Did you happen to record Monty Python’s Flying Circus when it was shown on PBS back in the 1970s?
Do you still have the tapes?
Is there a TIME LIFE logo at the end?
If so, please write to me. Thank you!

THE WORKS OF TINTO BRASS

Big Budgets and Big Headaches—Continued

A Documentary on the Making of
“Gore Vidal’s Caligula”

(1976–1981)

Bob Guccione hired his buddy Giancarlo Lui to make this technically inept 16mm featurette on the filming of the epic (Jack Pitman, “‘Caligula’ Winds Up $12.5-Mil Over Budget; Legalistics Too,” Variety, Wednesday, 30 November 1977, p. 31). The Caligula crew were exasperated that Lui never shot anything interesting (Solinas, Ultimate Porno, 196, 237–238). Instead, he came up with this thing. It’s a propaganda piece badmouthing Vidal and Brass and defending Guccione. Surprisingly, both Vidal and Brass (at his most corpulent and least enthusiastic) appear on camera, but not together, and not after their fallings out with Guccione. Hey, Don Bob was paying, so he was going to get the last word, right? And his last word, in the pretentious narrator’s voice: “One thing is certain: It will without question be the most widely seen and talked about film of our time.” Yeah right. This is included as a supplement in the DVD of Caligula.

Curiously, there are at least three different versions of this film floating around, two in English and one in Italian, and the differences are huge. It appears that Guccione interfered with this film almost as much as he interfered with Gore Vidal’s Caligula!

NOTE: It was in this documentary, among other places, that Guccione, without realizing that he had just put his foot in his mouth, admitted that his only reason for making Caligula was to combine big-name Shakespearean actors and hardcore sex into a mainstream movie. And that explains his unprofessional and unconscionable contempt for the writers, director, designer, cast, crew, suppliers, and shooting schedule.