Marlon Brando and other assorted "pigs"

A call went out to my loyal legion of Facebook compatriots asking that they overindulge this swine by oinking forth a few bacon bits of wisdom for my latest endeavor in unappeasable behavior, a video mashup of Hollywood’s finest, all squealing, "Pig!"

"It's not that I don’t appreciate the concept," came the puzzled murmur left on an incoming voicemail, "but where did it come from?" A return call to colleague Josh Board helped to clear things up. A few years back, I wrote a piece on the inordinate amount of times Marlon Brando had committed the word "pig" to film. Links to illustrative YouTube clips were posted, but without a steady flow of "pigs" stuck together, the gag felt flat. Unrewarding. Unredeemed.

Finally, after summoning the nerve to stare intimidation in the face and discipline myself in the ways of iMovie, hours went into assembling a practice run montage of fake babies. The end result was most rewarding, but what with the fixed aspect ratio and floating imagery spoiling the view, the purist in me was still left feeling unredeemed.

YouTube tutorials were either too hip for the room or so remedial, only a granny suffering from severe auditory damage and cataracts the size of a Lincoln Continental could follow. Moving my cursor – and cursing at every wrong click — I was able to surmise which buttons on the video-editing software app needed pushing to properly conform the varying dimensions.

My rapacious readers don’t boar easily. All told, Brando’s piggish pronouncements amounted to less than a minute, barely enough time to satisfy, let alone surpass their gluttonous craving for bad taste titters.

The first beacon of inspiration arrived in the form of premium-grade Brando bacon: what would happen if Marlon’s bathroom soliloquy from Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris were intercut with Porky Pig’s wide-eyed civics inquisition in Chuck Jones’s Old Glory? Dean Martin’s quartet of “pigs” in Vincente Minnelli’s Some Came Running was next in line, as was another of the director’s parenthetical porcines in Home From the Hill, this time aided and abetted by Robert Mitchum’s “done it all” delivery.

Pig after pig came to mind. A trio of Altman porkers? Check! Tony Bennett refusing to take things lying down in The Oscar? Check!

Clips featuring Joseph Gordon-Levitt and The Hunger Games’ Jennifer Lawrence for the youngsters in our audience? Check! “Pigs” joined at the lip by a galaxy of f-bombs? Double-check! Three Stooges pigs?

Soitenly!

One “pig” led to another and with the aid of my Facebook minions, I embarked on a sowbelly safari looking to carpenter a graphic lexicography of lard, a concise case compendium of cob-chomping confabulation.

Thanks again to all who contributed to this sty. Not every suggestion was useable. Many cited the commendable swatch of pig-talk in Snatch, but for the life of me, I couldn't figure out a way to incorporate it into the bit. And to those who asked for a nod to the Muppets I say, you know nothing of my work! You mean my whole fallacy is wrong.

I know you’ll agree that the following gammon gambol of outrageous delight firmly positions me as the Chuck Workman of the working stiff, the Thelma Schoonmaker of shite, and the Slavko Vorkapić of shoat! Feast on it!