The scale of the new sets in Rome was such that the country faced a material shortage on account of the production. Harrison, Burton, and McDowell picked up where Finch, Boyd, and Baxter left off. But he didn’t bring a change of luck with him Taylor nearly died of pneumonia, and the film lost all its leads except for her. He also oversaw the relocation of the production from Pinewood in London to Cinecittà in Rome. For example – it was Mankiewicz who approached Antony as an ersatz Caesar, forever in his hero’s shadow and slowly destroyed by his inadequacies. The new filmmaker brought with him a new approach to the story. Instead, they hired Mankiewicz, one of the few directors to meet Taylor’s contractually granted approval. The studio could have cut its losses at that point. When Mamoulian attempted to bluff for time by threatening to resign, he found Fox willing to oblige him. The studio blamed Mamoulian, whose own rewrites of the script with a favored writer didn’t make Taylor happy either. Costs were rising, the weather was destroying the set, and only ten minutes of film in the can. The results pleased neither the star nor the director. When Taylor’s condition forced a halt to the production, the script was rewritten again, partly to generate material that didn’t need Cleopatra. There was union trouble over hair styling on the first day, Taylor’s already-poor health was worsened by the British climate, and Mamoulian had little to shoot without her. (This being 1950s Hollywood, no one thought of filling the role of the Greco-Egyptian Cleopatra, or any of the prominent Egyptian roles, with Egyptians.) Wanger went through a string of writers searching for a new approach, and in the meantime, he hired a director ( Rouben Mamoulian) and the star he had long envisioned as the perfect Cleopatra - Taylor. The script for the 1917 version couldn’t be translated into sound and color anyway. An epic biopic on Cleopatra was a dream project for Wanger, and he wasn’t about to squander the opportunity on a quick dust-off of a silent picture. Unfortunately for that vision, the project ended up in the hands of producer Walter Wanger. 20th Century Fox initially hoped that a modestly budgeted Cleopatra, a remake of their 1917 silent film, could be the answer to their prayers after a string of flops in the late '50s. A miserable start to production that lost a director, an out-of-control budget, a scandalous love affair between two of its stars, and a financial ruin - that’s the lens the film is often seen through.Īnd there’s some truth to all of that. 'Cleopatra's Reputation Has Been Defined By the Production HistoryĪnd yet Cleopatra, even before its 1963 release, has been dogged by its reputation as a disaster.

Rex harrison richard finch