The Screengrab

We recently did a list of real bodily transformations in film, so it's only fair that now we look on the flipside and consider those bodily transformations that had nothing to do with an actor's ability to stay on or off carbs but rather tested their patience in the makeup chair. Of course, some had it easier than others: Goldie Hawn probably sat in makeup for hours for her fat scenes in Death Becomes Her and practically nobody noticed. On the other hand, Marlon Brando stuck something in his mouth and became an icon. (There's a joke waiting to be made here, but we won't be the ones to make it.) And some just got to walk around pretending they had a big schlong. You'll find them here, in our list of The Ten Greatest Prosthetics in Movie History.



Marlon Brando's Cheeks in THE GODFATHER (1972)

One of the most famous prosthetics in the history of film can't actually be seen on screen: it's stuffed inside Marlon Brando's mouth. No, not a Big Mac. It's a dental prosthetic designed especially for the actor, and which he uses throughout the film to facilitate both a vocal and physical transformation into Don Vito Corleone. Conceiving of the character as resembling a bulldog, Brando showed up for his screen test with cotton wool crammed between his teeth and the inside of his cheeks to give him a jowly, determined look; once he was cast, it soon became apparent that, however Method it might have been, this was an untenable choice, since the cotton dried out his mouth and left him unable to deliver his lines. Coppola, who was just beginning a long and agonizing decade of catering to Brando's ever-eccentric behavior, stepped in and had the dental prosthetic constructed. After he started using it, the actor discovered another happy accident: the way it shaped his cheeks and mouth helped him to lower his voice to the scratchy whisper that Brando was going for with the character, which he patterned after real-life mobster Frank Costello's raspy intonation. Though it's never actually seen (and it's left completely unexplained why Robert DeNiro, playing the young Vito Corleone in flashbacks in the film's sequel, has an entirely different facial structure), the plastic doohickey helped create one of the most memorable of all film icons, and boosted sales of cotton balls as a generation of bad impressionists found an easy way out.

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Two of the major film comedians of recent decades have started launching multiple assaults onto bookstore shelves. Woody Allen, of course, stop being a "mere" comedian a long time ago; he also started hemorrhaging audience shares a long time ago, and Conversations with Woody Allen: His Films, the Movies, and Movie-making, a redundantly subtitled collection of interviews conducted with his biographer Eric Lax, is designed to serve as a reminder that he is a major filmmaker, in case any of the people who've stopped seeing his movies have forgotten it. Much of what he has to say about the path he's taken as a director and his on-again, off-again relationship with his fans will be very familiar to anyone who's had moments of being interested lo these many years. Allen likes to affect a mandarin pose; the official story is that he stopped reading his reviews after Annie Hall, a film whose "classic" status apparently strikes him as inexplicable. But the 1980 Stardust Memories, a self-victimization orgy (and a work that Allen regards as among his very favorites) that includes a fantasy scene of extraterrestrials telling Allen that they prefer his "earlier, funnier" films, sure does look like it was made by someone who'd made a close study of the reviews of Interiors. Lax may be too deferential for the job; the book would be a livelier read if some of it had been done with an interlocutor who might have reacted to Allen's wondering aloud why Hollywood Ending "was not thought of as a first-rate, extraordinary comedy" by explaining, "Because it sucked donkeys, my liege."

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