SAVAGE ENTERTAINMENT: A new version of Tinto Brass and Bob Guccione’s notorious 1979 film Caligula provides a valuable record of one of the most fascinating disasters in cinema history.
Almost everybody involved with the production is made to look faintly silly, including the documentary’s narrator, Bill Mitchell, whose basso profundo voice makes him sound as if his vocal cords have been marinated in bourbon. His voiceovers, for all their florid verbosity, do not sound nearly as pompous as the monologues of Gore Vidal, who bullshits grandly on historical subjects he plainly knows nothing about in his magnificently resonant voice. Still, he maintains a certain sense of style throughout the proceedings.
The same cannot be said of Caligula’s director, Tinto Brass, who turns out to be a pudgy, hairy, and excitable yet melancholy little man with no obvious sense of the impression he makes on others. He often wears a floppy khaki-coloured fisherman’s hat that resembles a dead octopus or a piece of wet cardboard. He does not always seem to be in control of either himself or the production, but he clearly gets along well with the cast, including Malcolm McDowell, who appears in an even more unfortunate hat.
Nobody in the documentary looks more comical than producer Bob Guccione, who seems to be desperate to rival Vidal as a Serious Intellectual, despite his resemblance to a middle-aged divorcee who has decided to show everyone that he’s “still got it.” Clad in leather trousers and tight shirts unbuttoned to expose his gold medallions, he surrounds himself with Renaissance-style antiques to show off his taste and power. Guccione was no fool, though. By the mid-1970s, he was already one of the richest men in America, and Penthouse was selling over four and a half million copies a month.
The star of the documentary is Caligula’s production designer, Danilo Donati. His sumptuous sets and costumes steal the show, and look far more impressive here than they do in the film. Of course, this is thanks to the craftsmen caught on camera from time to time as they patiently transform Donati’s visions into something approaching reality. Admirably, they simply get on with their jobs, heedless of all the self-indulgence and bickering around them. Not everybody involved in this production was an unhinged egomaniac.
The most engrossing element of The Making of Gore Vidal’s Caligula is the palpable tension generated by the power struggle between Guccione, Vidal, and Brass. Each of these men had a radically different notion of who Caligula was and why he turned out that way and each had his own idiosyncratic views about how to make a movie and what the purpose of the production ought to be. There seems to have been absolutely no agreement on the point of the whole exercise, let alone on who was really in charge of it.
If you’re at all curious about how one of the biggest train wrecks in cinema history occurred (at least until Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis, which played in virtually empty theaters last month), read the whole thing.