Cleopatra, $44,000,000 and the Christmas Bonus 1963
Movietonews had two parent companies, The Daily Mail and Twentieth Century Fox. It was customary for the latter to provide us at Movietonews with a Christmas bonus. It was only a few pounds, but it was much appreciated because it would assist with those extras required to complete the Christmas festivities.
In 1960, 20th Century Fox started filming Cleopatra at Pinewood Studios. Some sizeable and hugely expensive sets were built. Elizabeth Taylor was engaged to play Cleopatra, the director was Rouben Mamoulian and the cast list included a large number of British and American actors, all well known to cinema audiences. Almost immediately, Elizabeth Taylor caught a cold which developed complications and she was taken into intensive care. Later she had a tracheotomy and was said to have been “near death”.
In January of 1961, Mamoulian resigned as director and was replaced by Joseph L. Mankiewicz. At this time, the film was over-running its budget by $5,000,000. This was a film that was originally budgeted at $2,000,000. Mankiewicz claimed that there was no usable footage at that stage.
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First of all the absence of Elizabeth Taylor and the inclement British weather further delayed production and, eventually, Pinewood and its sets were abandoned.
The production stumbled from one disaster to another. You could not make it up.
The whole production then moved to Italy, where all the sets had to be built for a second time.
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By June 1963, the film was ready for release, by now costing a massive $44,000,000. It is estimated that by today’s values this amount would be in excess of $300,000,000
The first version of the film which Mankiewicz screened for the studio was six hours long. This was cut to four hours for the premiere, but the studio wanted (In spite of objections from Mankiewicz) the film be cut to a little over three hours to allow cinemas to get one more showing in each day.
There was a crisis at 20th Century Fox
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At a board meeting, Darryl F. Zanuck spoke for hours, convincing directors that Spyros P. Skouras was mismanaging the company and that he was the only possible successor. Zanuck was installed as chairman, and then named his son Richard Zanuck as president.
The new management took over control of Cleopatra and speeded up its completion. They closed the studios, laid off the entire staff, axed Movietone Newsreel (in the United States) and made a series of cheap, popular pictures that restored Fox as a major studio.
The recovery of the studio would came from the huge success of The Sound of Music (1965), an expensive adaptation of the Rodgers and Hammerstein Broadway musical, which became one of the all-time greatest box office hits. All this because of the disastrous handling of Cleopatra.
How could so many talented people got it all so terribly wrong ?
The long, drawn out, process, together with the enormous cost of producing Cleopatra brought an end to the Roman and Biblical extravaganzas.
Image by lumierefl via Flickr
Incredibly, in the year of its release, 1963, Cleopatra was the highest grossing film in the U.S. while, at the same time, had the record for the largest budget overrun.
What was worse, we did not get our Christmas bonus in 1963.
Come to think about it, we never got a Christmas bonus again.
© Terence Gallacher and terencegallacher.com, 2010. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Terence Gallacher and terencegallacher.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
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