I think Marlon Brando is Loki.
When I state that, I don’t mean that Marlon Brando should have PLAYED Loki, in some crazy imaginary never-produced Marvel movie – I mean that at some level Brando WAS Loki: The Norse God of Mischief. Because when you watch Lost Soul, a documentary on the making of one of the worse movies of our modern era, the 1996 version of the classic H.G. Wells story The Island of Dr. Moreau… Brando as Loki becomes clear. Near the end of his career, Brando started doing projects just for the money, and the documentary clearly explains just how disinterested he was in actually delivering a performance for said money.
Of course, Brando was just one of the production’s problems. Richard Stanley, the director of the acclaimed SF film Hardware, had a dream to make a movie from the Wells book for years, and with a series of incredible storyboards and previsualizations (that this documentary shows for the first time) he was able to get studio backing for his vision.
And then… Everything went wrong. Cast members dropping out, actors changing parts, and Brando being… well, Brando. Stanley was fired, almost all of the vision and ideas he had for the film were dropped, and John Frankenheimer came in to save the film.
As critics and box office results can attest, he didn’t.
There is a lot of fun in the “What might have been” stories that comes from Hollywood’s history… What if Edward G. Robinson played Dr. Zaius in the original Planet of the Apes? What if Orson Welles had been allowed to finish The Magnificent Ambersons? What if Steven Spielberg got chance to direct a James Bond film? But in this case, there isn’t a lot of fun in seeing what happened to Richard Stanley after the Moreau debacle. A once promising filmmaker basically quit the movie business, and seeing how the machine treated him… it’s not hard to understand why. But still, thanks to Lost Souls we can see a little bit of the vision and talent and we can regret what might have been.
(Oh, and apparently Val Kilmer was a REAL A-hole.)
Lost Souls is streaming on Netflix.
(Thanks to Dana Gould and his podcast for turning me on to this story and this documentary).