Pull on your Brando jeans, slip your Brando leather jacket over your Brando white vest, adjust your Brando leather cap to a jaunty angle and ride off into the sunset on your Brando Harley. You’re an instant rebel. But not for long. If the estate of the late Marlon Brando has its way, you will only be able to rebel with its permission.
Alarmed that the actor’s name and image may be used for commercial gain without its say-so, the Brando estate has applied for trademark protection with the United States patent and trademark office.
As a precautionary measure, the application lists items that the estate is concerned might be marketed. So should you want to re-enact the later years of the actor’s life, when he lounged around in eccentric seclusion, often dressed as a woman, you will have to forgo donning a Brando kimono.
Also out of bounds, unless the estate decides to market them, are Brando sunglasses, bottle openers, fridge magnets, mouse pads, key rings, wrapping paper and temporary tattoos.
But one of the most famous of Brando’s images, after the motorcycle-riding rebel he played in The Wild One, is beyond the reach of his estate. Rights to The Godfather are owned by Paramount, the studio that made the film. Its rights include the image of Don Vito Corleone, the paterfamilias played by Brando.
The estate’s action, which aims to prevent any exploitation of the actor’s image without its approval, also means that Brando is unlikely, at least in the short term, to go the way of Frank Sinatra, who is the face of a campaign for a leading credit card: credit and debit cards are included in the list submitted by the estate.
‘The last thing I’m going to do is something that cheapens Marlon’s image,” Mike Medavoy, the co-executor of the estate and a friend of Brando’s, told the Los Angeles Times. ‘You want some sort of blanket protection against anyone doing something that basically goes out and steals his image and puts it on a napkin. This way, you can protect against it.”
Brando set up a trust several years ago to administer any profits that may be made from his image. But the beneficiaries of the trust, including his children, will have no say over the decisions of the estate in approving what may or may not be done with the late actor’s likeness.
The estate may stand to make further income from the publication of an unfinished novel Brando wrote, according to reports in the New York Post and the Library Journal. Sonny Mehta, of Knopf, apparently bought the manuscript of the novel, Fan-Tan, originally conceived as a film treatment, at the recent Frankfurt Book Fair. It will reportedly be completed by a co-writer.
Brando died of lung failure in July at the age of 80. His ashes were scattered in Death Valley, California, and in Tahiti. The actor’s estate, valued at $21,6-million, is already the subject of legal wranglings: one of his assistants, Joan Petrone, is seeking $3 000 for a ring she says she lost in Brando’s sink while she was making a salad, and an airline is claiming $460 000 for what it says are unpaid costs resulting from flights to Brando’s private Polynesian island of Tetiaroa.
Brando could prove to be one of the advertising world’s most lucrative dead celebrities. Late Hollywood stars, such as Marilyn Monroe, Humphrey Bogart, John Wayne and Steve McQueen, have gained new audiences thanks to their afterlife roles promoting products. In 1992, the Monroe estate accrued $7-million from advertising. Elvis Presley remains the highest-earning late star, according to a 2003 survey by Forbes magazine, which calculated that he had brought in $40-million over the previous year.
‘I really believe that Brando could be a brand,” Jeff Lotman of Global Icons told the Los Angeles Times. ‘When you have a name like that, which is so synonymous with tough and, at the same time, strength, I think there are things that could be significant.”
He probably wasn’t thinking of Brando butter. —