Caligula (Tinto Brass, 1979)

Before we Caligu-live, Caligu-laugh, and Caligu-love, please forgive this brief detour into remembrances of VHS days past. During my sophomore year of college in Lincoln, Nebraska, in the mid-'90s, a local man was struck with an epiphany while watching Babe and decided to open a video store specializing in cult, weirdo, and indie movies called Pig of Destiny Video. Around this same time, I was recovering from one of the worst bouts of depression I've ever experienced, one that put me within a hair's breadth of quitting school. I came out the other side, stayed in school (though I only took three classes that semester, two of them very easy), and slowly recovered by watching dozens of movies a week. I was a regular customer at Pig of Destiny during its brief existence (I got a VCR for Christmas that year and went berserk tearing my way through every cult movie, '70s movie, and '80s/'90s indie movie I could get my hands on). After the store had been open for six or seven months, the owner got in some tax trouble. I'm not sure if he didn't pay his taxes or filed incorrectly or what, but he was no longer legally allowed to sell or rent anything from the property. Being the cool and unusual guy he was and with a few months' rent already paid allowing him to remain on the premises through the end of his lease, he decided to give unlimited free rentals the last two months to anyone who already had a store membership. I took great advantage of this sad yet briefly awesome turn of events, and I watched, for free, nearly every day, as many movies as I could carry while riding my bicycle during this magical couple months. I was 19, I was thin, a fascist wasn't president, and for eight glorious weeks, I had unlimited free movie rentals. I watched so many good and great movies in that 60-day window of time. I also watched Caligula. Last night, after a 22-year Caligula-free stretch, I watched Caligula again.

Caligula, the only theatrical feature produced by Penthouse magazine, is basically an expensive splatter-porn version of Fellini's Satyricon with great sets and actors but pure chaos behind the camera. It's a terrible movie, and a long one at nearly three hours, but it's somehow entertainingly watchable throughout, mostly thanks to Malcolm McDowell's lead performance, which finds the perfect happy medium between seriousness and camp. It's one of those movies where the sex, nudity, and violence are piled on so thickly and continuously that the impact is lost. Ho-hum, another bucket of blood, yawn, another shapely naked ass in my face. If the film had weaker actors, Caligula would have been a trial to sit through once its oddball novelty wore off and the barrage of orgies and killings began its viewer desensitization, but McDowell, Helen Mirren, Teresa Ann Savoy, and John Steiner keep the crazy train solidly on the tracks. (On the other hand, Peter O'Toole looks tired and preoccupied, though he does give some good line readings, and John Gielgud can barely hide his shame and embarrassment.)

Caligula is the kind of project that could only have existed in the second half of the '70s. The country was in the waning days of post-Deep Throat porno chic, glossy sex mag publishers were rich, home video wasn't yet an option for the average person, no one but a few computer scientists had any idea what the Internet would be, major actors could take on ill-conceived projects without seriously damaging their careers, blockbuster madness was only just beginning and hadn't yet colonized every theater chain in the country, and cocaine hubris was still in full snort in the world of film production (I apologize for that terrible pun but will not delete it, in the spirit of Caligula). I'm not even sure if Caligula was fueled by cocaine dreams, but it sure feels like it.

Bob Guccione, publisher of Penthouse and wearer of deeply unbuttoned shirts and gold medallions, had a dream. He wanted to make the Citizen Kane of adult movies, an explicit sex movie that would play in regular movie theaters with a scripted narrative, expensive production values, and professional, non-porn talent behind and in front of the camera, and he thought the life story of insane, priapic Roman emperor Caligula would be just the ticket. Guccione, who was wildly wealthy at the time, convinced Gore Vidal to write the screenplay for $200,000. After his first two choices for director, Lina Wertmuller and John Huston, both turned him down, Guccione talked Italian filmmaker Tinto Brass into taking the project. Vidal and Brass hated each other, and Brass and Guccione also fought throughout the production.

The shoot and post-production process were both chaotic. Brass banished Vidal from the set, and the two men insulted each other in the press. (Brass called Vidal an "aging arteriosclerotic" while Vidal called Brass a "megalomaniac" and said film directors were "parasites" with screenwriters being every film's true authors.) Guccione thought Vidal's script had too much homosexuality and not enough heterosexual sex, and Brass worked on a rewrite that substantially changed the direction of the script, prompting Vidal to request his name be removed from the film. (The producers decided to go with "Adapted from a screenplay by Gore Vidal.")

Meanwhile, Brass wanted no unsimulated sex in the film and refused to shoot the porn scenes. He also specifically focused his camera in the big orgy scenes on extras he thought Guccione would find unattractive. They fought about this throughout the shoot, and eventually Guccione and Giancarlo Lui snuck back on the sets with Penthouse Pets and a skeleton crew and directed the unsimulated sex scenes themselves (mostly oral sex and masturbation, with a little bit of full-on intercourse sprinkled throughout for flavor), adding these scenes to the final edit. (The hardcore scenes were removed for a shorter, R-rated cut that played theaters a few years after the initial run.) Credit where credit is due, the nudity in Caligula is pretty egalitarian. Tons of naked ladies and dudes, and everyone wears open tunics. I guarantee you will be tired of looking at dicks (both flaccid and hard), vaginas, breasts, butts, buttholes, side boobs, and side butts thirty minutes in, or your pizza is free.

Side tangent: I had to laugh at a few of the people involved in the film's many orgies. Amidst all the intercourse, oral sex, groping, voyeurism, and solo and mutual masturbation, there was a naked guy with a hard-on walking around on giant stilts, a guy in a thong hopping around on one foot, a nude guy juggling, some clothed plate spinners, and various clothing-free men and women casually wandering around aimlessly. Imagine being some horny freak excited to attend a giant orgy and getting assigned juggling duty. 

Director Brass was also hired to edit the film, but after Guccione watched the first hour of his cut, he fired him. Instead of hiring an editor, Guccione assigned multiple people to the task. The film's credits list the editor as "the Production," one of many weird credits in the opening scroll. No director is listed in that sequence, either. Brass gets a "Photographed by" credit, even though the cinematographer was Silvano Ippoliti (some of the production staff thought Ippoliti had no idea what he was doing, in yet more off-screen drama), with Guccione and Lui getting an "Additional scenes directed by" credit.

Brass also clashed with actors Peter O'Toole and Maria Schneider, and actor Anneka Di Lorenzo sued Guccione for sexual harassment, winning her initial case but losing it on appeal. O'Toole hated Brass, finding his large, loud personality insufferable. O'Toole was also having personal problems. He quit drinking shortly before filming (probably a bad idea to stop drinking before Caligula instead of after) and was in a vulnerable place. Guccione claimed that though O'Toole was alcohol-free, he was nevertheless high on drugs during the shoot, though Guccione didn't specify which drugs. Schneider's short time on set was even more dramatic. Initially cast as Caligula's sister/lover Drusilla, Schneider pushed back against the production adding more nude scenes for her, and in act of rebellion, sewed up the open tunics worn by most of the cast. She quit the production just a few days into the shoot, and Brass replaced her with Savoy, who had starred in his previous film Salon Kitty.

Whew. That's a lot of drama, which continued into the initial theatrical release, as multiple countries and U.S. cities took legal action against public screenings of the film, though the film's producers and distributors won the bulk of these cases and got some great publicity as a result. I wish the film itself was as exciting as its production history, but, again, McDowell is hilarious and excellent, Mirren is slyly funny and sexy, Italian horror movie veteran (and current California real estate agent) Steiner is also slyly funny and a great visual presence, and there's a lot of comical business with Caligula's beloved horse Incitatus (though the film weirdly fails to mention that the real Caligula made Incitatus a consul).

Danilo Donati's set design, though underused, also deserves mention here. The bizarro, face-shaped chambers of O'Toole's Tiberius, complete with a precariously tall, uneven, carved-from-rock staircase, is a feast for the eyes, as is the enormous, blood-red, slowly moving wall with rotating scythes that decapitates prisoners buried up to their necks in the soil of an outdoor amphitheater. I have to give it Donati. The sets are pretty cool.

Do you need to see Caligula? No. Is Caligula an essential cult film? Also, no. Will you be sorry you saw Caligula? Maybe. Is it somehow weirdly enjoyable? Yes. And maybe, just maybe, as our own supposedly formerly enlightened nation grapples with its own mad emperor, a Filet-O-Fish Caligula if you will, we can glean some lessons in how to handle and remove him and his twisted, corrupt hell-spawn.
Caligu-later days, my friends.