Free My Life with Cleopatra by Walter Wanger Page B

Rouben is also intelligent, but has less sense of humor. The main difference between these twomen is their ability to adapt to situations. Mamoulian is unbending as is JLM, but JLM is much more adept in handling touchy matters.
    F EBRUARY 1, 1961
    Mankiewicz begins to take over.
    He has arrived in London with an entirely new, modern, psychiatrically rooted concept of the film. It is one with which I can agree entirely and I believe it can lead to a great picture. Mark Antony lived always in the shadow of Caesar—Caesar’s trusted lieutenant, Caesar’s loyal friend, Caesar’s right hand—but never a Caesar. JLM sees Antony as a bad replica of Caesar, following desperately in Caesar’s footsteps, but rattling loosely in them on the battlefield, in the Senate and in Caesar’s bed. He sees this inability to match Caesar as the cause of Antony’s excessive drinking and eccentric behavior. Antony’s conquest of Cleopatra is his only triumph over Caesar. Then he realizes he has not conquered but has been conquered—and this leads to his ultimate self-destruction.
    JLM sees Cleopatra as one of the very first women to rule in a man’s world—a woman who wanted it all and picked off the Number One and Number Two ranking men of that world in succession. Cleopatra is not a wide-eyed child in his concept. She is an artist of consummate femininity, a genius in the art of attracting men. His overall approach is through the story of the woman who nearly made it.
    It is his plan to stay very close to history. The lives of our chief protagonists, as chronicled in Plutarch, Suetonius, Appian and other ancient sources, are crammed with dramatic event and structure. He is going to start the script with the battle of Pharsalia.
    JLM comes in the midst of a crisis: the cast is in open rebellion against being required to play the original script, whichconceives of Cleopatra as a virgin who could be deflowered only by a god. JLM says he cannot salvage anything from the original, and he plans to disregard it completely in favor of his own concept. In this case he has my enthusiastic OK, as well as Skouras’. But more will have to be discarded than the script and the 10½ minutes of film already shot—all the footage made during these disastrous ten weeks.
    We must also pay off all the contract people like Peter Finch, who will receive $150,000 for the role he was not able to complete. We are recasting the entire production as well as replanning and rebuilding. And we need enough screenplay ready to enable us to start shooting here again as close to March 15 as possible.
    A hurried call has gone out to writers to help organize and set down a story line which can be translated into a screenplay as quickly as possible.
    F EBRUARY 5, 1961
    Sidney Buchman and Lawrence Durrell, both of whom like the Mankiewicz concept, made themselves available for enough time to get us started at any rate. Durrell is to be paid $2,500 a week.
    The modus operandi is to hold conferences plotting the story line section by section. Buchman and Durrell then prepare separate “story-step outlines” which Mankiewicz adapts and expands into his screenplay outline. The outline has to be detailed and as close to the eventual screenplay as possible because of the pressure of time.
    F EBRUARY 9, 1961
    Received a copy of budget report from Rogell. Total cost to date: $4,998,000. Estimated further cost to complete the picture: $4,866,000. The grand total is almost ten million dollars. What we have spent so far is, I am sure, wasted, and I doubt that we will ever finish the picture within this estimate.
    F EBRUARY 14, 1961
    The London
Evening Standard
reported that Fox is claiming almost twelve million dollars from the forty insurance companies and ninety syndicates of Lloyd’s underwriters that insured us on the picture.
    The paper also reported that Liz had won her libel suit against the
Daily Mail
for claiming
Cleopatra
had been held up because she was overweight.
    F