Pink Triangle: The Feuds and Private Lives of Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, and Famous Members of Their Entourages (Blood Moon's Babylon Series) (149 page)

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.

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.”

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.”

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.

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.

Chapter Forty-Six