Patrick Humphrey‘s “Cleopatra and the Undoing of Hollywood: How One Film Almost Sunk the Studios” (History Press) isn’t due until next April, at least according to Amazon.
And yet the Guardian‘s Vanessa Thorpe has posted an article about it and the film itself. Thorpe’s piece is titled “Cleopatra at 60: new book reveals ‘stunning profligacy’ of infamous Hollywood epic.”
Cleopatra‘s 60th birthday was actually celebrated a couple of months ago but who’s counting? The ill-fated Rouben Mamoulian version, shot in England, began filming on 9.28.60. The final version, directed and written by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, opened on 6.12.63. The final cost was around $40 million in 1963 dollars, or just shy of $400 million today.
Yes, Cleopatra eventually made its money back, slowly but surely.
Thorpe’s article covers the basics about this 251-minute epic (mainly a talkfest but persuasively acted and very handsomely produced), and lists many of the production-out-of-control anecdotes we’ve all read about for decades.
Perhaps Humphrey has uncovered fresh material or perhaps not, but the whole magillah and more is contained in Kevin Burns and Brent Zacky‘s ‘Cleopatra’: The Film That Changed Hollywood, a two-hour, first-rate doc that came out in ’01. It was a DVD supplement at first, and is now included in the Cleopatra Bluray.
Honestly? The Burns/Zacky doc is better than the film itself. It always has been.
An excellent making-of-Cleopatra book is Jack Brodksy and Nathan Weiss‘s “The Cleopatra Papers“, originally published in January ’63.
Here’s Part One of the Burns-Zacky; Part Two is pasted below.
