He made other films — The Chase (1966), Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967), The Nightcomers (1971) — and he continued to take roles in projects he found interesting or worthwhile. He was an actor by profession and continued to act. But his standing in the industry had shifted, and his own interest in the industry had evolved.
The political commitments that culminated in the 1973 protest were being developed throughout this period. The 1964 fish-in arrest was not a one-off publicity stunt; it was an action in support of a specific cause that he would continue to support over subsequent decades. He read seriously. He engaged with Native activists. He thought about what the entertainment industry specifically could do differently.
When The Godfather gave him the opportunity to return to the center of his industry’s attention — when Francis Ford Coppola cast him in a role that would win him the second Oscar of his career — he arrived at that moment with a political agenda that his decade of commercial difficulty had not diminished. The twelve years between On the Waterfront and The Godfather had not turned him into a cooperative Hollywood institution. They had turned him into something more interesting: an insider who had spent enough time outside to see clearly what the institution he had re-entered was actually doing.
## The Theatrical Construction of the Oscar Ceremony
One element of the 1973 protest that receives less attention than it deserves is the specific theatrical logic of what Brando and Littlefeather actually disrupted.