THE past several years have drawn enormous attention to inequality in Hollywood and the mixed political reality behind the entertainment industry’s liberal reputation. But at times it often feels like it’s easier to point out dismal diversity figures or the limits on what Hollywood can say about subjects like the War on Terror than to advance any actual proposals for change.

But just as a sense of hopelessness about racial equality on television has historical precedents, so do strategic efforts to make changes. And, as Susan L. Mizruchi’s terrific 2015 study of Marlon Brando suggests, there are lessons for socially-conscious actors in the legacy and negotiating style of one of their greatest colleagues.

Brando’s Smile: His Life, Thought, and Work is refreshing because Mizruchi treats Brando as a thinker and a political figure, considering him as much as a public intellectual as a very famous person with a complicated personal life. Her access to Brando’s library means she has great insight into how Brando took and shaped parts in accordance with the issues he cared about most. And her exploration of Brando’s strategic approach to his career offers a number of ways actors who want to change their own industry and the wider world might leverage their fame for good.

At a moment when actresses like Jennifer Lawrence, Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin are talking publicly about pay equity, Brando’s career is a reminder that Hollywood contracts can be about more than money.

When Brando was negotiating over his role in Sayonara, in which he plays an American air force officer who falls in love with a Japanese woman, “Brando insisted that the ‘Madame Butterfly ending’ be replaced with one that portrayed racial intermarriage as a ‘natural outcome’ of love,” only agreeing to take the part after the producers committed to those changes, and fact-checking cultural inaccuracies in the script even after he signed on. For Mutiny on the Bounty, Brando negotiated over the plot again, and pushed for Polynesian people to be cast in the film as extras. On The Ugly American, Brando “insisted that the failures of American strategies in Southeast Asia be exposed. Second, he urged an even-handed treatment of Communists and Americans”.

And he used his fame to call attention to his colleagues’ working conditions on the set of Burn! a film about a slave revolt when he “charged (director Gillo) Pontecorvo with paying black cast members lower wages than whites, and giving them substandard food”.

Even when his contracts didn’t give him direct influence over scripts or working conditions, Brando could lead by example. On the set of his 1996 movie The Island of Dr. Moreau, “Brando noticed an actor from the Dominican Republic, Nelson de la Rosa, with a genetic mutation, who was two and a half feet tall and weighed twenty-two pounds. De la Rosa had been outfitted in a loincloth with a tail, which Brando found demeaning. So Brando made de la Rosa his sidekick, beside him in nearly every scene, dressed identically.”

This approach didn’t produce the results Brando wanted. When he was considering working on Christopher Columbus: The Discovery, Brando “hoped that the clause in his contract stipulating that the film honor the historical facts would ensure him significant influence, especially given his wealth of knowledge about the Indians ... Brando was able through script revisions to document the cruelty of Torquemada, but he had little success countering the film’s suppression of Columbus’s violence against the natives”.

He deliberately tanked the performance. And on A Dry White Season, Brando offered to pay for edits to the film and was refused.

Brando also rationed his media exposure so he could use his rare appearances to call attention to the causes he cared most deeply about. The most famous example of this approach was Brando’s decision to give Sacheen Littlefeather the opportunity to take the stage on his behalf and to decline his 1973 Academy Award for Best Actor.

In 1963, Mizruchi points out, Brando went on the Today Show to read excerpts from Time magazine’s coverage of playwright Tennessee Williams, “calling attention to the anal rhetoric and physical slurs so obviously misplaced in a reputable journal”, and criticising Time for letting homophobia colour the publication’s coverage.

Sometimes Brando acted privately, too. In 1960, he sent a telegram to “the news editor at KNXT, the local Hollywood station, about their coverage of the Olympic Games, the telegram noted that the commentators at the ski-jumping event ‘consistently referred to the Japanese as Japs.’ This is a term that is considered by the Japanese as unsavory and derogatory. I am sure that this was an oversight but felt obliged to send this.”

It’s absolutely true that few actors have Marlon Brando’s star power or influence. But if you don’t ask, you don’t get. In 2015, Hollywood figures talked the talk. 2016 should be the year they actually start negotiating for what they say they want.

—By arrangement with The Washington Post

Published in Dawn, January 11th, 2016