If you’re a movie person, regardless of whether you’ve ever sat through the film’s voluptuous four hour and ten minute duration, you probably know the basics of 1963’s Cleopatra. For the unacquainted: for many years, it held the title of most expensive movie ever made. It was meant to save floundering studio 20th Century Fox, but instead the massive budget overruns almost destroyed it. Its star, Elizabeth Taylor, became the first ever actor to earn a million dollar pay check, just before narrowly avoiding death from a terrible bout of pneumonia.
Of course, the most noteworthy of the many noteworthy things that happened during the two and a half year shoot was the introduction of the recuperated Taylor to Richard Burton, and the world to “the romance of the century”.
Although the tale of Cleopatra has been told many times before, in the sixth season of TCM’s podcast The Plot Thickens, host Ben Mankiewicz finds a new angle. You see, the poor man charged with corralling these lovestruck actors, 20,000 extras, an enormous crew, increasingly anxious money men, and a whole host of other interested parties, was acclaimed writer-director Joseph L. Mankiewicz. Mankiewicz was Ben’s great uncle.
Besides overseeing the movie’s vast spectacle, and penning the script after the original version was deemed unusable, Joe found himself in the peculiar position of being counsellor to all the main players of the romantic scandal that captured the world. Through his diary entries, recollections from his children, and plentiful archival audio, The Plot Thickens tells the story of one of the most eventful shoots in movie history from one of its most important, yet little heard from players.
And it’s a terrific angle. Joe Mankiewicz was a fascinating, fiercely talented man. The younger brother of Herman, who wrote Citizen Kane, Joe described himself as a “midget in a family of giants”.
That feeling wasn’t warranted. Whereas Herman only ever wrote, Joe became one of classic Hollywood’s most widely respected writer-directors; he won Oscars for both positions in 1950 (A Letter to Three Wives) and 1951 (All About Eve).
But this season of The Plot Thickens isn’t just an excuse for Ben Mankiewicz to boast about the formidable skill of his great-uncle. Learning about Joe’s failed early attempts to become a psychologist and complicated marriage to his troubled second wife, are vital to understanding how he faced the biggest challenge of his career.
The Plot Thickens paints a nuanced picture of his personal and professional successes and failings, drawing out a recognisably human center around which all the madness of Cleopatra orbited.
The set of Cleopatra was a hive of activity, and we are treated to a host of wonderful details of the production’s profligacy, from the many hundreds of fish purchased to distract the seagulls who swarmed the set when the production was still in London, to the many thousands spent on wigs for the centurions who would never remove their helmets on screen.
Yet, what makes this movie podcast consistently gripping is the emphasis on the emotions that powered the drama: Joe’s stress and exhaustion manifesting in a host of physical ailments (he was in a wheelchair by the time the shoot had wrapped); Taylor’s guilt at breaking up another marriage; even the experiences of Joe’s children, talking many decades later about how Cleopatra was “the Voldemort of [their] childhood”.
It seems strange, on reflection, that there’s never been a dramatic movie about the making of Cleopatra – though the 1963 production does contain gripping passages within its mammoth runtime, none are quite so riveting as what was going on behind the scenes. If such a film never comes to pass, however, then at least The Plot Thickens has illuminated this singular moment in movie history.
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Chloe Walker is a writer based in the UK. You can find her work at Culturefly, the BFI, Paste, and her Letterboxd page.