∎So far, the $8.5 million Penthouse production of Gore Vidal's Caligula has had all the success of an open-air orgy in Antarctica. First, Writer Gore Vidal quarreled with Director Tinto Brass and was barred from the movie's sets in Rome. Next to exit was Actress Maria Schneider, who called the film biography of the Roman emperor "a grotesque pornographic movie," and walked out after a day's shooting. "For an enormous amount of money they're asking people to prostitute themselves. I was ready and willing to act, but not to take my clothes off and do whatever they wanted me to," she complained. Enter Penthouse Publisher Bob Guccione, who found Schneider's story out of focus. Not only did she need help in paying some old hotel bills and a trip to Paris for an abortion, insisted Guccione, but she was all wrong.
"If the film was obscene, what would Sir John Gielgud and Malcolm McDowell be doing in it?" he asked. Then what about Actress Teresa Ann Savoy? Quickly hired as Schneider's replacement. Savoy last starred in a 1975 sado sexploitation special titled Salon Kitty —made by Director Brass.
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Mick Jogger, take note. That gun-steel gaze and pistoleer's pose belong to your wife Bianco. But relax—she's not thinking about your nights on the town during the Rolling Stones' tours. She's working in Flesh Color, a movie by Belgian Director Francois Weyergans.
The film features Actress-Model Ve-ruschka as a part-time stripper, Dennis Hopper as a misogynistic photographer and brown-eyed Bianca as a streetsmart nightclub impresario and all-round rough customer. The movie's message? "Women don't want to fall in love with the tough hero," says Bianca, "but rather with the child in the man." Got that. Mick?
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SORRY U.S.A., WE STILL LOVE OUR PRINCE announced several placards and banners as Queen Juliana and her disgraced husband, Prince Bernhard of The Netherlands, rode in their 1898 golden coach to the opening of the Dutch Parliament. Just a month earlier Bernhard had ceased all official duties and resigned his post as armed forces Inspector General after a government investigation uncovered "extremely imprudent" links between the prince and the Lockheed Aircraft Corp. Despite the gray civvies that replaced the favorite naval uniform he had relinquished.
Bernhard hardly looked the fallen prince on his return to public life last week. No wonder. As if to ease the pains of humiliation, the Dutch government had voted him a 10% raise, giving Bernhard a princely $321,000 a year in pocket money.
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