CALIGULA: THE ULTIMATE CUT DVD Review

**½ out of ****

The mid-1970s to early-1980s were an interesting time in movie history for a variety of reasons. On the one hand, the era of director-driven, personal films was ending with Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now and Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate nearly bankrupting the studios that financed them. On the other hand, the age of the blockbuster sprung on the world with Steven Spielberg’s Jaws and George Lucas’ Star Wars. On a third, somewhat dirtier hand, there were mainstream films featuring hardcore pornography.

The age of Emmanuelle and Behind the Green Door was indeed, unbelievably now, upon that era’s ticket-goers in select cinemas near them. The reason it seems hard to imagine today is, after the NC-17 rating promised death at the box office, you don’t see such things anymore. Overall, given the quality of such ventures, that’s probably a plus. While certain European films still navigate the world between serious films and porno (a recent-ish example being Blue is the Warmest Color), such movies are virtually unknown in America and have disappeared in the age of home viewing, beginning with direct-to-video and DVD and well into the streaming boom.

The most notorious of all such “high-class” porn films was dreamed up by Bob Guccione, founder of Penthouse magazine, who wanted in on the action after Hugh Hefner (of all people) invested the money to give us Roman Polanski’s chilling version of Macbeth. Guccione’s dreams were somewhat more elevated, however. He wanted to make a Roman epic that would show Ancient Rome as it truly was, unlike the Ben-Hurs of the world—not just the playful and orgiastic sex, but the sheer ubiquity of violence and bloodletting. His choice of subject was the emperor Caligula and the screenwriter he chose for the project was none other than the uncredited author of Ben-Hur himself, Gore Vidal.

Vidal was not a bad choice in the slightest. Through his novel series Narratives of Empire (in works such as Burr, Lincoln, and Hollywood), he chronicled the subject of power in America like no one had or has since. Born into a political family, he made a splash in his home country before moving to Ravello, Italy to watch the imperial American bloodletting from the other side of the Atlantic. While his fame was chiefly gained from his talk show appearances and snarky columns, he was a gifted writer of prose and gets little credit for his borne profession: as a real writer of and about power.

Guccione’s choice for director was slightly odder: an avant-garde filmmaker who had turned to Eurosex films, Tinto Brass (Salon Kitty). But more audaciously than hiring Vidal, he wanted unsimulated sex to be filmed in between dramatic scenes featuring the top talent of the acting world, including Malcolm McDowell, Helen Mirren, Peter O’Toole, and John Gielgud. So, Guccione wanted to go big or go home, clearly.

The resulting production smacked of disaster from the get-go. Brass disliked Vidal’s two drafts and hired his own onset writers, Guccione fired Brass and so, a big budget, arthouse-porn film appeared with the credits “Principal Photography by Tinto Brass” and, most hilariously, “Based on an Original Screenplay by Gore Vidal.” The latter is possibly the funniest film title card of all time except a 1930s Hollywood production of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream that included “Additional Dialogue by…”

Nevertheless, after censorship issues in many major countries, Guccione released his Caligula in 1979 to horrendous reviews, but huge ticket sales as few could stay away from what Mirren called later called “an irresistible mix of art and genitals.” The version that was finally released was completed by Guccione and Giancarlo Lui, who went back onto the sets and inserted the hardcore shots, much to the dismay of everyone involved. But the movie made money and, on videocassette, became a notorious cult classic.

In the early 1980s, Guccione released an R-rated version for wider distribution and, a few years ago, an “Imperial Edition” DVD gave us the Imperial Cut, which also ejected the pornographic content and was allegedly supposed to give us more of Brass’ original intentions. Recently, however, Caligula has been back in the news as a new edit premiered at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival. The Ultimate Cut is nearly three hours in length, was produced by Thomas Negovan (primarily a noted creator of art installations), and still manages to cut the same sex material as the other cuts mentioned. What sets it apart, however, is it uses a newly commissioned score, an animated title sequence, and (most impressively) not one single shot from the original film.

My Ultimate Cut DVD arrived recently and, for frames of reference, I watched the original and Imperial Cuts before plunging into Negovan’s work. I must admit, though I’ve owned the Imperial Edition for many years, I still hadn’t seen the original film all the way through. Mostly because I would fall asleep less than an hour in every time—not saying much for a “notorious” movie. This time, however, I took advantage of the Imperial Edition’s Special Features and read Vidal’s two drafts before watching the film. The Ultimate Cut is supposed to be more of Vidal’s intentions, and it largely is, though there are still significant differences in the last third of the new reconstruction.

So how can one film provide us with so many disparate versions and why? For one thing, McDowell’s performance has always been criticized in much the same way as Jack Nicholson’s in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. In the original Stephen King novel, Jack Torrance gradually becomes a monster while many who watched Kubrick’s adaptation (a bad one, of bad source material—sorry) saw madness in Nicholson’s eyes from the first frame leading to the overwhelming critical and audience consensus that Nicholson’s performance does not build much.

With Caligula, Vidal wanted to portray him as a good person who went bad. Guccione and Brass wanted the madness from the beginning and both the original and Imperial Cuts suffer from this. Sadly, as early on as the scenes with Tiberius (O’Toole) and Nerva (Gielgud), McDowell’s Ultimate Cut performance does not escalate as much as we would have hoped. Overall, it might still be a better performance—McDowell certainly thinks so—but not appreciably.

Also, curiously for a project showing Vidal’s read on the character, one of the most interesting aspects of the original version—Caligula demanding Nerva say he was seeing Isis on his ascent to the inevitable is lost in the Ultimate Cut. This is, perhaps, the only change I missed, but most of what Vidal wanted as far as Caligula’s monotheism was never filmed for the movie in the first place, so Negovan can only deal with the footage he has—it’s 90 hours of footage (and he went through all of it), but some good material from Vidal is still lost to time.

Is this Caligula a better film than the one from 1979? Well, in the original and Ultimate cuts, one today can admire its ambition. Guccione’s idea, overall, was not a bad one: to show pagan Rome with realism. But, along with that, scenes of endless sex cut back and forth from ones of such extreme violence (downplayed a tad in the Ultimate version) makes it hard to keep one’s eyes glued to the screen. While the shot of Princess Julia Drusilla’s death is much more palatable in the newer version, there remains a lot of senseless violence filmed rather too naturalistically. In telling the story of Caligula, that is perhaps inevitable, but never satisfying on a movie-going level in any traditional way.

Overall, I admired Negovan’s work. You have to give it to someone who takes on a task such as this because the film does include great acting from some of the best actors who ever worked onscreen. Mirren’s role has tripled in size, but to be ever the contrarian, I disagree with the consensus that it is a better performance. With the role of Caesonia, there is only so much one can do. In the never-seen-before footage, Mirren is not especially dazzling (a crime, given her obvious ability).

In the end, we have a new cut of the film that is better, but not a masterpiece. Ambitious as it is, when you think about wanting to portray “the real Rome” and yet having see-through, plastic-looking bathtubs (no matter how gloriously rendered by Oscar-winner Danilo Donati), there are still laughable moments between what you can admire and what you can stomach

The DVD features two audio commentaries, one by Negovan with the new editor, Aaron Shaps, and another with Negovan and author Grant Morrison as well as the Teaser from Cannes. The Blu-Ray edition includes the original 1979 film as well.

PS—While the new score is fine, it is actually hard to watch Caligula without the original musical selections from Sergei Prokofiev and Aram Khachaturian. The former’s work, especially, is almost indelibly linked to the film.

Caligula: The Ultimate Cut

Blu-Ray/DVD, 2024

Drafthouse Films/Sunshine Mesa Films/Vitagraph Films

Thomas Negovan, reconstructionist/producer, Ultimate Cut

Tinto Brass, principal photographer

Gore Vidal, original screenwriter

Troy Sterling Niles, composer, Ultimate Cut

Aaron Shaps, editor, Ultimate Cut

Silvano Ippoliti, cinematographer

Danilo Donati, art director

Bob Guccione/Franco Rossellini, producers

Malcolm McDowell as Caligula

Helen Mirren as Caesonia

Teresa Ann Savoy as Drusilla

Peter O’Toole as Tiberius

John Steiner as Longinus

Lori Wagner, Agrippina

John Gielgud as Nerva

To My Teachers, with Love

Growing up as an actor, I always believed actors were born, not made. Certainly, one can learn techniques of speaking and movement, period styles, etc. But I’ve never seen a mediocre actor become great. Writers are another thing altogether. There may be folks born with the gift of gab or a preternatural understanding of the English language, but they do not appear from the ether ready-made writers. Writers need training, feedback, honing, workshopping. They must be taught.

I’ve been blessed in my life with teachers who made me the writer I am now. What am I? A playwright first and foremost, a poet, and a sometime writer of nonfiction with a focus on criticism and personal essays. Each of the following people contributed to these sometimes-disparate elements, although there is a connection between drama and poetry that is surprising to some folks, though not to me. Both forms seem to be a kind of calling out to the gods for help in understanding the world. One just goes about it in a slightly different way.

I was eleven when I wrote my first blackout sketches and monologues and fourteen when I wrote my first short play, seventeen for the first full-length. Those early works would not have been possible without the support of two teachers who were not my playwriting teachers, but their guidance and provisions were essential to my earliest days of dramatic writing.

Elizabeth, awarding me the 2001 Thespis Award

Elizabeth Adkisson was the acting teacher at the Alabama School of Fine Arts (ASFA). In my ninth-grade year, we began hosting a student-run coffee-house night in the black box studio theatre and this was the first time I did readings and productions of my plays. Most, I’m sure, I would balk at if I watched them today, though they do exist on rotting video tape. One night, I asked Elizabeth to listen in on the first play which made me proud—a twenty scene romp entitled Hopeless Romantics. It was based on a list of questions I had about women and featured two guys at a bar asking them and attempting to answer in curious, non-adult ways.

We had to have a chaperone on sight for the coffee house, so she stayed behind the homemade bleachers and listened as I and another actor sped through the piece, dodging thrown shoes from the audience because, even then, I had no filter, and I wrote with complete abandon in terms of content. Afterwards, I asked her opinion. I was all of fifteen. Of course, as my acting teacher, she wanted to criticize my diction, but something struck her obviously and she brought to my attention a regional playwriting award for which I could submit the piece.

Southern PlayWorks was the only company in Birmingham devoted to new works. At the time, they had the responsibility for giving out the Ruby Lloyd Apsey Award. One of its prior winners (for the hilarious Holmes & Watson) was Lee Eric Shackleford, the Playwright-in-Residence at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He responded to the facile, stichomythic dialogue (Seinfeld-like, I’m sure) and awarded me first prize. The prize included, I think, some cash, a framed award with my middle initial printed wrong, and a reading supervised by a local director and actors.

The reading itself was a bust. Somehow the madcap romp my friend and I had performed in the studio theatre fell flat in the ASFA Performance Hall, where the ceremony was held. The director and I did not get along—she was one of many who was concerned at the immaturity of characters allegedly in their twenties and thirties—and the actors must have been on Xanax or something that afternoon. Nevertheless, both Adkisson and Shackleford kept track of my development.

The next year, Elizabeth agreed for a friend of mine to direct two of my new one-acts for his senior project. The plays were a cyclical drama, A Plumber’s Story, and a paper-thin romantic comedy, More Than Words. On Elizabeth and the director’s suggestion, I was banned from rehearsals so he could learn his directorial craft. While he left A Plumber’s Story alone, to my great surprise, More Than Words was chopped up, re-written, and mangled to suit popular taste. But, based on the strength of A Plumber’s Story, Elizabeth began to take me seriously as a writer. She submitted a never-produced one-act of mine, Call Waiting, to the Alabama Shakespeare Festival’s Young Southern Writers’ Project and asked me to collaborate on a full-length adaptation as my senior project.

Part of "Shack"'s head awarding me the 1999 Ruby Lloyd Apsey Award

Shackleford had other ideas in mind. Money for Southern PlayWorks was going dry, but it just happened to be that he had (I hope) a promising playwright in his midst, so he decided to produce and direct a night of one-act plays written by student playwrights. The evening was called Four Blinks of the Eye. It seemed to me “Shack,” as I called him, was going through a wistful spell remembering his youth as, around this time, he produced one of his most mature plays, May Flies Fast. So, the “four blinks” were four snapshots of life as seen from young people. The first half of the evening consisted of Hopeless Romantics and a much re-written version of More Than Words that was more of a dramedy that lost a lot of its initial humor. The show was, overall, well-attended and we young playwrights were given our first royalty checks. We felt and were treated like professionals. That’s what “Shack” did for me—along with including a more mature one-act of mine, Above the Mountains, in his first night of ten-minute plays he produced at UAB some three years later.

Back to ASFA, Elizabeth had picked out a classic Russian comedy, Denis Ivanovich Fonvizin’s The Minor as our mainstage show my senior year, but the script was hopelessly outdated and in a translation that did not help matters one bit. Our agreement is she would find a suitable way to adapt it for contemporary audiences and I would write the dialogue and stage directions. The result was Discordia, a futuristic comedy. The play was (and is) terrible, but it was a legitimate, two-act play. I also found my love for adaptation which I’ve since treated as a collaboration between a living and a deceased writer. Walking in another writer’s shoes to see why they did this or chose that was a remarkable experience and I’ve continued the work in adaptations and translations of plays by Chikamatsu Monzaemon, Henrik Ibsen, O. Henry, Edgar Allan Poe, and George Washington Parke Custis.

Then, “Shack” and Liz sent me off to college for a professional playwriting education. At Bennington, I was grounded academically by the Pulitzer Prize-nominated fiction writer and playwright Gladden Schrock, a seven-foot-tall bear of a man whose output consisted of many counterculture works from the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. His The Green Lute, in its premiere at the Long Wharf Theatre (where he was a founding member along with his Yale buddies Jon Jory and Stacy Keach), starred a young James Cromwell and a (believe it or not) young Abe Vigoda, though I’m sure he still looked old even in 1965. His plays Madam Popov, Glutt, and Taps railed against the “me” generation following the peace movement of the 1960s. Schrock’s crowning achievement was Letters from Alf, a 1973 novel that has smatterings of The Catcher in the Rye, Man’s Fate, and Portnoy’s Complaint, but with half the solipsism and thrice the intelligence.

Gladden, me, and my Uncle Harlan at graduation

Schrock had been taught by John Gassner at Yale, Gassner being the great anthologizer of American drama at the time American drama was worth anthologizing. Gassner was taught by George Pierce Baker, the first person to teach playwriting in an academic setting. He had taken his ideas to Harvard, where he was rejected, and eventually landed at Yale, which is still the university most associated with producing some of the best theatrical artists of the day. While Schrock’s education was very traditional, his plays were rather avant-garde, perhaps influenced by Beckett to a fault. But where Beckett was minimalist in language, Schrock’s plays were chock full of words only Shakespearean-level actors could hope to render. As a wordsmith, he was a maximalist to the nth degree and his plays should be more well known because Glutt, in particular, describes this miserable day and age as much as it did in its own time.

David and me in New York, New York

On the other hand, I interned two years with David Henry Hwang, the Tony and Obie Award-winning playwright of FOB, M. Butterfly, Golden Child, and other classics of Asian-American theatre. He was taught by Sam Shepard and Maria Irene Fornés (the latter often considered one of the best playwriting teachers the country ever had). So, David’s education was experimental in nature while his plays strike a chord between traditional comedy/drama and moments of lilting, poetic beauty (most often on display in his work for opera). I felt, with the two, I had two genetic linkages of playwriting from which to drawn on. To have a link to the writer of the seminal Dramatic Technique and to the Pulitzer Prize-winning Shepard was not too shabby.

Schrock did just about everything to get me to drop his course. He sent me to the library where there was one copy of our textbook which we all had to share, and he referred to the work I brought to school as having not one single interesting character. He was tough, but fair. It took two years until he said one day, “You’ve walked in the room a different person” and we became fast friends. For years after Bennington, he would read my work and comment through e-mail. David showed me the ins and outs of professional New York theatre, exposing me to Broadway and Off-Broadway work and allowing me to tag along to business meetings, introducing me to other writers I loved, and landing me a gig as a Production Assistant on a James Lapine play in the winter of 2003.

Bach, sadly no longer with us

Also at Bennington, I studied screenwriting with the producer/biographer Steven Bach, whose book Final Cut, about the making of Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate (which he was personally involved in) is a standard tome for cinephiles. Bach believed I was a better screenwriter than playwright, though I never remember him seeing any of my plays. Nevertheless, his friendship and our mutual adoration of Stephen Sondheim made us bosom buddies. Just like with Schrock and Hwang’s works, I’m proud to have an inscribed, signed copy of Final Cut near my mantle.

I never studied poetry at all. I submitted material to try and gain acceptance into courses at Bennington but was always turned down. Nevertheless, I took it back up a few years after college and poetry provides me a break when I’m stuck on a play and a place for me to explore ideas that are not inherently theatrical. Being self-taught, my poems may not strike you as particularly good, but one did win a prize, so at least I have that.

Poirier's other work includes MODERN RANCH LIVING and the screenplay for SMART PEOPLE

As far as non-fiction, this was the ass-kicker. As far as forming words, I had Wayne Hoffman-Ogier, an instructor at Bennington who helped me reign in my excesses on essays. Through reading gorgeous prose such as Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, I learned a lot from his wisdom and guidance. He struck me as a craftsman extraordinaire and I soaked up all I could. While I have never written much fiction, I also learned a lot from two novelists, Rebecca T. Godwin (Keeper of the House) and Mark Jude Poirier (Goats). Godwin taught on a class on the works and writing lives of Welty, Woolf, and O’Connor which was my favorite class second only to A Capella Choir and Poirier took me on in a course reading Moliére and writing flash fiction. My fiction was never good, but I can’t help thinking the assistance of these three teachers helped me hone the prose I write today—weekly, for you.

Take a moment and remember your teachers—what they did for you, what they didn’t do for you. One must always take one’s advice with a grain of salt, but if you know how to sift through what’s right and wrong, you can learn a lot from someone whose been produced or published.

Columbus Day and the Offended Generation

Not all holidays are created equally, but there is a ubiquity about them. It is necessary, for example, to have a bright spot in the bleak midwinter and some sort of festival atmosphere as Spring dawns, so for most folks in the Western World, Christmas and Easter serve these needs, but there are equivalent holy days for different religions as well. While no one can deny the appeal of Christmas, Easter has always been my favorite. No matter where I’ve lived, the weather has always been gorgeous and it has special religious significance to me as well.

I celebrate holidays usually with a piece of art. For Easter, I might watch a documentary or film about Christ; for Christmas, we have scores of films, television specials, and music to fill our eyes, ears, and hearts. But I have traditions of my own for other holidays as well. On Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, I inevitably listen to James Taylor’s “Shed a Little Light,” often posting it on social media. This year, you’ve already seen my appreciation of the musical 1776 on Independence Day. I am a flag collector, so while I don’t have any traditions for it, Flag Day is even kind of special.

We are, of course, coming up on Halloween and I’ve never seen so much pre-decoration. There is apparently a new phenomenon called “Augtober,” where people anxious for Fall start Halloween decoration in the month with no legitimate holidays. Prior to that however, we have what has become the most controversial federal holiday: Columbus Day.

A desecrated statue of Columbus.

In this age of historical purgation, rabid ideology, and fruitless attempts to make the past palatable, we have seen statues of Columbus thrown into the sea and the typical image of the man desecrated and ridiculed. Certainly, looking over his biography, one can see why people would choose to try and throw the man off their backs (a rather different matter than the lunacy that drove some to desecrate statues of Lincoln a few years ago). Obsessively ideologically possessed academics want the whole notion of a day celebrating the “discovery” of the New World jettisoned and replaced with Indigenous Peoples’ Day, which is celebrated on the same day. More moderate and, therefore, most often, academically-rigorous ones see a complicated man of his own time who cannot be judged any differently than most of the people of his time—along the lines of Richard Wagner, Thomas Jefferson, and a few other historical figures I’ve discussed on the blog.

So, do I have any Columbus Day traditions? Well, yes, oddly enough. While no world was ever exactly “discovered” and Columbus was late to the party in terms of Leif Erikson, his stamp on the continents on this side of the world can be seen everywhere. He brought the laws, the (often) savage justice, and the imperialism of the Old World here, marks of which can still be seen today (this, Lief never did). He made contact (and did several other awful things) with our Indigenous populations, and his name is stamped into the names of many cities, including our capital. Why we are not the United States of Columbia I’ve never figured out. Score one for Vespucci. Regardless, one can’t deny Columbus made a mark in addition to his crimes and excesses.

In 1992, my friend David Henry Hwang, whose 2007 Obie Award-winner Yellow Face is currently having its Broadway premiere, had his grand opera debut as the librettist of Philip Glass’ The Voyage. The opera was commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera for the 500th anniversary of Columbus’ “discovery.” Glass and Hwang, true to both their styles, chose to write an opera more generally about discovery than about Columbus himself, although he does play a role in it. Having a rather wild production design in what seems from contemporaneous reviews as a neon spectacular, The Voyage largely sank despite a beautifully written libretto and some rare instances of humor from Glass. It was not until the work was revived in the twenty-first century when a recording was made, and I typically listen to it on Columbus Day. The following excerpt from Glass’ liner notes and a snippet of Hwang’s libretto gives you some idea of why the concept of what Columbus did, rather than the man he was, is a reason to celebrate:

"Now, Christopher Columbus was a dynamic, fascinating man. In most ways he was a man of his time—no better and probably no worse. He was remarkable for the force and dedication that he brought to his dreams. And this, above all, is what sets him apart and makes him compelling for us today—a half a millennium later."-Philip Glass

"From the first amoeba

Who fought to break free of itself

To Ulysses, to Ibn Battuta, to Marco Polo

To Einstein, and beyond

All that we seek to know

Is to know ourselves

To reduce the darkness

By some small degree

To light a candle, jump a stream

That the sum of human ignorance

Might dwindle just a bit

And the deeds done in darkness

May wither one day perhaps even

Expire

And if our human voyages

Are riddled sometimes with horrors

With pride, with vanity

With the mother's milk of cruelty...

Yet finally human evil

Does not deny the good

Of knowledge

Of light

Of revelation

Of the hope that lo one day

Exploration will make obsolete

Even the sins of the explorer"

-Epilogue, The Voyage (text by David Henry Hwang)

In the end, I choose to think of the day as commemorating the spirit of discovery which I hope humans never give up on. While some of the things Columbus did are squalid and barbaric compared to today’s standards, without him, and the thousand other horrors since, we wouldn’t have the experiment called America. We inherit on our backs a lot of blood, it’s true, but we must move forward now—discovering more. We can’t do it as the divided nation we are. Perhaps something will bring us back together and the petty bickering over what happened in yesteryear will pale in comparison to what could be the glories of our future.