While most of the U.S. movie industry was prudently cutting production costs at home last week, its biggest studio was on a spending jag in Rome. Using $4,000,000 in blocked Italian lire and $1,000,000 in frozen sterling (for British actors), M-G-M began production on what promised to be the most colossal film spectacle of all time.
After a decade of dickering for the rights, Metro was filming Quo Vadis? (Where Are You Going?), Henry Sienkiewicz' flamboyant old (1895) novel of Nero's Rome. Filmed three times before on a much smaller scale (once by the French and twice by the Italians), Quo
Vadis is a project no U.S. movie company has ever before attempted. After figuring the odds, MGM's Louis B. Mayer anted up $6,000,000, the biggest budget in movie history, and dispatched ace Production Man Henry Henigson to Rome with orders to prepare the ground.
Sandals & Bulls. This spring, Metro's emissary was able to report progress. Hunting and haggling through Italy since 1948, Henigson had collected enough costumes to outfit a small army, enough animals to stock a zoo. He had bought 12,480 yards of specially dyed material to be made into togas, had cornered 10,000 pieces of gold-plated jewelry for Quo Vadis' 5,000 extras. From Roman shoemakers, he had ordered 6,250 pairs of handmade sandals, and from the women of the Italian Alps, several hundred silky-haired wigs. For the circus scenes in Quo Vadis, there would be six fighting bulls, a stable of horses to pull 14 racing chariots, 50 lions to be set upon persecuted
Christians. Human brawn would be well represented by two outsized wrestlers, and hulking Nightclub Singer Buddy Baer in the role of Ursus, the heroine's bodyguard.
One of Henigson's worst headaches was taking over Rome's giant (148 acres) film city, Cinedtta, for the actual shooting of Quo Vadis. A German army barracks during the war, Cinedtta had been stripped of all electrical equipment, and its sound stages had been smashed and gutted. A hurry call for Metro's own big generator went out to Hollywood and the Italian government lent two more from the torpedoed battleship Vittorio Veneto.
Palace & Circus. By the time Producer Sam Zimbalist and Stars Deborah Kerr and Robert Taylor arrived, Nero's Rome was as lavish as the original. Some 3,000 Italian workmen were putting the last careful touches on a mammoth reproduction of Nero's palace and a wooden replica of the Emperor's circus. A facsimile of the slimy, green-watered River Tiber had been dug, and for the single scene to be shot outside Cinedtta, a section of the Appian Way had been repaved.
As the cameras began panning through the early scenes last week, $3,000,000 had already been spent on Quo Vadis and 50,000 people had got in on the handout. Some estimated that the cost would hit $9,000,000 before the film is ready for release late in 1951.
But for all its size and glitter, "the biggest picture of all time" was not stirring the expected commotion in Rome. The staggering preparations and frantic bustle out at MGM's "Hollywood on the Tiber" were only mildly amazing to modern Romans. In the wineshops, the talk was of the women telephone operators out at Cinedtta who these days answer with a cheery: "Good morning. Quo Vadis?"