In
the 1970s, the Students' Representative Council at the University of
Windsor, Ontario, Canada, had a policy of inviting famous Movie Stars
to speak informally with students for an hour-or-so. Attendance at
these engagements was free to the general public, as well.
Among
the Stars who accepted the invitation were, alphabetically, not in
order of dates, Marlon Brando, Richard Burton, Len Cariou, Jim
Carrey, Sir Laurence Olivier, Peter Ustinov. The Council encouraged
the visitors to declare if they were homosexual. Brando and Burton
said they experimented, occasionally. The others declined to comment.
Curiously,
there were no Actresses among the invited visitors, nor was there
comment on this negligence from any professors and students, female
and male. The negligence was of particular seriousness in the
University's School of Dramatic Art where females were in a
significant, and very loud, majority every semester. Too, although
they were not yet in a majority in the Department, homosexuals,
female and male, aggressively ran the Department. The founders of the
School had been a female-male couple who presented themselves as a
married husband-wife couple.
This
story is about Marlon Brando's account of his plan for a movie he
intended to make about a folk tale he was told by the people on the
Pacific Island of Tahiti.
Brando
owned one of the islands that were in the Tahiti groups of islands.
Brando's island was Tetiaroa. The folk tale was about one of the poor
fishermen founders of the Polynesian nation of Tahiti.
The
fisherman and his wife were as successful as the others in their
small poor Community. The ocean waters around the islands were so
crowded with fish, that the fisher folk fished with nets of
interlocked branches of trees. As yet, fabric had not arrived in
Polynesia.
The
couple of whom this story is about, were sad because they were the
only couple who did not have children. After years had passed, they
decided they would have to decide who of the other fisher folk would
inherit their possessions after they died. The husband and wife did
not inform anyone of their discussions.
The
wife had a dream that she had, unknown to her husband, exchanged
places with a fish in their net in order to give her husband a wife
that would be able to have his babies. Her dream gladdened her, but
she refrained from telling it to her husband because she thought,
like every other dream she ever had, it was, most probably, merely a
fruitless dream, generated from her desperate wishes and hopes.
Sometime
soon after her dream, when they pulled in their fishing net in the
ocean waters, they found a newborn baby girl among the fishes. The
child was expertly wrapped in clothing that floated as a basket. They
took the baby into their home. They told everybody. Everybody was in
awe of the baby whom everybody regarded as a miracle gift. Part of
the miracle was that the baby's clothing was the first fabric in
Polynesia.
The
wife told her husband of her dream. She said she believed the baby
was given to them for him to have a second wife who would,
eventually, have children with him. He said he would agree to that if
the others in the Community approved.
A
meeting of all adults in the Community was called. At that meeting,
the wife recounted her dream, and her interpretation of it. Her
interpretation was unanimously approved.
Folk
lore has it that the baby grew up without an interest in fishing.
Instead, it was she who introduced fruit and vegetable farming in all
of Polynesia.
Surprisingly
and inexplicably, the folk tale ends with the fisherman and his two
women companions disappearing into the island mountains. After an
annual ritual celebrated by the whole Community in the mountains, the
three did not return. Their leaving the Community seemed to have been
planned inasmuch as there was no trace of their home in the village
after they had disappeared.
Equally
mysterious, was that there had not been babies in the family.
Marlon
Brando promised the Students at the University of Windsor, that he
would cast his movie, partly, from among them.
He
invited the Council to send up to five students to vacation on his
island of Tetiaroa. He would match all the expenses the Council
incurred.
Brando
suggested the visiting students be inspired by Polynesian Culture to
come up with creative explanations of 'gaps' in the folk tale: Where
did the baby girl come from, originally? What would be her
appropriate adult visual ethnicity? Does Polynesia's contact with
Europe begin during the time of this folk tale?
The
next year after Brando's visit a group of students spent a few weeks
in Tahiti as Brando's guests. The group was not sponsored by the
Student Council, but by a cinema theatre on University West Avenue in
the City of Windsor, Ontario, Canada. The Students' campus newspaper,
The Lance, carried some of the students' creative suggestions. I
remember the one by the student, Vera Lazovic. My memory might not be
fully accurate.
"Long,
long ago when there were no humans on Earth, a space ship had engine
trouble. Its two pilots, humanoid artificial intelligences, landed
the ship on Tahiti as a mountain next the mountain of Orohena. They
began a search for the rare ore metal that was needed for their
repairs.
They
also began experimenting on some of the animal species around in
order to engineer slave workers to help. In time, they evolved one
species of animal into their look-alikes. They sent this species to
all parts of the Earth to search for their needed rare ore metal.
All
the while, they transmitted signals into outer space, attempting to
make contact with others of their kind for help.
Eventually,
contact was made. One of their kind was sent as a baby. It was sent
as a baby because the intelligences far out deep in our galaxy
discovered that in order for the rare ore metal to be found, an
intelligence had to evolve from an elementary beginning on Earth in
order to assimilate Earth-generated elements into maturity. This was
a gamble, but desperately resorted to since after thousands and
thousands of years of searching, not even a trace of the required ore
metal had been found anywhere on Earth.
The
gamble was won in that by the time the baby grew into human adulthood
and married the fisherman, it had acquired the ability to convert any
Earth ore metal into the required one. The fisherman married his
second wife at a celebration attended by the whole Community.
Sometime after that, the three humanoid artificial intelligences went
to Mount Orohena, completed the repairs, and left Earth."
By
this Lazovic version of all three being artificial intelligence
humanoids, it is not a mystery that the husband did not have children
by his second wife.
There
has been no word about what came of Brando's intention to make a
movie about the Tahiti folk tale.
