Hollywood loves few issues greater than retailing myths and legends about itself. Few of those yarns have had an extended life than what occurred on the 1973 Academy Awards involving Marlon Brando, John Wayne and a Native American activist named Sacheen Littlefeather.
Film aficionados typically do not forget that Brando despatched Littlefeather as much as the stage to say no his Oscar as finest actor for “The Godfather.”
Littlefeather, sporting buckskin and moccasins, learn a quick assertion of lower than a minute, politely stating on Brando’s behalf that he “very regretfully can't settle for this very beneficiant award,” to protest “the therapy of American Indians as we speak by the movie business and on tv in film reruns.”
As soon as once more, we’re flooded with the story of John Wayne and the Six Safety Males, the awful selection act many individuals consider performed the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion again in 1973.
— Movie authority Farran Nehme
She talked about Wounded Knee, the South Dakota city occupied at that second by Native activists marking the bloodbath of 300 Lakota by the U.S. Military at that website in 1890.
Littlefeather was interrupted as soon as by a refrain of catcalls, boos and scattered applause from the viewers. She closed with the hope that “sooner or later, our hearts and our understandings will meet with love and generosity.”
The entire episode has moved again into the information over the past couple of weeks as a result of the academy final week issued an apology to Littlefeather, now 75, for her reception on the ceremony. The academy additionally mentioned it might host Littlefeather at a night of “dialog, therapeutic and celebration” on Sept. 17.
“The abuse you endured due to this assertion was unwarranted and unjustified,” the academy apology reads. It might have been alluding to the catcalls from the viewers, or maybe to a crass crack by Clint Eastwood, who, upon presenting the Oscar for finest image, puzzled into the microphone whether or not he ought to accomplish that “on behalf of all of the cowboys shot in John Ford westerns through the years.”
However the a part of the story that has grown with the years and was dredged up, once more, in articles concerning the apology is the John Wayne half. Based on legend, Wayne, listening to Littlefeather from backstage, grew to become so incensed that he needed to be restrained by six safety guards from storming the stage to both assault Littlefeather or drag her offstage.
(The legend has additionally been invoked in reporting of Will Smith’s assault of Chris Rock onstage at this 12 months’s Oscars, typically by folks difficult descriptions of that assault because the “ugliest” second of the Oscars—"What about John Wayne and Sacheen Littlefeather?” goes the everyday rebuttal.)
The revival of the Wayne story caught the eye of one among our most realized and entertaining cineastes and movie historians, Farran Nehme, who writes an indispensable movie weblog underneath the pseudonym Self-Styled Siren.
“As soon as once more,” Nehme writes, “we’re flooded with the story of John Wayne and the Six Safety Males, the awful selection act many individuals consider performed the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion again in 1973.”
Her conclusion, after appreciable reporting and analysis, is: “By no means occurred.” Relatively, she says, the story started as an exaggerated yarn that Oscar telecast director Marty Pasetta began telling interviewers a 12 months or so after the actual fact “that bought extra thrilling every time it was informed” till it grew to become “a persistent city legend.”
Nehme’s effort deserves to be acknowledged as a result of it’s a terrific mannequin of methods to debunk a narrative that has been cemented into historical past. Writers of historic nonfiction have typically encountered this drawback; I do know I've. In researching nearly each one among my very own books, I’ve discovered myself making an attempt to trace down a cherished historic “reality” and discovering that it has completely no foundation in actuality. It’s a chore that nearly counts as an occupational hazard.
On this case, Nehme has to deal not solely with Pasetta’s model but in addition one supplied by Littlefeather herself on a number of events, together with in a 2020 documentary about herself. There, as Nehme stories, she states, “I used to be escorted off of that stage by some armed guards.... And by chance so as a result of John Wayne was ready within the wings able to go on to drag me off the stage, and he needed to be held again by six safety males as a result of he was so outraged about what I had mentioned.”
Nehme begins her inquiry by noting the evolution of Pasetta’s personal story. In 1974, he informed an interviewer that on listening to Littlefeather converse, “John Wayne [is] backstage and he’s in an uproar and I needed to calm him down.” In 1984, he informed one other interviewer that “John Wayne was within the wings and was so indignant he wished to go and pull her offstage.”
The six safety males (a suspiciously exact quantity, Nehme observes) first make their look in 1988, when he informed a 3rd interviewer, “We had a battle is what we had.... John Wayne wished to go on the market and bodily yank her off the stage. It took six males to carry him again.”
Then there’s the circumstantial proof. When Littlefeather took the stage, nobody knew what she would say — together with Howard Koch, the Oscars producer, who had merely informed her she would have 60 seconds to talk after which the stage could be darkened and she or he could be escorted off.
A clip of her look exhibits that she truly appeared on stage for about one minute and 20 seconds. She spends the primary half-minute or so introducing herself as an Apache and the president of the Native American Affirmative Picture Committee. Solely then does she say that Brando is declining the award and why. Then she demurely follows the presenters, Roger Moore and Liv Ullman, offstage.
As Nehme observes, that will counsel that within the area of 45 seconds, John Wayne heard her phrases, determined that they had been infuriating, bought as much as mount an assault, and drew the resistance of six safety guards.
It’s price protecting in thoughts, as she factors out, that 9 years earlier Wayne had undergone lung most cancers surgical procedure during which two of his ribs and a part of his left lung had been eliminated. He was by no means completely hale and hearty after that. Certainly, on the closing set piece of the telecast, when Wayne arrives onstage to ask all of the winners to come back out for a wan mass rendition of “You Oughta Be in Footage,” he’s noticeably gasping for breath.
Wayne by no means criticized Littlefeather personally; his common remark when requested about Brando’s refusal is that the actor ought to have come out and accomplished it in individual.
Littlefeather suffered years of ridicule, which the academy alludes to in its apology. However she performed herself with poise and calm; after her stage look she was introduced by Moore to the Oscars press room, the place she learn out the lengthy assertion Brando had written.
And naturally, Brando was proper to be essential of Hollywood’s therapy of Native Individuals, then and now. The academy has been making an attempt to make amends, in its means. Amongst different efforts, it created an Indigenous Alliance whose co-chair, producer Hen Runningwater, will conduct the dialog together with her subsequent month. Native Individuals have benefited from a sluggish evolution of inclusiveness in American films in recent times, however way more must be accomplished to erase its stereotypical therapy of the previous.
As for the John Wayne story, it’s an insult each to the academy and to Wayne himself. We’ve been essential up to now of the tendency to simply accept Wayne’s on-screen persona of a rough-and-tough American frontiersman, together with, sure, as an Indian-killer, as true to life — notably in the naming of Orange County’s airport for him and the set up of an enormous statue of the Hollywood model of Wayne in entrance of its terminal.
Wayne was a dyed-in-the-wool political conservative, however in response to his biographer, Scott Eyman, in actual life he was a “effectively introduced up Edwardian man” who would by no means consider assaulting a lady. Nehme elicited that perception from Eyman immediately, noting that he didn’t even point out the episode in his guide about Wayne.
“No person I talked to who knew Wayne,” Eyman informed her, “ever referred to or, apparently, believed that story.” It could be justice to retire it perpetually.
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