 Starring: Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Rex Harrison
Director: Joseph L. Mankiewicz
Year Of Release: 1963
Plot: Charting 18 years in the life of Egypt’s legendary Cleopatra, the film sees the queen scheming to use tensions in Rome to marry Julius Caesar and consolidate her position as a powerful ruler. However his death puts her plans into turmoil, but things change when Mark Anthony arrives in Egypt and they fall in love. |
Stories abound about what a legendary money-pit Cleopatra was. Indeed, until the last few years with the likes of Avatar and Pirates Of The Caribbean 3, it remained the most expensive movie ever made, adjusted for inflation. So what exactly happened to make it cost so much?
When a film loses the studio money, it’s bad enough, but when a production haemorrhages money to the point that it threatens to bankrupt the studio, things get very serious. That was the case with the 1963 sword and sandals epic Cleopatra. With an original budget of $2 million, the film ended up costing 20th Century Fox a staggering $44 million (over $300 million, adjusted for inflation). As the finances of the studio (as with most of Hollywood at the time) were rather precarious, the movie really could have, and nearly did, destroy Fox.
Originally set to be directed by Rouben Mamoulian, Cleopatra was conceived as a mid scale production (the likes of Joan Collins tested for the lead role), but was turned into a far grander affair when Elizabeth Taylor came on board. Her initial contract guaranteed she would become the first actor to earn a million dollars for a single film, meaning that it was apparent early on that the budget would have to grow. As a result, the whole thing was turned into a major star-driven epic, which the studio pitched as being on the same sort of scale as 1959’s Ben-hur, which was a very expensive movie for the time at around $15 million but nothing like Cleopatra ended up costing.
Sets doubling for Ancient Egypt were built in England ready for a large-scale shoot, but soon after filming began in 1960, Taylor fell seriously ill and a tracheotomy had to be performed to save her life. Initially Mamoulian tried to shoot around Taylor, filming scenes with Peter Finch as Julius Caesar and Stephen Boyd as Mark Antony, however they quickly realised that they couldn’t continue without the main title star.
As it was apparent that Taylor was not going to get better quickly, things were put on hold for six months. Then, when preparations were made to start the movie back up the following year, things really got out of hand. The star’s respiratory problems meant that shooting in the damp climate of England wasn’t a good idea (there had also been problems getting the outdoor sets in the gloomy UK to properly look like they were in a sunny desert country like Egypt, as the plants kept withering and the sets deteriorated every time it rained), so at enormous expencse, everything had to be dismantled and completely reconstructed in Rome for a brand new shoot.
The delay also meant that despite having been paid, Peter Finch, Stephen Boyd and director Rouben Mamoulian had to drop out due to other commitments, and were replaced by Richard Burton, Rex Harrison and All About Eve helmer Joseph L. Mankiewicz. You might have thought that at this point Fox would have cut its losses and run, but it had already sunk so much money on the project, and had guaranteed many people, including Taylor, a lot more, that despite these massive extra costs, it still seemed to be economically sensible to carry on. It was more that they couldn’t afford to stop than anything else.
The new director then set about completely reworking the script, and didn’t stop until principal photography ended. This in itself slowed things down and added significantly to costs because the constant rewrites meant no one knew what they might have to film on any particular day. Rather than shooting everything that was needed on one set and then moving onto the next, the production had to jump around based on what bit of the script was ready that day. Huge amounts of equipment had to be kept on permanent standby, simply because it was never known whether it would be needed or not. In fact, some sets were built based on the initial script, which weren't ever used once Mankiewicz has made his alterations.
Even the costume budget was unprecedented, with Taylor wearing a record-breaking 64 different, lavishly created, outfits, costing $200,000 (more than what some Hollywood films at the time cost), including one made from 24-carat gold cloth.
Even in post-production the chaos continued, with four-time Oscar winning writer/director Mankiewicz getting fired during editing. He’d shot huge amounts of footage and initially wanted to put together a film over six hours long that he hoped Fox would split in two and release as separate movies (one concentrating on Cleopatra and Mark Antony and one on the queen and Julius Caesar). However, having already spent unprecedented amounts of money on the film, Fox decided they wanted to take control, keeping it as a single movie but hacking it down to a more manageable length themselves.
As soon as they got rid of Mankiewicz though, they realised they had a problem. Due to all the rewriting that had gone on during filming, no finished script was ever completed and Mankiewicz was the only person who knew how the film was all supposed to fit together. As a result Fox had to rehire him. The director cut the movie down to four hours for its Hollywood premiere, with Fox insisting another hour was removed for the normal cinema run (while the 248-minute version has been released on DVD, there’s hope that one day they’ll find the rest of the footage from Mankiewicz’s six-hour version, which he said contained many of the film’s best scenes).
It’s also true that while Taylor’s original contract guaranteed her at least a million, she got more if the production went over-schedule. By the time the seemingly never-ending shoot finished, she’d already earned over $2 million. She was also promised 10% of the gross. After Fox eventually realised how much they were going to have to pay the star, they sued her and Richard Burton, partially blaming them for the budget overruns, as well as for causing huge amounts of adverse publicity that they said affected the film's box office potential.
Taylor and Burton's tumultuous relationship started on the Cleopatra set, causing immense controversy when it was revealed to the public, because they were both married to other people at the time. Indeed, even at the time of Cleopatra's premiere, neither of their divorces were finalised (they married for the first time a week after Taylor's divorce from Eddie Fisher went through, in March 1964), and the whole thing was quite a scandal. Burton and Taylor then countersued and by the time everything was sorted out in 1966, Elizabeth walked away with a truly unprecedented (for the time) $7 million.
Luckily upon its 1963 release – two whole years later than it should have come out – Cleopatra grossed enough money to help cushion the devasting hole the film had put in Fox's bank-sheet. Nevertheless it lost money on its initial theatrical release, having the unusual distinction of being the only film ever which was the highest grossing movie of the year, but still made a loss on its first release. Thankfully for Fox though, it did make enough money to stave off bankruptcy, which was a real possibility at the time due to the fact its films had been underperforming for years and it was very low on cash. Indeed, because Fox was forced to put so much money on Cleopatra, the studio had to cancel several other movies that they simply couldn’t afford to make, ensuring the epic was even more important to the company’s survival than it might otherwise have been, as there was nothing else to make them money
Despite its legendary reputation as a flop, Cleopatra eventually broke even by the time the TV rights were sold in 1973. Still, if it wasn’t for the gigantic success of The Sound Of Music a couple of year’s later helping to recoup Fox’s staggering outlay on Cleopatra and put things back on a firm financial footing, we could now have been without one of the world’s biggest film studios.
It really is a fascinating story, and it’s worth getting hold of the three-disc Special Edition DVD release, which includes a feature-length documentary on the making of the movie, which goes into great detail about what happened and how it affected Hollywood. It’s well worth a watch.
TIM ISAAC
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