Because he and Tony Kushner were, in the most admirable way, determined to correct the mistakes that were made in the original movie with respect to gender and color and what is a Puerto Rican, what is a white boy. I certainly wasn’t going to be a producer-producer, but there were things I could tell him that were helpful, not the least of which were Puerto Rican and Hispanic matters. ![]() Really nothing more than helping Steven with things that he wanted to know about the original. You’re credited as an executive producer on the new one. Toni Morrison could tell you that because they were very good friends - same thing. Marlon was famous, as you may know, for long conversations. He did the calling, I never called him, and sometimes he’d say, “Let me talk to Lenny,” my husband, and they would talk for a half-hour. We had a telephone friendship after that. I was surprised to read in your memoir that you and Brando continued to be friends to the end of his life. And I feel so sorry for that girl on the screen. Yes, it is because I know what I’m experiencing, and it hurts me so much that it took me so long to express what I was feeling. ![]() Is it tough for you to watch a scene like that? The director could not have been happier, so he kept the camera rolling. It surprised the hell out of him, of course, and he kept trying to defend himself by putting his arms up and all that. It had been sitting there all these years, and I went berserk. As I say in the documentary, the pond scum just came right up to the surface. It opened up this well of hurt, and rage, and disappointment, that had been obviously sitting there for years and years and years unexpressed. He hauled off and cracked me across the face, and I understood what people meant when they said, “I saw stars.” I really saw sparkling things in front of my eyes. And it was a very emotional scene anyway to start, and I saw his hairline go back about two inches. Let’s practice a little bit.” And I kind of slapped him, and he said, “Okay, but don’t do any less than that.” But what happened is when that moment came for me to slap him, I hauled off and slapped him. Anyway, so Marlon said, “You can’t fake it. She really had to make me so angry because I had a hard time doing it. I mean, I had a hard time slapping Faye Dunaway once when she was playing a version of Evita for a television series. I am really very, very bad with striking people, acting or not. On the whole it was not, but then it came to this particular scene where I had to slap him. Your performance in that film is phenomenal and quite disturbing. I recently watched the film you and Brando did together years after your breakup, The Night of the Following Day. ![]() It’s probably the greatest favor I ever did for myself. And at one point he said to me, “You need help,” which now makes me really laugh hard because it’s one loony telling the other loony that they need help! It turned out he was absolutely right. We had this almost eight-year relationship. You talk a lot about the importance of therapy in the documentary. (She was only the third person to have done it at the time.) We talked recently about West Side Story (both film versions), One Day at a Time, and her relationships with fellow actors Marlon Brando and James Garner. “But I wanted to reveal something very different in terms of my success and the struggles.” And Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go For It is a moving exploration of her turbulent, up-and-down career, which saw her going from being cast in a variety of “exotic” parts in genre pictures, to winning an Oscar for 1961’s West Side Story, to achieving the rare distinction of the EGOT, having won an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar, and a Tony. What was left to say? “Here’s a woman who ostensibly is quite successful and has beaten some odds, it seems,” Moreno, 89, reflects. The legendary actress, born Rosa Dolores Alverío in Humacao, Puerto Rico, had already written a memoir, and performed a solo show about her remarkable life and career, both back in 2011. Believe it or not, it took Rita Moreno a full year to agree to appear in a documentary about herself.
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