The Ultimate Cut, out this week, is the latest attempt to deliver the true version of the infamous 1979 sword and scandal epic, Caligula.
Does a great version of Caligula really exist? Ever since its star Malcolm McDowell went on television, imploring viewers not to go to the cinema and see it it in 1979, there have been those who’ve championed the period epic as a would-be masterpiece – a film with literary and artistic underpinnings that was brought low by a greedy pornographer and an editing room full of people who simply failed to understand what it was they were cutting together. McDowell himself has long said that there’s a brilliant film in Caligula, which was widely castigated by critics on its release, if only someone could go back and find it hidden among all the reels of footage.
Forty-five years later, that’s what filmmaker Thomas Negovan has done: tracked down 90 hours of celluloid shot by original director Tinto Brass in 1976 and attempted to forge a new version of the film that is truer to the original screenplay by literary titan Gore Vidal. The result is a three-hour pseudo-erotic drama in which more space is given to the performances – specifically McDowell’s increasingly deranged Roman emperor Caligula and Helen Mirren as his shrewd, hard-dancing wife, Caesonia.
What the Ultimate Cut also does, however, is further highlight the vast artistic differences that threatened to tear the film apart before a frame of it was even shot.
The story of Caligula’s making is so infamous that you’ve probably read at least a bit about it before. Bob Guccione, the Penthouse magazine founder who made millions out of his pornographic media empire, decided he wanted to make a film that was “as revolutionary to motion pictures as Penthouse has become to magazine publishing.”
Inspired by such explicit films as Deep Throat and Last Tango In Paris, released earlier in the 1970s, Guccione later reasoned to New York magazine, “Why not make the definitive X-rated film? Why not make a film by a major author, with a major director, major stars, and go all the way?”
Fronting millions of dollars of his company’s money, Guccione and co-producer Franco Rossellini hired Gore Vidal to write a screenplay about Gaius Julius Caesar (nicknamed Caligula, meaning ‘Little Boot’), whose brief reign as emperor violently ended while the despot was still in his late 20s. Rossellini had initially tried to get Caligula made as a TV mini-series earlier in the 1970s; when that failed, he found an unlikely ally in Guccione – at least for a while.
With Vidal’s script complete, Guccioni then hired Tinto Brass after seeing sequences from the Italian filmmaker’s cheerfully salacious 1976 drama Salon Kitty, about the Nazis’ use of a brothel to spy on German diplomats. After it was panned by critics, Brass said of it in 1978, “People didn’t understand that I set out to make a vulgar film, deliberately to try and halt the cinema’s slide into elitism.”
The problems that would dog Caligula well into the 1980s were born at its inception. Guccioni wanted to make a big-budget movie with hardcore sex – or, as he said in a self-serving interview with his own Penthouse magazine at the time, his plan was to “weld scenes of explicit sexuality and violence to an otherwise establishment project – i.e., big stars, big budget, et cetera, et cetera.”
Vidal, an intellectual whose previous work for the big screen included uncredited work another period epic, Ben-Hur, wanted to write a comparatively accurate account of an emperor’s descent into megalomania and deviancy. Tinto Brass, on the other hand, wanted something bigger and more outrageous – a larger-than-life story of an anti-hero who begins as a sociopath and only becomes more morally bankrupt from there.
This triangle of creative directions – between Guccioni, Vidal and Brass – continued through the writing process, into Caligula’s troubled shoot, and well into editing. Brass disliked Vidal’s initial script and set about rewriting it (with Vidal’s help, initially); when Vidal very publicly described directors as ‘parasites’, an enraged Brass had Vidal kicked off the production.
During filming, Brass and McDowell continued working on the script, changing dialogue and scenes to reflect their more theatrical take on the power-mad Caligula. They also struck out much of Peter O’Toole’s lines as the syphilitic emperor Tiberius, reportedly because the pair simply didn’t particularly get on with the actor.
When Guccioni saw the wilfully grotesque, arthouse direction Brass was taking the movie, however, he took drastic action in order to drag it back to the more crowd-pleasingly smutty trajectory he’d originally envisioned. Flying to Rome with 11 or 12 Penthouse models in tow, Guccioni sneaked onto the production’s baroque sets (created at huge cost by production designer Danilo Donati) and personally filmed several hours of hardcore sex scenes.
Guccioni then had the entire negative – not just his footage, but also the 90-plus hours filmed by Brass – secretly flown out to the UK. As editing began on a rough cut of Caligula at Twickenham Studios, Guccioni fired Brass, later accusing him of having “mishandled and brutalised the film’s sexuality,” and further condemning him as a “crude and uncomprehending lout” and a “very sick guy.”
(Tellingly, in the Penthouse interview in which he says this, Guccioni doesn’t have a good word to say about anybody, with the fault for Caligula’s failure being assigned to almost everyone but himself.)
It was here that an already chaotic production got even messier. “That’s when all the lawsuits started,” Guccioni said at the time; “Tinto was suing us, we were suing Tinto, Tinto was suing Gore, and Gore was threatening to sue everyone else.”
Brass later confirmed in a 1978 interview with Boulevard magazine that his lawsuits were against Vidal and “the producers who, after I had finished shooting and was half-way through editing, threw me out and wanted to finish the film according to their tastes. So I’ve taken them to court.”
The legal scrap over Caligula rumbled on for almost three years, during which time all kinds of rumours were seeping out both about the pornographic nature of the film and its troubled making. There were reports that McDowell was so traumatised by the shoot that he’d sought psychiatric help; that the film featured just about every kind of perversion imaginable, and one or two that weren’t.
In an attempt to quell rumours about scenes of bestiality in the film, a Penthouse Films PR spokesperson told Photoplay magazine in 1977, “Those stories above love scenes with horses and dogs are just ludicrous… we do have one scene with an actress and a donkey, but it is shot through a translucent curtain and the donkey is just a wooden prop manipulated with levers,” which cleared that up.
There was also the rumour that actor Maria Schneider, originally hired to play Caligula’s sister (and lover) Drusilla, had stormed off the set after a few days’ shooting. The latter story turned out to be true; Schneider was hurriedly replaced by Teresa Ann Savoy, who’d previously appeared in Salon Kitty.
During this period of chaos and legal warfare, a revolving door of editors came in and attempted to craft some sort of movie out of Brass’s confiscated footage. Author Randjit Sandhu’s website caligula.org has what is likely a complete list of the staggering 42 edits and the editors who worked on them, at least where the name of the editor responsible was known. It’s difficult to think of another film that has been recut and reworked by so many editors as Caligula; the resulting edits range in length from comparatively short 116-minute versions to the 156-minute cut shown at Cannes in March 1979.
Some cuts have been lost to history; others have the hardcore sex inserted at Guccioni’s behest; still others are heavily tamed in order to appease censors in certain territories. For years, there were even whispers of a 210-minute cut, said to be racier than any version publicly seen, and shown only to a select number of people in private screenings. This is almost certainly an urban legend, partly based on either a typo or a mistaken bit of reporting during the production’s turbulent pre-release period.
That Caligula even has an urban legend speaks to just how much fascination surrounded the film, both in the run-up to its release and years afterwards. Guccioni’s decision to forbid the press from visiting the set added to its mystique, as did the news that the film’s Rome premiere in 1979 was disrupted by a police raid during which the film’s reels were confiscated for obscenity.
When US critics finally got to see it, their reaction was generally one of collective horror. Roger Ebert famously walked out in disgust. Critic Rex Reed wrote in the New York Daily News, “Movies won’t be the same. They can’t sink any lower than Caligula.” Even those credited with making or starring in it were quick to distance themselves. Gore Vidal sued to keep his name out of the title, and Rossellini demanded his name out of the credits, while Tinto Brass was given a ‘principal photography by’ billing.
Peter O’Toole said it was “about as erotic as bath night on a battleship.” Malcolm McDowell often commented that he’d been tricked into making ‘pornography,’ and condemned Caligula as “a pile of crap.”
For decades afterwards, as Caligula became a cult item and sales of VHS tapes and DVDs ultimately rewarded Guccione’s huge $22m investment, there was the continued theory that a better movie could be mined from all that archived footage. A cut called the Imperial Edition appeared in 2007, for example, which restructured the narrative and got rid of Guccione’s unsimulated sex scenes.
In 2018, filmmaker Alexander Tuschinski attempted to come up with another edit which hewed more closely to the movie Brass originally wanted to make. The edit would have been made with assistance from Brass himself, and the project appeared to be progressing well in 2017; but then there appeared to be some sort of disagreement with Caligula’s rights holders, and the re-cut was never completed.
All of which brings us back round to Caligula: The Ultimate Cut, which attempts to refashion the film so that it more accurately reflects Gore Vidal’s original screenplay. Unusually, filmmaker Thomas Negovan hasn’t just re-edited footage from previous releases – he’s gone back into those miles of Tinto Brass celluloid to seek out alternate shots and unused takes. Brass commonly shot every scene with three cameras running simultaneously, hence the vast trove of film he ended up with before he was fired in 1977.
This meant that, in his absence, the revolving door of editors hired by Guccione had an absolute nightmare trying to figure out Brass’s original intent. But for Negovan, it’s an opportunity to draw out a film with more nuanced performances, particularly from McDowell. His turn as Caligula is, undoubtedly, brilliant – sprightly, nimble and gleefully anarchic. It’s little wonder that McDowell himself approves of this latest edit (“Negovan’s Caligula is very much the movie I thought I was making with Tinto Brass,” he recently said).
In seeking to make a moodier, more dramatic film, however, The Ultimate Cut’s sombre tone clashes with the inherently camp elements already baked into the production: the gigantic decapitating death machine, whose presence in the film always felt slightly out of place, feels even more bizarre when set against Troy Sterling Nies’ new, deadly-serious score. Brass intended Caligula to be a pitch-black, parodic comedy – hence scenes like O’Toole’s Tiberius riding an anachronistic lift through an orgy scene, or the distinctly 1970s, disco edge to some of the costumes. All of this clashes quite awkwardly with what remains of Vidal’s high-minded dialogue.
Nor does The Ultimate Cut’s near three-hour duration help matters. Even in earlier cuts, Caligula’s scenes often felt overly drawn out, and here they play even longer – which merely gives us more time to ponder at how stagey the expansive sets feel, or note how bored and uncomfortable the background extras look. Like every other version of Caligula, The Ultimate Cut is a fascinating mess – a grandiose film that has some extraordinary, striking moments in it, but also huge stretches of tedium.
What’s even more striking than the film itself is how many people have become hypnotised, perhaps even addicted to Caligula's aura. As we’ve seen, numerous filmmakers have spent months or years of their lives tinkering with it. Authors have spent even longer delving into its sordid production history. Even this piece has stretched on far beyond this humble writer’s original intentions.
Authors Randjit Sandhu and James Chaffin spent years writing 200 Degrees Of Failure: The Making Of Caligula, an exhaustive attempt to tell the film’s bizarre story. For reasons unclear (though potentially due to a falling out with whoever owns Penthouse) their book was never published. On Sandhu’s website, the co-author expresses his disillusionment at both having spent 35 years researching and writing his book and at the film itself. In the process, he’s managed to pin down what might be the fundamental problem with Caligula:
“In numerous interviews, Malcolm McDowell expressed his conviction that, buried beneath the mess, there is a great movie struggling to get out, if only it were to be edited properly. Until recently, I agreed. Then I saw some more rushes, and I saw what survives of Tinto’s first draft of the rough cut. I thought it was dreadful. Once I saw that, well, I was deflated. I had been eagerly pursuing a whole big bag of nothing for all those years. I felt so stupid.”
Too bloody and depressing to be erotic, and too campily salacious to be taken seriously as a period piece, Caligula is instead its own uniquely malformed creature. It’s the result of conflicting visions that, no matter how often they’re massaged and re-cut, can never be reconciled.
Caligula: The Ultimate Cut is out in select UK cinemas and on digital on the 9th August.
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