PINK TRIANGLE

Top-Tier Actors Are Cast in Key Roles

Sir John Gielgud Mourns: “It’s My First Porn Film”

The 1979 film, Caligula, was an Italo-American erotic biography financed by Penthouse guru, Bob Guccione. With stars such as Peter O’Toole, Helen Mirren, John Gielgud, and Malcolm Mc-Dowell, it became the first major motion picture to feature both prominent stars and pornographic scenes. Even today, it remains the most infamous cult film ever made, and it is still banned in many countries around the world.

When it became clear that the film’s boundaries went way beyond what he had contracted for, and that his scripts had been virtually ignored, Gore Vidal demanded to have his name removed from the title.

Gore Vidal became the original scriptwriter for one of the most controversial movies of all time, the 1979 Italo-American erotic epic produced by Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione and Franco Rossellini. Originally entitled Gore Vidal’s Caligula, it became the first hard-core porno film to cast A-list stars, although they didn’t know at the beginning what they were getting into.

Malcolm McDowell, born in 1943 in the industrial city of Leeds, and the star of A Clockwork Orange [released in 1971 and directed by Stanley Kubrick], was an unlikely choice for the role of Caligula, the ruler of the Roman Empire from 37 AD until he was butchered by his guards in 41 AD.

Penthouse founder and publisher, Bob Guccione (“the Caesar of sex magazine gurus”), believed in breaking taboos and outraging the so-called “guardians of taste.” He made millions before drowning in a slough of bad investments, one of which involved financing the controversial pornographic epic, Caligula. Most movie houses refused to show it.

Guccione accumulated a vast fortune of $400 million, collecting art masterpieces and Penthouse pets, before losing it all.

McDowell starred opposite Peter O’Toole as the syphilis-ridden, half-mad Emperor Tiberius. O’Toole looked like he’d been recently dug up after spending twenty years buried in a coffin.

Long before she played the Queen of England [The Queen, directed by Stephen Frear and released in 2006], Helen Mirren was cast as the notorious courtesan, Caesonia [“the most promiscuous woman in Rome”], who married Caligula. Mirren appears in most of the movie’s scenes dressed like a drag queen imitating a burlesque dancer.

Sir John Gielgud, cast in the stately role of Nerva, a loyal advisor to Caligula’s dissipated great uncle, Tiberius, was about the only “class act” in the entire cast. He never regretted appearing in “my first porn movie.”

Back in London, he told his friend, Noël Coward, “There were side benefits, at least a hundred Italian stallions working as extras.”

Maintaining his dignity, John Gielgud played Nerva, a long-suffering friend of Tiberius, as if he were quoting Shakespeare.

His farewell to Tiberius (and to life itself) begins when he slits his wrists and submerges himself in a bath of hot water. Unaware of the sex scenes that Guccione would later insert into the context of the film, Gielgud, after seeing the final cut, announced to the press, “Caligula is my first porno movie.”

Originally, Maria Schneider was cast as Drusilla, Caligula’s sister and the love of his life. But when she learned the scope of her scenes, calling for nudity and sex acts, she retreated. That was perceived at the time as an unusual decision for the lesbian actress, since she had had no such inhibitions when stripping down for Last Tango in Paris opposite Marlon Brando in 1972. She was replaced in Caligula by Teresa Ann Savoy.

Bob Guccione selected Giovanni (“Tinto”) Brass, to helm his controversial Caligula. He’d been impressed with how daring Brass had been in his release of a 1976 film, Salon Kitty, which fused explicit sex scenes with historical drama.

Before Caligula’s filming was over, Brass and Guccione were locked in a major battle. The director also ridiculed Gore Vidal’s scripts.

Gore developed his screenplay from Roberto Rossellini’s conceived but never produced TV mini-series Caligula. One of the reasons for hiring Gore in the first place was that he’d been a scholar of ancient Rome.

Franco Rossellini, the nephew of Roberto Rossellini, had trouble obtaining financing, so Gore approached and solicited Bob Guccione, the founder of Penthouse. He agreed to put up the millions for this very expensive film, which demanded elaborate sets as a means of evoking the orgiastic heyday of Imperial Rome.

Shooting was to begin at the same studio in Rome, (Cinecettà) where Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor had shot Cleopatra thirteen years earlier.

In ancient Rome, courtesans of the Emperor Tiberius (Caligula’s great uncle) occupy themselves in the pool when he was resting. When he opted to enter the water himself, he demanded that his “little fishes” go underwater to perform various sexual acts on his ravished, syphilitic body.

After murdering Tiberius and marrying the notorious courtesan, Caesonia, Caligula demanded that his armada of “little fishes” be recruited from the Empire’s ranks of starving, nubile boys, aged 9 to 13.

Guccione approached both John Huston and Lina Wertmüller to direct the epic, but each of them turned him down. A young Italian director, Tinto (Giovanni) Brass, was selected instead. Guccione had been impressed with his film, Salon Kitty, in which Brass had fused explicit sex scenes against a historical background.

[Salon Kitty was an erotic drama, among the prototypes of the “Nazis-ploitation” genre, set in an expensive brothel in Berlin. According to the plot, it was wiretapped and the whores were trained as spies for gathering data on various members of the Nazi heirarchy.]

Shooting of Caligula was scheduled to begin in Rome during the autumn of 1976. At first, Gore agreed to Guccione’s request for the inclusion of sex and nudity, not realizing at the time that Guccione’s vision meant hard-core porno.

Harmony prevailed in the beginning. Guccione referring to Gore as an immense talent and Gore telling the press, “Bob and I were made for each other.”

Gore’s relationship with Brass, however became toxic after Gore told Time magazine, “All directors are parasites just living off writers. All a director has to do is follow the directives of the author’s screenplay.”

The English actor, Malcolm McDowell, played the title role as the depraved Emperor Caligula. His slightly startled look was defined by some critics as “emotionally greedy.”

He was not ashamed to appear fully nude in the movie. Thanks to his striptease in Caligula, the star of Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange developed a whole new fan base.

Gore had turned in five different versions of his script, and Brass had detested all of them. In retaliation, Gore called Brass “Tinto Zinc” and denounced him as a megalomaniac. “In a perfect world,” Gore said, “Brass would be washing windows in Venice.”

After filming began, Roberto Rossellini sued Guccione and Gore for plagiarizing his material from the never finished TV series about Caligula. The suit, however, was eventually dropped.

In a surprise undercurrent of treachery, Brass turned to his star, McDowell, asking him to help with rewrites of the script. Gore, in his own words, “was seriously pissed off.”

When word reached him that hard-core scenes were being filmed with Roman actors, and inserted into the context of the film, Gore demanded that Guccione remove his name from the film’s titles. Consequently, Gore Vidal’s Caligula was renamed as just Caligula.

Brass later told the press, “If I really get mad at Gore, I will publish the original script he turned over to me. It was laughable, it was so horrible.”

Like Cleopatra, memories of which were still prevalent on the Cinecettà lot at the time, Caligula ran into costly delays in production. The costs of the lavish sets became outrageous, and there was a lot of graft and actual stealing by the Roman film crews. Guccione was outraged, and he and Brass feuded a lot.

Caligula ended up costing Guccione $25 million. He claimed that Brass shot enough film to make the original MGM BenHur (1925) starring Ramon Novarro, about “fifty times over.”

In one of the most artful of screen makeup jobs, Peter O’Toole played Caligula’s great uncle, the half-mad syphilitic débauché, the Emperor Tiberius, who killed people for his own amusement.

In real life, as O’Toole grew older, battling alcoholism, he began to look more and more like Tiberius.

Brass and Guccione even fought over the actresses selected to appear in sex scenes as the wives of Roman Senators, whom Caligula had forced to become “harlots in the harem.” The publisher claimed that Brass had hired, “fat, ugly, and wrinkled women, as opposed to my Penthouse pets I wanted cast.”

Gore pocketed his $200,000 writer’s fee and fled from the scene. “After Myra Breckinridge, I felt my reputation couldn’t endure another sex scandal.”

The most serious lawsuit Guccione faced was from actress Anneka Di Lorenzo, cast as Messalina. She sued him for sexual harassment, winning $60,000 in compensatory damages and $4 million in punitive damages. On an appeal, the punitive damages were determined by a judge as not recoverable, and the multi-million dollar award was invalidated.

Helen Mirren was cast as the nymphomaniacal Caesonia, “the most promiscuous woman in Rome” and later, the wife of Caligula.

In later years, she was destined (brilliantly) to play more demure roles, including a 2006 portrayal of Queen Elizabeth Segundo in The Queen.

Based partly on the delays and litigation, Caligula did not appear in theaters until late in 1979. Franco Rossellini, in the meantime, had taken advantage of the elaborate sets created for ancient Rome, and he’d made use of these backdrops by producing a film based on the life of Messalina. His movie actually made it into theaters before Guccione released Caligula.

Reviews of Caligula were harsh, Roger Ebert claiming “Caligula is sickening, utterly worthless, shameful trash. People with talent allowed themselves to participate in this vulgar travesty. Disgusted and unspeakably depressed, I walked out of the film after two hours of its 170-minute length.”

Truman Capote, in New York, sat gleefully through the entire film. “I just had to see Gore’s latest disaster.”

Provocatively, he later asked a reporter working at the time for an underground gay newspaper, “Do all Roman actors have such enormous cocks? Obviously, the casting director—lucky guy—auditioned them for reasons other than their thespian abilities.”

“As a voyeur,” Truman said, “I couldn’t wait to see McDowell’s dick in an outdoor nude scene shot in the rain. For me, seeing his Full Monty was the highlight of the movie, rivaled only by his beautiful ass on ample display.”

Another critic made no comment on McDowell’s penis, but wrote of his “emotionally greedy look, including elaborately made-up eyes gazing at the camera with all the loaded essence of charm, insolence, and trickery.”

When Gore saw the final product for the first time, he sat through the entire picture aghast. Subsequently, he denounced it as “A joke of a movie, a hard-core disaster.”

Guccione had hoped to make $100 million off Caligula, but it grossed only $24 million, a million dollars less than its production costs.

If a movie-goer wanted to see the full version of Caligula, he or she would have to have attended its original screening in New York in 1979.

Today, new generations of movie-goers will have to be satisfied with countless “butchered” versions of the film, including the 2007 three-disc special edition released by Image Entertainment. This edition, for example, left out some of Guccione’s more explicit sex scenes, including a lesbian tryst and various sexual couplings during the Imperial Bordello sequence. One scene that was omitted involved Caligula ordering a newly married couple into his lavish bedchamber and raping each of them as part of their honeymoon ritual.

In 1982, Guccione’s personal fortune of $400 million had defined him as one of the richest Americans, according to Forbes magazine. But at the time of his death in 2010, he was hovering close to bankruptcy because of a series of bad investments.