Cleopatra - Trivia, Questions and Fun Facts

[discussimdb]

Fan of Cleopatra or just want to share your movie knowledge? This topic is dedicated to all trivia and questions related to Cleopatra

[terry]

When Joseph L. Mankiewicz came on board as director after the departure of Rouben Mamoulian, he inherited a movie that was already $7 million over budget and with only ten usable minutes of footage to show for it, and those ten minutes would not be used in the finished movie.

[aaron]

During production, Twentieth Century Fox chairman Spyros Skouras sold 1,000 of his estimated 100,000 shares in the studio on a whim. When rumors of his lack of faith in the studio began to spread, he bought them back to quash the rumors.

[jamie]

Actors and actresses arrived from all over the world every day, and most of them were not met at the plane because of major transportation problems. According to the producer Walter Wanger, the housing department neglected to get the right accommodations, which made for even more chaos.

[jamie]

When Milton Berle was asked if he'd seen this movie yet, his reply was "I never miss a Hume Cronyn picture!"

[leo]

By the time Rouben Mamoulian was fired, he'd been on the movie sixteen weeks. $7 million of production costs yielded ten minutes of usable film.

[caroline]

One of Richard Burton's costumes was later worn by Sidney James in Carry on Cleo (1964), which is a parody of this movie. Burton and James played Mark Antony.

[russell]

When this movie was cut from six hours to four, forty-nine pages of re-shoots were required to make sense of the changes.

[frances]

A group of female extras who played Cleopatra's servants and slave girls went on strike to demand protection from the Italian male extras. The studio eventually hired a special guard to protect the female extras. In the gossip press, it became known as "The Revolt of the Slave Girls".

[oscar]

Filming of Cleopatra's entrance into Rome was delayed for several months due to lighting problems. The American child actor who played her four-year-old son got taller during the delay. He was replaced by an Italian boy, complete with a thick, inappropriate accent.

[frances]

Dame Elizabeth Taylor demanded that this movie be shot in the large, 70mm Todd-AO format system. She owned the rights to the system as the widow of the format system's creator: Mike Todd.

[ruby]

Writer and director Joseph L. Mankiewicz's first cut ran five hours and twenty minutes. Studio head Darryl F. Zanuck's first reaction was that Mark Antony was ineffectual, many of the scenes were too long, and the battle scenes were amateurish.

[bessie]

While filming Cleopatra's entry into Rome, a scene requiring thousands of extras and the pulling of a huge sphinx carrying the Queen of Egypt and her son between its paws, Joseph L. Mankiewicz said a master shot was spoiled because the camera caught an enterprising extra hawking gelato to his fellow extras.

[nina]

While filming the Battle of Actium off the Italian island of Ischia, a producer invited Richard Burton and Dame Elizabeth Taylor for lunch on his yacht and placed hidden cameras in their room in the hope of capturing and then selling pictures of them kissing. Taylor spotted the cameras immediately, and Burton had to be restrained from attacking the host.

[ruby]

While the studio executives decided to stop the shooting because of the gigantic expenses, the whole crew, from actors and actresses to technicians and even extras, made large personal concessions in time and salary to finish the movie properly.

[cameron]

When it seemed like Dame Elizabeth Taylor wouldn't recover from her illness, Audrey Hepburn was considered to replace her.

[victoria]

This movie's initial North American box-office take was $48 million, the highest-grossing movie of the year. Fox's share of the receipts was $26 million, half of the total production costs. This movie eventually recouped its budget through worldwide box-office receipts and television sales, but the studio had to cut costs drastically to survive. The studio managed to stay afloat with the success of The Longest Day (1962). Twentieth Century Fox then invested in The Sound of Music (1965), which became the most financially successful movie ever at that time, turning the studio's finances around.

[javier]

At the time, all Italian movies were dubbed in post-production. Carpenters constantly hammered on the set during filming. Joseph L. Mankiewicz spent hours trying to make it clear to the Italian crew that silence was required on-set at all times.

[claude]

This movie has no big final battle sequence because the studio couldn't afford one.

[wesley]

When the Marilyn Monroe vehicle Something's Got to Give (1962) was shelved due to budget overruns and an unreliable star, this movie became the only one in production at Twentieth Century Fox.