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Surely many of you kino connoisseurs are familiar with this movie.
Blog Dangerous Minds reports that a remaster is underway:
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My old pal Tom Negovan is the proprietor of the Century Guild, a Los Angeles-based art gallery, publishing company, fine art print maker and private museum specializing in Art Nouveau & Symbolism. He has what I, and many other people, consider to be one of the most unusual art businesses anywhere in the world. His interests are esoteric to say the least, and his talents for finding rare gems makes him a sort of cultural cross-pollinator of the highest order. He’s also a musician and a filmmaker.
I saw Tom last fall at a wedding in Los Angeles and he told me about a new project he was engaged in, a recut of Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione’s lone foray into cinema, the ill-fated and critically savaged X-rated epic Caligula and suggested maybe there was something there for Dangerous Minds.
Last week he told me over email about an amazing discovery he’d made:
I’m sure you know the general story: Bob Guccione took control of the production of Caligula, fired the director, and edited something with no sense of plot whatsoever. We have all 96 hours of original camera negative and all the location audio, and we are editing these to conform to Gore Vidal’s original script. This new version that we are titling Caligula MMXX will bear no resemblance to the 1980 version. The footage is brilliant; Helen Mirren and Malcolm McDowell actually made a good movie but no one’s ever seen it! (Malcolm has been saying this for 40 years in interviews.)
We are finding tons of odd rarities in the vaults: promotional items, interviews, and over 11,000 set photographs, nearly all of which have never been seen before. Mario Tursi took most of them, and we are compiling the best of them into a book. (One of the other photographers was Eddie Adams who took that award-winning photo of the Vietnamese guy getting shot in the head.)
There was even a proposed Caligula toy line(!!) if you can believe that. A company named Cinco Toys pitched Guccione, who never met a deal he didn’t like, on them getting a license to do a line of action figures. Star Wars action figures were making millions and apparently they pitched him pretty hard for this. Caligula‘s budget was twice that of Star Wars. They made a handful of prototypes for action figures. They even went so far as to make a spec TV commercial to woo Guccione to let them do this, which is extra insane. They made it like he (Guccione) would be (star) in the commercial himself and had someone do a VO as if they were Bob. And there it was on the shelf with the various drafts of the script. There was a 3/4” tape and a VHS of the same commercial with Cinco labels. They also wanted to do Caligula jigsaw puzzles.”
Obviously I had to see that! I asked Tom if he’d post it on YouTube for Dangerous Minds readers to see it, too.
Here it is, folks:
The site Caligula MMXX reads:
It was the boldest move in cinema history: presenting the most celebrated and respected actors of the day in a film that could only be described as pornographic. Bob Guccione, founder of Penthouse magazine, set his sights on decimating the boundaries between art, sex, and cinema and succeeded to such a potent degree that even 40 years later, no theatrical event has come close to matching the scope and scandal of Caligula.
Produced with twice the budget of Star Wars, Caligula captured an unbelievable 96 hours of footage of boldly costumed drama, sex, and violence on the most extravagant stages imaginable, and at an estimated cost of 17.5 million dollars remains the most expensive and extravagant pornographic film ever created.
Originally envisioned as a historically accurate depiction of anarchy and corruption, the writer and director of the film (legendary author Gore Vidal, and counterculture icon Tinto Brass, respectively) ultimately distanced themselves from the production, having their names removed from the final product. The movie was ultimately released as a bastardized vision of the original creators, edited by Guccione himself, with extended pornographic sequences replacing important plot developments. Famed critic Roger Ebert described the film as "sickening, utterly worthless, shameful trash" yet admitted in the same review that lines to see the film stretched around the block.
Various edits of Caligula have surfaced over the years, each with only minor adjustments and brief bits of footage added from foreign releases.
Amidst the drama and excessive litigation surrounding the completion of the film, the original 96 hours of raw footage were spirited out of Italy, and hastily placed in mismarked cans to hide their location. In the years that followed, the camera negatives and any unseen footage of Caligula was long believed lost, and the possibility of a coherent edit of the materials took on a mythical status among cinephiles.
In the January/February 2020 issue of Penthouse, it was announced that the original materials had been located and that a restoration of the film to the original Gore Vidal script was underway by author and archivist Thomas Negovan and Shadow of the Vampire director E. Elias Merhige for a Fall 2020 limited theatrical release under the 40th anniversary title Caligula MMXX.
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I'll keep an eye on this one for sure.
