Gore Vidal has not been so angry since his famed TV screaming bout with William F. Buckley Jr. The movie that finished shooting last week in Rome, he says, is "easily one of the worst films ever made." But then Vidal qualifies his indictment. The film does have some distinction after all: "It is not just another bad movie. It is a joke movie." What is the name of this silly film? Why Gore Vidal's Caligula, of course. Despite the exploitation of Vidal's money-coining name, it has little to do with Vidal—and even less to do with Caligula.
It has everything to do, however, with Penthouse magazine and its publisher, Bob Guccione, who has put up $16 million, exactly double the original budget, to film the life of one of history's most colorful monsters. The movie is the grandest spectacle to be shot in Italy since Elizabeth Taylor's Cleopatra (1963). Guccione hired some of England's best actors—Malcolm McDowell to play Caligula, Peter O'Toole for the diseased Emperor Tiberius and John Gielgud for the aristocratic Nerva. He then set about constructing half of ancient Rome: a mile-long facsimile of a 1st century street, a 100-yd.-long stadium, and a 175-ft.-long floating bordello, encrusted with gold leaf, where the wives of Roman Senators were forced into prostitution to fill Caligula's treasury. "We've got to find a museum for the boat!" Guccione exclaims. "It's so beautiful!" As for Vidal's criticisms . . . well, he must be talking about somebody else's Gore Vidal's Caligula. Guccione's Gore Vidal's Caligula "is going to make history—like Citizen Kane. "
This case of mistaken identity started two years ago when Vidal was approached with the idea for the film by Producer Franco Rossellini. Vidal agreed to write a screenplay, and he introduced Rossellini to Guccione, who, with a logic Descartes would have envied, realized that where there are mad Roman Emperors there must also be orgies—along with big grosses at the box office and an endless supply of nude picture spreads for Penthouse.
With that end in mind, Guccione chose Italian Tinto Brass to direct his movie. Virtually unknown even in Italy, despite ten pictures to his credit, Brass had won Guccione's admiration with his last film, Salon Kitty, a spy thriller set in a Nazi brothel. Brass, a Falstaffian figure with a temper as big as his waistline, soon decided that Vidal's script was too bourgeois for his taste. "It was the work of an aging arteriosclerotic," he says. "Vidal redid it five times, but it was still absurd." With the help of McDowell, Brass rewrote the screenplay.
How much of the finished script is Vidal's is a matter of clamorous dispute. Vidal apparently saw Caligula as a kind of all-Roman boy gone wrong; the producers made him a monster from the beginning. Vidal says that most of the dialogue is his but complains that "they are playing scenes backward," reversing his meanings.
Where Vidal was liberal with sex scenes, Brass has been profligate: there are enough orgies to satisfy even Guccione, and phalluses in all sizes decorate walls, dinner plates and nearly everything else—with naked girls taking up the spaces in between. "To the Romans," notes McDowell, "sex was like driving a car."