This was after Guccione branded the Italian extras as ugly (Tinto Brass ejaculated “This is Rome, for God’s sake. He told a planeload of Penthouse Pets that they were going to Sardinia to shoot The Spy Who Loved Me, but the plane landed in Rome, where the Pets shot the hard-core scenes.
He told Gore Vidal he was making a movie about Caligula’s last days. He told the actors they were working on a movie with a script by Gore Vidal. Guccione, like any lover hiding the ring in the chocolates, made Caligula through subterfuge and trickery. Those who live on the island being kicked by the boot of Italy also have clung more tightly to old Roman ways than their northern counterparts, anyone with a friend of a friend of friend will attest to that. Italians are world-renowned as hot, romantic lovers. Sicilians are like Italians, just a little more Sicilian. Born in Brooklyn, he was brought up in Bergenfield, N.J. Rossellini instigated an orgy of lawsuits for this movie.īob Guccione is Sicilian. Vidal wasn’t prepared for the bitch-slap that he got from Guccione and had his name taken off the title. Vidal regularly contributed to Guccione’s Penthouse Magazine and Guccione had already pimped such movies as Chinatown, The Longest Yard and The Day of the Locust. His nephew Franco and Gore Vidal presented a retooled script for Bob Guccione to sniff. The original treatment for Caligula was written by Roberto Rosselini, Isabella’s dad. Savoy was game, she’d done Tinto Brass before, playing Margherita in the Berlin brothel movie, Salon Kitty, the movie Guccione saw seven minutes of before he shot out with “this is the man I want directing Caligula.” Teresa Ann Savoy was a sloppy second choice to Maria Schneider, hot off rolling around with former Mark Antony, Marlon Brando, in Last Tango in Paris, to put out as Drusilla, Caligula’s sister and lover (while lounging in bed, Caligula tells his sister that he’s also gotten it on with her husband). John, sorry, Sir John was clueless about what he was sticking his Gielgud into when he signed on to off his own damn self as Senator Nerva. The pleasantly perverse Peter O’Toole was equipped with enough of the right stuff to lend his double-phallic name to the festivities as the syphilitic Tiberius, Caligula’s father and once and future debaucher. Sure, now she’ll flash her tits for any magazine promoting one of her movies, but at the time she needed to be scriptually and contractually obligated to show her ass. For the part of most promiscuous woman in Rome, Caesonia, Caligula’s wife, McDowell lured Shakespearean actor and Bond Girl, Helen Mirren. Matthew, including David Bowie in Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ. I never understood why Romans are always played by British actors, in HBO’s Rome, on PBS’s I, Claudius and in every Jesus picture except The Gospel According to St. The English are not particularly associated with romance, in spite of their romantic poets. Leering and smecking all over the finest of the Senator’s wives, or daughters, or sons or horses, or the Senators themselves, McDowell’s Caligula is a man born to bone. Caligula is in so many ways Alex a couple years older, transplanted from a London tenement to the Palace. We absolutely believe in him, we’ve seen him do this before. Always up for a skorry in-out in-out, great bolshy yarblockos out for all to viddy. And who but who could slip us the chocolate better than Malcolm McDowell, the most horrorshow droog a malchick could have. It’s Valentine’s Day fare for the sensualist.Ĭaligula is a big, heart-shaped box overstuffed with candy of all flavors, gay, straight, threesomes, foursomes, bestiality, sadomasochism, necrophilia, decapitation, evisceration, rape, emasculation (a man’s genitals are tossed to some dogs who munch ‘em down like beggin’ strips right on screen.) But you never know what you’re tasting until you take a bite. Italian impressionist director Tinto Brass bared Rome to its decadent core in a way no Hollywood director would dare, happily fucking and sucking and fisting and twisting the night away. Historically accurate to the point of pain, it was a messily decadent orgy with a vomitorium to die for. The magazine magnate who built his empire on the sexiest pages in publishing assembled the classiest actors, the most intelligent writers and the most respected filmmakers to make a film that wasn’t too bright, had no class, got no respect and turned no one on. Caligula is Bob Guccione’s Valentine to the forgotten pleasures of Rome and he shot quite a load filming it.