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"The picture won't be like DeMille's," says one of De Laurentiis' assistants. "DeMille would take the 40 years of Moses' life not covered by the Bible and he would create a motion picture story. We have tried faithfully to reproduce and annotate the text of the Bible." Christopher Fry apparently was not told this because, although the Bible gives no hint what instrument Cain used in killing Abel, the Fry Bible does. In showing the world's first fratricide, Fry has the psychotically jealous Cain pick up an ass's jawbone—si, si, Samson, an ass's jawbone—and bash Abel. The jawbone was custom-built out of hard rub ber. Cain missed Abel's upper cranium the first time he used it, and the scene had to be interrupted for nearly a week until the black and blue patch subsided.
Efficient Cost. Special-effects men are having their finest hour. The top of the Tower of Babel was shot in Egypt, where 4,000 sun-baked Egyptians were hired to play Babylonian extras. One day only 1,500 arrived for work, so armadas of taxicabs had to be sent out through the streets of Cairo to pick up anything that moved on two feet. The bottom of Babel's tower was shot near Rome, where one genius in the makeup department ran around with cans of something called Clean Fly, which he sprayed on pale Italians to turn them brickbrown; these secret ingredients have worked—except when January winds sweep down from the north; then the extras have been registering blue.
One of the smaller arks has been moored just below a tributary of the Tiber; soon the gates will be open and the deluge will result. Sodom has been built out of charred plastic and spreads over 25 acres of Mount Etna. Katherine Dunham and her dancers were called in to provide the sin. Huston filmed Sodom dimly lit, and shied clear of the debauches of DeMille's epics. "There's no obscenity," says Huston, "but you will know unspeakable things are going on."
With only three more scenes and three more months of shooting left to go, the company is already boasting, "This is the most costly, efficiently made picture in history."