As far as I can recall, I have never watched
this movie. It is of course a legendary film - not necessarily for what ended
up on the screen but for the story around it. It nearly bankrupted Fox Studio
and become a textbook lesson of a studio that completely lost control of
a film. Yet after all is said and done, the film eventually made money and
I suppose still is. This documentary details all that went wrong - which
is pretty much everything. At the end of the 1950s, Fox was in financial
trouble and they needed content. Fast and cheap content. They turned to long-time
veteran producer Walter Wanger and he had the perfect product - a remake
of a property they already owned - Cleopatra from the silent era with Theda
Bara. They gave Wanger a 2 million dollar budget. By the time the film was
finished the budget was more than ten times that number - in 1960 dollars
- it would be over $500 million in today's dollars.
One wrong decision after another. Rouben
Mamoulian was given the director reins - they hired Peter Finch to play Ceasar
and Stephen Boyd to play Antony - and of course Elizabeth Taylor to be Cleopatra.
She was paid one-million dollars. The first actor to receive that much. And
they decided to film it in London. It rained incessantly and Taylor was sick
time after time. One time so badly that she nearly died. The film came to
a hiatus - and by the time it started up again Mamoulian was replaced by
Joseph Mankiewicz, Finch by Rex Harrison and Boyd by Richard Burton and they
moved the filming to Italy - destroying all the sets already built in England.
Mankiewicz re-wrote the script and made it bigger and bigger and more and
more expensive. It got to the point that the studio could not shut it down
- it had already cost too much. As the film went on, the head of the studio
was fired and they rehired Darryl Zanuck who had headed Fox previously for
years and was just finishing up The Longest Day. When the shooting was all
done, Mankiewicz edited together a 6-hour film. He wanted it shown in two
parts - Caesar and Cleopatra and then Antony and Cleopatra.
Zanuck said hell no - the Burton Taylor
affair was huge tabloid news and he wanted their part of the film shown before
they broke up. Mankiewicz got it down to four hours - after the premier -
Zanuck demanded another hour and it ended up at three hours. I think they
have been trying to find all the film that got cut and are trying to create
a director's cut - though Mankiewicz is long dead. Not sure what is available
these days. Not sure I want to watch this film - maybe, maybe not - I love
epics of that period - before CGI. All those thousands of extras - those
were real people all in costumes - all those structures were real and built
for the film. We will never see that again. How much this changed Hollywood
is debatable. It is a fine documentary running about two - hours.
