CALIGULA

A scandal upon release, 1979’s Caligula was destroyed when porn scenes were sliced into the cut, unbeknownst to its director or star Malcolm McDowell. But now rediscovered footage and painstaking work has rescued this raucous Roman epic. Buff dons its toga to find out more.

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RETROSPECTIVE

Made in the late 1970s, the film Caligula became a byword for notoriety. Detailing the life of the titular Roman emperor, it began with a script by esteemed author Gore Vidal before Italian director Tinto Brass (1976’s Salon Kitty) was brought in to direct it. Then came the fallout as Bob Guccione, publisher of erotic magazine Penthouse and the man bankrolling the project, stormed in and filmed soft-core material that made the final cut at the expense of much original material. Suddenly, a film that featured Helen Mirren, John Gielgud and Peter O’Toole was a laughing stock. Or as Time magazine put it, the film enjoyed ‘all the success of an open-air orgy in Antarctica’.

‘I’ve never liked it,’ reflects Malcolm McDowell, the British actor cast as Caligula. ‘And I advise people never to see it. It is a terrible film, and it’s exploitative and pornographic. For no reason. Except that it’s to exploit. And that’s what he [Guccione] did. And he really could not care less about what we did as moviemakers, Tinto Brass and myself particularly, because I was there every moment of every day. So when I originally saw it, the Guccione version, I was completely shell-shocked. I’ve never known a betrayal like that. Just huge scenes taken out of the movie and replaced by just porn.’ One of the most iconic stars of the 1960s and 70s, thanks to turns in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange and Lindsay Anderson’s If…. and O Lucky Man!, McDowell’s work in Caligula should’ve elevated his stardom even further. Instead, he was left devastated by Guccione’s pernicious meddling. ‘I was really very depressed about it. Actually, I think I went into a depression. It affected me badly. Honestly, I think it was one of the reasons I left England.’ The actor can’t help but also reflect on Guccione’s fate. ‘He was a very wealthy man. And he ended up dying in a trailer park. And so things did not go well towards the end of his life. Karma is a bitch.’

TOTA L FILM RETROSPECTIVE

Originally titled Gore Vidal’s Caligula, the screenwriter’s intention was to create a serious drama about the life of Caligula. The Roman emperor, from AD 37 until his assassination in AD 41, he became famed for rumoured incestuous relations with his sisters, his tyrannical rule and his increasing bouts of mania. It was Vidal who first contacted McDowell about the project. ‘The Roman Empire has always been a fascinating subject,’ says McDowell. ‘So I was very interested. And when I talked to Gore, I didn’t want to play him as a madman. And I said, “People get bored watching a madman for two hours.”’

While Vidal told McDowell to think of financier Guccione ‘as one of the Warner Brothers’, this amicable feeling didn’t last. Vidal quit the project, aghast that Guccione hired Danilo Donati, the production designer who went on to make the fantastical sets for Mike Hodges’ sci-fi Flash Gordon, to create outlandish backdrops.

But Brass remained at the helm. ‘Tinto was a very principled man, very strong, and wouldn’t put up with any bullshit,’ recalls McDowell with Helen Mirren as Caesonia McDowell. ‘And his words to me, as we were about to do take one, the very first scene… He turned to me and said, “We do not screw Penthouse – or we fail.” That was ringing in my ears as I started this long journey.’

‘Huge scenes were replaced by porn. I was shell-shocked’

MALCOLM Mc DOWELL

After Guccione secretly brought in Penthouse girls to film porn scenes on the same sets when the main shoot wrapped, McDowell was so crushed, he told his agent always to block any requests concerning Caligula. ‘I never, ever wanted to talk about that damn film ever again.’ Which rather explains why Thomas Negovan had such trouble getting in contact with him, Mirren or Brass, who is now 90 years old. ‘Absolutely none of them ever got back to me,’ he says, ruefully. ‘The thing that I didn’t know when I got the job was how terribly traumatic the experience had been for everyone involved.’

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‘If this version had opened at the time, it would have been a game changer. It would have been one of the films of the year’

MALCOLM Mc DOWELL

An art-gallery owner and short filmmaker, Negovan had experience working with museums on archival projects. With a friend who worked for Penthouse Global Licensing, the branch of the company dealing with legacy materials, Negovan was asked to look at the raw footage of Caligula, untouched for years and held in a Los Angeles storage facility. ‘It just started with mountains of filthy, dusty boxes,’ marvels Negovan. ‘It was like going into your grandfather’s garage or something.

They just hadn’t ever opened them.’

Wading through a treasure trove of materials, Negovan discovered original camera negatives, location audio, reams of paperwork and nearly 11,000 behind-the-scenes photographs. ‘My basic statement to them was, “I don’t know what you have, but you

have something.”’ Gradually, it became clear that ‘something’ could be a reworking of the Guccione travesty, an attempt to bring Caligula back to what Vidal and Brass has originally intended. ‘I think that my expectation was that it would be a bit of a hodgepodge,’ says Negovan. ‘It might be the old version with some extra scenes put in.’

Over the next three years, ‘it just completely turned into a different animal’, says Negovan, who set out to painstakingly jigsaw the original Caligula back together, ultimately increasing the running time to almost three hours. Among other things, he was able to use advanced AI tech, notably around the poor-quality audio in scenes involving Gielgud, who plays Nerva, Caligula’s friend. ‘A huge rescue for us was AI,’ says Negovan, who latched onto the same technology that Peter Jackson used for The Beatles: Get Back, his marathon look at the recording of the Fab Four’s final studio album.

Peter O’Toole as Tiberius

‘We were able to separate John Gielgud from the machinery sounds. And otherwise that clanging of the motor when he’s in the bath… That was the worst audio that we had. [So much so], I was like, “We’re just going to have to put a disclaimer on the film.” And by the end of the movie, that was some of the best-sounding audio. We couldn’t have done it five years ago. This was a great example of technology being in service of art.’

TOTA L FILM RETROSPECTIVE

When McDowell finally saw this new cut, he was in Newfoundland, Canada, lying in bed, watching it on his iPad. There to shoot comedy series Son of a Critch, it was the show’s creator, Mark Critch, who had been contacted on Instagram by Negovan, and convinced McDowell to watch it. ‘I was amazed – it all came flooding back,’ says McDowell. ‘And I was sort of vaguely stunned. I sat there in silence for quite a while thinking about what I’d seen. I immediately called Thomas to talk to him. That was the first time we spoke and we spoke for an hour and a half, two hours.’

Among other things, the film rescues Helen Mirren’s performance as Caesonia, the courtesan who Caligula eventually marries. In the tampered Guccione version, Mirren’s appearance was limited to just 17 minutes. Now it has been restored so she appears for almost an hour. Negovan reports that Mirren’s husband, director Taylor Hackford, came to the LA premiere. ‘He did jokingly confide she probably won’t watch it, only for the reason that she just doesn’t really like to watch her films. But he said, “I’ll tell her that I saw it.

I loved it. I thought it was great. And that she was great in it.”’

No doubt, Caligula: The Ultimate Cut isn’t exactly a sex-free zone, adds Negovan. ‘The movie is certainly not suitable for children. It’s a very erotic film regardless. Tinto had all of those elements present. But we made the decision that, OK, you can cut an orgy from 12 minutes down to five. And put seven minutes of the characters actually talking to each other. And so that’s the way the globe started to shift… I mean, really, the way that we approached this movie is we pretended that the 1980 release never happened. I did not study the original film until after we were done.’

For McDowell, the erotic content still held an importance – like the moment Caligula goes to a wedding and has sex with both the bride and groom. ‘That’s not porn!’ he remarks. ‘That is who Caligula was. Ultimate power corrupts absolutely. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. And that was the beginning of him losing control. And it’s a very important scene. It’s all the extraneous stuff

[that was awful, like]

Cut back to me and a smile on my face.’

McDowell can’t help but hide his delight at Negovan’s work. ‘I am thrilled that he did it. Thrilled that the real film is there now for everyone to see. I’m also thrilled to be able to answer the critics, who would say things like, “Why would these mainstream actors do this crap?”’

Sadly, he feels that Brass won’t be able to appreciate this restoration at this point in his life. ‘So he will never really know. And I think he’d be very happy with his movie because all the major sequences are in it. And they are really beautiful.’

With choral music added, The Ultimate Cut also stitches together non sequiturs from the original movie. ‘When Caligula says to his sister at the funeral, “It’s just like the dream,” there’s no dream. They never filmed it,’ reports Negovan. ‘That’s why we had to make the opening credits. That nightmare that he wakes up from.’ No question, it’s unrecognisable from the mangled release that came out in the UK in 1980. ‘If Thomas’ version had opened [at the time], it would have been a game changer,’ enthuses McDowell. ‘It would have been absolutely one of the biggest films of the year. I bet you. Because it’s very cutting edge. Even today you go, “Wow.”’

CALIGULA: THE ULTIMATE CUT OPENS IN CINEMAS IN SPRING 2024.