Trivialidades for
The Arrangement (1969)

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• In his autobiography, Elia Kazan says he wanted Marlon Brando to play the protagonist of his film, Eddie Anderson. Brando initially agreed to play the role, but backed out after the assassination of Martin Luther King, saying he could not go on with the film in light of such terrible events. While Kazan, a political person himself, took Brando's exit graciously, he wondered whether Brando's excuse was just a con and that he didn't really want to play the role. Kazan says that Brando's interest in playing the role, during their discussions, never got beyond his desire that the studio use a particular Italian wigmaker for his hairpieces. On his part, Kazan had urged Brando to lose weight so that the character would be "lean and hungry."
  
  
• The critics were overwhelmingly negative when the film came out, and it was the consensus that Elia Kazan should never have filmed his own best-selling novel, which was panned by most literary critics as trash when it was published in 1967. It was widely known that the lead role had been turned down by Marlon Brando, who had won three Academy Award nominations and one Oscar under Kazan's direction at the beginning of his film career and was the heart and soul of some of Kazan's best work as a movie director. By the late 1960s, after a string of flops, most critics felt Brando was through as a movie star and that he desperately needed Kazan to turn his career around, both as an artist and as box office star. When the film came out, Kirk Douglas's lead performance was roundly panned, and most critics felt that even Brando at his best couldn't save what was, in essence, a melodramatic potboiler. The failure of "The Arrangement" was the end of Kazan's own career as an A-list director.
  
  
• The character of Gwen in Kazan's 1967 best-seller is based on his second wife, Barbara Loden. Ironically, Faye Dunaway - who played Gwen in the movie - had been Loden's understudy in the 1964 Broadway production of After the Fall (1974) (TV), in which Loden played the role of Maggie. The character of Maggie was based on Marilyn Monroe, the second wife of the play's author, Arthur Miller. The 1964 production by the Lincoln Center Repetory Company was directed by Kazan, who was the co-manager of the acting troupe. Loden won the 1964 Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Play. Dunaway played the part of Maggie in the 1974 TV movie. According to Mark Harris in his 2008 book "Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood" (one of which was Bonnie and Clyde (1967), which made Dunaway a star), Dunaway as a tyro actress who was part of Kazan's Lincoln Center repertory company, carefully studied Loden's performance.
  
  

• Kazan was dissatisfied with Kirk Douglas' performance as Eddie Anderson, according to his autobiography, and wished Brando had taken the role, as Brando would have been able to suggest depths of feeling that Douglas could not.
  
  
• Richard Boone, who plays the father of Kirk Douglas' character in the film, was actually six months younger than Douglas in real life.
  
  

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