Trivia / One-Eyed Jacks

• Box Office Bomb: Budget, $6 million. Box office, $4.3 million.
• Completely Different Title: The Sweden, the film was called "Revansch", meaning "Revenge" (in the competitive sense—defeating someone who has previously defeated you—not in the sense of vengeance).
• Creator Backlash: Marlon Brando was unhappy with Paramount's Re-Cut of the film:
  I don't feel it's what I set out to do. In my film, everybody lied, even the girl. The only one who told the truth was the Karl Malden character. Paramount made him out to be the heavy, a liar...Now the characters in the film are black and white, not gray and human as I planned them.
• Directed By Castmember: Marlon Brando directed. It took so much out of him that he never directed again.
• Executive Meddling: Louisa was shot in the back and killed by a stray bullet, fired at Rio by the dying Sheriff Dad Longworth in Marlon Brando's original cut of the film. Paramount substituted a different, upbeat ending that appears in the film.
• Missing Episode: Marlon Brando's original cut was five hours long. He then, as he put it, "got pretty sick of it and turned the job over to someone else." After he walked away from the editing, the studio cut the picture down to a manageable 141 minutes and added a new ending, which was filmed almost a year after principal photography was completed. It's safe to assume that the deleted footage no longer exists.
• Referenced by...:
  • A notorious club on the outskirts of town bears the name "One-Eyed Jacks" in Twin Peaks.
  • A short clip of the film is seen within gameplay of Cyberpunk 2077.
• Troubled Production: Marlon Brando's inexperience behind the camera was obvious on set. He shot six times the amount of footage normally used for a film at the time. He was indecisive and ran extremely overlong in getting the film finished. He insisted on getting drunk to film a scene in which he was supposed to act drunk, but he got too drunk to act or direct and so he insisted on repeating the process another day. Again he got too drunk to direct or act. Another time, Brando made everyone sit around while he waited for the "right" wave off the Monterey coast. All this while utilizing the Vista-Vision process, which cost fifty cents a foot! In the end, the film, originally budgeted at $1.8 million, wound up with a price tag of $6 million. Paramount eventually took the film away from him and recut it. He found the experience so grim that never stepped behind the camera again.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Rod Serling wrote an adaptation of the non-fiction book The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones by Charles Neider that was rejceted. Sam Peckinpah was then hired to revise it, but it didn't meet Brando's approval.
  • Stanley Kubrick was originally going to direct, but left after numerous disagreements with Marlon Brando. Kubrick wanted Spencer Tracy or Henry Fonda for Sheriff Dad Longworth, but Brando insisted on Karl Malden.

---