“Surely you know you’re going to lose, don’t you?”
—Herbert Lom as Tigranes Levantus
THE LIGHTS CAME UP IN the screening room. Nobody spoke. I looked around on either side of me. On my left, Eddie Lewis seemed shell-shocked. On my right, Dalton Trumbo, wearing an unseasonal overcoat and a floppy hat pulled low over his head, was slumped down in his folding chair. Under the cover of night, I’d snuck him on the lot in the backseat of my car, covered by a blanket, to see Stanley’s first rough cut of Spartacus. No one at Universal knew Dalton was there.
I couldn’t read his expression, but his body language said it all—he wished he had stayed home.
Kubrick was pacing back and forth at the front of the small theater. The editor, Irving Lerner, and his assistant, Bob Lawrence, were huddled together just in front of me, furiously making notes.
I turned around. In the very back row, sitting alone, was Lew Wasserman. His normally impassive face was positively inscrutable. So far, Universal had spent more than $9 million on this film. Lew had personally guaranteed his studio “partners” that Spartacus would be a hit. After tonight’s screening, that didn’t seem very likely. Not likely at all.
Eddie was the first to speak. “The music will help,” he said hopefully. We were all eagerly anticipating Alex North’s score. A six-time Oscar nominee, North was in great demand, and landing him for Spartacus had been a real coup.
Stanley planted himself in a seat in the front row and started bouncing a tennis ball off the side of the screening room wall.
“We need more money,” he said.
I looked at him like he was nuts. “We’re two and a half times over budget and this is a mess! Why would the studio give us another dime?”
Stanley kept tossing the ball against the wall. He was talking to himself. “We need to shoot the final battle sequence. Right now all we’ve got is the aftermath. That’s cheating the audience.”
I turned around and looked up at Lew in the back of the screening room. He was putting on his hat. I started to walk up the aisle to talk with him, but Dalton grabbed my arm. “Let’s get out of here,” he said. When I looked back up the aisle, Lew was gone.
Irving Lerner approached me tentatively. “Don’t worry, Kirk. We’ll have another cut to show you within the week.”
“No, you’ll have it tomorrow,” I said sharply. “I don’t care if you have to work all night. Put cots in the cutting room. Just get me something I can show Universal.”
“Please, Kirk. We need more time. How about four days? Today is Thursday, we’ll have something for you by Monday night. We’ll work tomorrow and all weekend.”
Trumbo was tugging at my arm to leave. Stanley was still tossing the ball back and forth against the wall.
I shouted at Kubrick, “Good night, Eisenstein. I’ll see you back here on Monday. And you’d better have something else to show me or I’m shipping you back to Brando.”
Stanley ignored me. I heard him mumble something about “Spain.”
Dalton, Eddie, and I walked out into the warm night air. Dalton kept his head down and made a beeline for my car. The parking lot was empty—we’d deliberately scheduled the screening for 8:30 p.m. and it was almost midnight.
I lingered for a moment with Eddie Lewis. “How bad is it?”
Eddie puffed on his pipe. “There’s some tremendous footage, Kirk. You’re great. Larry’s great. Jean is wonderful. Peter is hysterical. Even that cantankerous old goat, Laughton, is fantastic. In fact, there’s not enough of him. He was right about that.”
“I know all that. The performances aren’t the problem. The problem is there’s no story. We tried the flashback angle to explain Spartacus’ threat to the Roman Empire, but now it just feels like a ragtag bunch of convicts on a three-hour prison break.”
“What does Sam think,” Eddie asked, pointing at Trumbo, whose cigarette holder was sticking out of the passenger window of my car. There was no danger of him being spotted. He was enveloped in a cloud of smoke.
“I don’t know yet,” I said, starting toward the car. “I’m about to find out.”
When I got behind the wheel, I said, “So, do you still want your name on this goddamn picture?”
Trumbo looked at me curiously. “More than ever.”
Surprised, I glanced over at him. “Did you like it?”
“I need to see it again. Can you have someone run it for me—alone—tomorrow night?”
“Dalton, that’s risky. We’re taking a big chance just bringing you on the lot.”
“I have to see it again.”
I was silent for a moment. “Okay, I’ll send a car for you tomorrow night. Wear a bigger hat.”
He smiled slightly, lost in thought. After that, he said nothing the entire way home.
Dalton called me on Saturday morning. He fended off my questions about what he thought about the film after seeing it a second time. “I’ve been writing down some ideas. Let me put them all together on paper. You’ll have them by Monday.”
Later that day, I heard from Stanley. He said there would be another rough cut ready by Monday night. The only thing he told me was that the film would now open with me as a captive slave in the Libyan desert. No more flashbacks.
On Monday morning, a messenger boy arrived at my house as Anne and I were having breakfast with Peter and Eric. This was odd. There were no more script pages. What was being delivered at this hour?
I signed for the hefty envelope and saw “S. Jackson” scrawled in the upper left corner.
I tore it open as I walked back to the breakfast table. Inside were two typewritten documents—Dalton’s carefully annotated analysis of the Spartacus rough cut. Every scene was broken down, even to the point of critiquing specific lines of dialogue.
He had written most of it over one weekend, and he couldn’t have started until well after midnight on Thursday. My God, when did that man ever sleep?
Fascinated, I began reading. It opened with a quote from Churchill:
Never give in! Never give in! Never, never, never. Never—in anything great or small, large or petty—never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense.
The Trummbbow clarion call! Encouraged by his fighting spirit, I continued to read:
Let me make myself perfectly plain at the outset: more than any film I’ve ever worked on, I want this to be a great picture.
I think it can be.
From the opening of the film through the poem and the first real love scene between Spartacus and Varinia, sequence after sequence explodes onto the screen. The Roman scenes are, as we expected them to be, brilliant. But the delight and the surprise come in Kirk’s characterization of Spartacus. There is here a warmth, a tenderness, a strength that is nothing short of wonderful. I have never seen anything like that first scene in the cell between him and Varinia. Throughout the whole Capua sequence, the expression on his face whenever he looks at Varinia—a combination of reverence and wonder and yearning—conveys the essential feeling of poetry.
It is a very great achievement for both star and director; a piece of pure film for which no writer would dare take credit, since what has happened could never have been accomplished by words.
Then, as quickly as he’d inflated it, Dalton punctured my swelling pride when he put a numerical value on each of the main performances:
In my scale we got 100% of what Olivier had to offer, a skimpy 90% of Ustinov’s potential, no more than 65% of Laughton’s, and approximately half of Kirk’s and Simmons’ . . .
I felt like I was on a dizzying roller-coaster ride. First, I was “warm, tender, strong, and wonderful,” then he said I only gave half a performance. Talk about being damned with faint praise. I sipped some more coffee and kept reading:
The first hour of Kirk is so lovely that with a few loops and re-cuts, plus contemplated re-writes, it is quite possible even now to get 90–100% of what he has to offer. He will automatically pull Simmons up with him. The possible result? We should have a lovely smash on our hands. And something more than a smash—a successful film financially in which we, as artists, shall all be able to take a quiet, personal pride.
Dalton then launched into his main argument: that there were two fundamentally conflicting views of the character of Spartacus and, as a result, of the film itself. Diplomatically (for him), he put it this way:
I am going to try to point out as objectively as I can what I consider to be our past mistakes which have brought us to this present condition, not to arouse old differences between us, but to resolve them in a way that we shall not have to fear their repetition in the future. From the very beginning there have been two perfectly honest points of view on the nature of the Spartacus story. They are, I hope, objectively summarized below:
LARGE SPARTACUS: The revolt of the slaves was a major rebellion that shook the Republic.
SMALL SPARTACUS: That it was, in reality, more on the scale of a jail-break and subsequent dash for freedom.
LARGE SPARTACUS: That it lasted a full year.
SMALL SPARTACUS: That it was much briefer duration.
LARGE SPARTACUS: That it involved a series of brilliant slave military campaigns, and the defeat of the best Rome had to offer.
SMALL SPARTACUS: That it was a simple dash to the sea.
LARGE SPARTACUS: That it was finally put down only by the overwhelming weight of three Roman armies against the single slave army.
SMALL SPARTACUS: That it was put down by one Roman army.
For seventy-eight pages, Dalton argued eloquently, sometimes caustically, and always persuasively, for his vision of the “Large Spartacus.”
I had never read anything like it. As I turned each page, mesmerized, I thought, They could teach this. It should be required reading for every would-be screenwriter, actor, or director.
Trumbo/Jackson ended his manifesto with a passionate exhortation to return to battle. In his final section, self-deprecatingly titled, “THANK GOD HE’S THROUGH DEPARTMENT,” he recalls why we began this film in the first place:
Our whole danger and our whole promise lies in the fact that we have aimed very high. If we for one moment forsake this high aim for a lesser one, we shall fall much lower than if we’d aimed lower in the first place.
Actually, this is not a matter of saving the picture: it’s a matter of making it great. By the grace of God, and luck, a thousand mishaps to the schedule, the only part we could have cured is the part that is now physically possible for us to cure. Who could ask for more?
I say we can do it. Now goddam it, team, go, go, go!
Sam
It took eight more days before we reassembled under cover of darkness on the Universal lot—the same group: me, Eddie Lewis, the heavily disguised Dalton Trumbo (he had changed hats), Stanley Kubrick, and his editing team of Irving Lerner and Robert Lawrence.
The only one missing from the prior screening was Lew Wasserman. I had promised him that I’d call him immediately after I watched it.
The lights went down and the screen filled with designer Saul Bass’ magnificent opening titles.
Anthony Mann’s beautifully shot opening sequence in the desert now began the film. Olivier’s flashback narration was gone.
Despite Stanley’s reluctance to use anything he hadn’t shot, even he had to acknowledge that Mann’s footage was excellent. The Death Valley setting translated onto the screen exactly as we had hoped—bleak, desolate terrain where slaves lived short lives of hard labor and hopelessness.
Peter Ustinov’s character, Batiatus, appeared on the screen. I watched in amusement at the completely improvised business where he inspects Spartacus’ mouth before buying him. I thought it was a great idea at the time and had gone along with it completely. Of course, Peter came off best in the scene, as he knew he would. I was fine with it, because I knew it would help the picture.
The moment where Spartacus first meets Varinia in his cell came up on the screen. Dalton’s fulsome praise of that scene made me reconsider my skepticism about how it would play. It was difficult for me, because I had to look at Jean and say the line, “I’ve never had a woman.” Given my public image, I thought this tender moment might get a bad laugh.
Stanley left it in. He was right. (The first time test audiences were shown this scene, I held my breath. When I said the line, they accepted it completely. They didn’t see Kirk Douglas playing a role—they saw Spartacus. I was dumb. I misjudged both the audience and myself.)
The next three hours went by far more quickly than they had the week before. As we approached the ending, where Peter Ustinov’s character of Batiatus helps Varinia escape to freedom along with Spartacus’ newborn son, I was relieved. Stanley and his editorial team—Irving Lerner and Bob Lawrence—had made some smart fixes.
One glaring problem remained. Again, Stanley was right—we needed more money to shoot additional battle sequences. For Dalton’s vision of the Large Spartacus to work—a vision Stanley, Eddie, and I all shared—the audience had to actually witness his military prowess; it couldn’t just be implied. They had to see Spartacus defeat legion after legion of Rome’s finest soldiers, and the final battle scene had to be powerful enough to convey how close he had come to toppling the Roman Empire itself.
The last reel unspooled. Varinia impulsively kisses Gracchus (Charles Laughton) in gratitude for guaranteeing her safe passage out of Rome.
As Charles feared, his reply was cut out. His original line, written by Trumbo, was remarkably tender: “My dear young woman, I’m somewhat startled. You see, I’ve never had love. And I’m naturally chagrined to discover so late in my life that the having of love . . . is to set it free.” The scene was still beautiful, despite the omission.
I watched, rapt, as Varinia spots her beloved Spartacus among the endless rows of crucified slaves along Appian Way. Ignoring Batiatus’ warning that she shouldn’t even look at him, Varinia, carrying the baby, rushes up to Spartacus on the cross. She looks up at him, tears in her eyes. The camera goes tight on her face and she holds the baby boy up for Spartacus to see.
Cut to: Varinia and the baby get in Batiatus’ wagon and ride off into the sunset. We never see Spartacus on the cross! WHAT?!!