or the PRC’s desire to annex Taiwan. These documents have a number of features in common. They isolate Taiwan from other areas and issues of PRC expansion. They blame Taiwan’s rhetoric or behavior for PRC actions, particularly pro-Taiwan leadership and behavior. They present the brutal authoritarian state across the Taiwan Strait as conciliatory and rational. Even their historical frames are PRC propaganda. All of this, and more, colors the latest “analysis” and recommendations from the International Crisis Group, “The Widening
Sept. 30 to Oct. 6 Chang Hsing-hsien (張星賢) had reached a breaking point after a lifetime of discrimination under Japanese rule. The talented track athlete had just been turned down for Team Japan to compete at the 1930 Far Eastern Championship Games despite a stellar performance at the tryouts. Instead, he found himself working long hours at Taiwan’s Railway Department for less pay than the Japanese employees, leaving him with little time and money to train. “My fighting spirit finally exploded,” Chang writes in his memoir, My Life in Sports (我的體育生活). “I vowed then to defeat all the Japanese in Taiwan
RSS