The Cleopatra Disaster, Part V
Concluding one of the most notorious productions in Hollywood history
Once Cleopatra was finished filming in the summer of 1962, there was likely a collective sigh of relief from 20th Century Fox, and from all of the crew and players. But the disaster of the film was far from over. One could even call it the beginning of something far worse.
As we’ve seen, Spyros Skouras was “allowed” to resign his presidency rather than be kicked out of the company. The original founder of the studio, Darryl F. Zanuck, came back to fill in that power vacuum. One of his first acts as the new president of the studio was to fire Joseph Mankiewicz, the massively tortured director of Cleopatra, before he could really dig in and edit the film. Mankiewicz was blamed for the bloated cost of the movie, the first in a list of scapegoats the studio would compile.1 Mankiewicz was “heartbroken” that the editing was taken away from him, and what he saw as a mangling of the best parts of his movie.2 Star Elizabeth Taylor agreed. She hated the finished movie - a movie she had spent five years, on and off, making. After the premiere, she was so upset over the movie that she threw up.3 The studio had removed so many scenes, that the movie doesn’t have great cohesion or pacing. Taylor particularly resented the removal of what she thought were her and Richard Burton’s best scenes: ones that gave their characters humanity.4 Mankiewicz was upset about Burton specifically: “Zanuck destroyed an extremely good performance by Richard Burton that no one has seen,” he said.5 Admittedly, the whole movie was so unwieldy, that there’s no guarantee that anyone could have corralled it into any decent shape. As Mankiewicz also said, “Cleopatra was conceived in emergency, shot in hysteria, and wound up in blind panic.”6 Apt description.
Despite the film’s director and star loathing the movie, audiences flocked to see it, likely because of all of the publicity generated by the real-life affair between Taylor and Burton. In fact, when it premiered in June 1963, Cleopatra garnered the greatest amount of advanced U.S. ticket sales in movie history up to that point: 11.5 million dollars’ worth.7 A mere drop in the bucket of the movie’s total cost of 67 million dollars; adjusted for inflation today, this would be, in the down-to-the-penny calculation of Burton-Taylor biographer Roger Lewis, $546,670,588.24.8 In these days of billion-dollar box office takes, maybe that figure isn’t so jaw-dropping; but this was 1963. Think the President and his Cabinet laughing at Dr. Evil for trying to extort them out of a hundred billion dollars: “This is 1969! That amount of money doesn’t even exist!” A joke, obviously, but not far off the mark. This amount was unprecedented in Hollywood, making this the most expensive movie ever made, and still up there with a few others. Cleopatra cost so much that Fox couldn’t recoup its money right away. Even though Cleopatra was a monster hit and took in millions over a really long theatrical run, only one thing made the movie finally profitable: selling Cleopatra’s broadcast rights to a television network - and that didn’t happen until 1966.9 Along with being the most expensive, it was also the longest movie ever made (at just over four hours) and the heaviest: each print of the movie sent to theaters weighed six hundred pounds.10 That would have been a lot of labor for the movie projectionist. And aside from blaming Mankiewicz, Fox also sued producer Walter Wanger, and sued Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton! Each were blamed for the excessive costs, and Taylor and Burton for the added embarrassment of adultery. There seem to have been moral clauses in their contracts - but it’s not clear if they were invoked. The two stars countersued, and the whole thing was dropped or settled out of court.11
But Fox as a business was in a massive hole. To be fair, it wasn’t “just” Cleopatra: Fox had a string of flops all around the same time. Cleopatra was the last straw on an overloaded camel of reckless spending. The Cleopatra financials were in such disarray, that Peter Leavthes, the studio’s head of accounting, couldn’t actually track all of the expenses, which makes the modern-day 500 mil a possibly conservative estimate. “It was a nightmare,” he understated.12 He also uncovered numerous instances of fraud. According to him, executives at Fox charged thousands of dollars’ worth of things to the Cleo budget that had nothing to do with the production, like their personal laundry and lunch bills. There were double charges for things that had already been purchased, with made Leavthes suspicious that they were laundering more than their clothing. Leavthes confronted the Board about these budget items, pointing out to them that what they were doing was, um, you know…illegal. They told him flat-out: it was their studio and they could do what they wanted with it.13
Zanuck was brought it to clean house, so some corporate heads most definitely rolled. But what to do about the studio and its descent toward bankruptcy? Maybe this would be a time to rein it in, take fewer risks, don’t go for any more pigs in any more pokes…but that just wasn’t in Fox’s playbook. And you know, sometimes it worked. Fox bought the rights to this really dumb Broadway musical that no one in their right mind believed was adaptable to film - a schmaltzy, watered-down slice of real history, stripped of everything that made it true. It was called The Sound of Music. Everyone in Hollywood believed Fox would really lose their shirt this time: instead, their unbelievably awesome adaptation of that musical (which cut and rearranged a lot of the songs, and had the good sense to cast someone as devilishly gorgeous as Christopher Plummer) taught generations of kids like me about Nazis (thank you, Fox) and pulled themselves back in the black for what was their most successful movie ever.
Yay! Riding high on victory! Staving off the banks taking all their stuff! Except that success once again went to the execs’ heads. Fox ended up right back where it had been, blowing all their Sound of Music money on bloated productions like Doctor Doolittle (1967), which could probably be the subject for another series discussing moviemaking follies. Fox was in a bad pattern with its finances, from which it did not recover. Cleopatra was truly the beginning of the end for 20th Century Fox as a conventional movie studio.
It went through multiple bankruptcies and leadership, until finally the failing studio was purchased by billionaire media magnate Rupert Murdoch in 1985, who revived the studio’s fortunes by expanding to scripted television (The Simpsons) and infotainment (Fox News). Right now, we are at an inflection point: Hollywood studios are once more in crisis, and their marriages to Wall Street money and political power have been extremely detrimental. As an historian, I am usually wary of drawing straight lines between events in the past and events today, but there is a thread linking the Cleopatra disaster to some of our recent sociopolitical problems. The thing at the heart of it all remains greed - for money, sex, and power. Cleopatra left behind a lot of wreckage and destroyed people, for megalomaniacal expectations of profit. Has the studio that made this movie really changed all that much? I would say no, because they (and all of our media) do harmful things to us and our nation, still chasing those risky millions of dollars.
Walter Wanger and Joe Hyams, My Life with Cleopatra: The Making of a Hollywood Classic. (New York: Vintage Books, 2013 ed.), 215-16.
Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger, Furious Love: Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, and the Marriage of the Century. (New York: It Books), 46.
Elizabeth Taylor by Elizabeth Taylor. (New York: Harper and Row, 1965),115.
Taylor, 116.
Joseph Mankiewicz qtd. in Roger Lewis, Erotic Vagrancy: Everything About Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. (London: riverrun, 2023), 267.
Joseph Mankiewicz qtd. in Kenneth Turan, “Afterword.” My Life with Cleopatra: The Making of a Hollywood Classic. (New York: Vintage Books, 2013 ed.), 222.
Turan, “Afterword,” 217.
Roger Lewis, Erotic Vagrancy: Everything About Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. (London: riverrun, 2023), 601.
Turan, 214.
Kashner and Schoenberger, Furious Love, 46.
Ibid., 46-7.
Peter Harry Brown and Patte B. Barham, Marilyn: The Last Take. (New York: Dutton, 1992),185.
Brown and Barham, Marilyn, 96.