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Caligula received its world première at private screenings during the May 1979 Cannes trade festival (as distinct from the concurrent Cannes Film Festival):
So now we know precisely how many private screenings there were, but we don’t know exactly when or where they all occurred. A few months later the weekly edition of Variety said something even more enticing:
Of course, “Werb” did not see the version presented Cannes.
Nobody from Variety saw it at Cannes or was permitted to see it at Cannes.
By the end of 1978 Caligula was pretty much in the form in which we now have it, about 156 minutes.
So what’s all this about a 210-minute version screened half a year later?
A claim of 210 minutes seems a bit extreme.
Were, perhaps, the numerous deleted scenes,
many of whose publicity stills were published in the May 1980 Penthouse and elsewhere,
put back in to the print screened at Cannes?
That would seem to be a reasonable assumption, yet that is certainly NOT what happened.
Nonetheless, this unsubstantiated passing reference has gone into film history,
and “sources” from the
Certain that he was mistaken, I wrote to him, and he replied as follows:
So the claim of “over 210 minutes” is here modified to “well over three hours”
with the proviso that the person making the claim was inebriated both times he saw it.
What the “visceral violence... So for the sake of argument, let us assume that Noel is being honest, if perhaps mistaken in his recall of events that took place years ago while he was under the influence. We can then turn to another source that would seem to confirm Noel’s recollections. Check out the interview with a fellow to whom the Caligula SuperSite provides the protective pseudonym of Lucky Fellows. He appeared in Guccione’s inserts, and states:
Assuming that this extra was being honest, it is clear that he was reaching into the recesses of 20+ years of his memory to recollect that the Cannes edition was “three and a half hours long.” But in those 20+ years the “three and a half hours” claim had been published far and wide, and could well have influenced his memory. For the sake of argument, let us assume, for the moment, that there actually was a 210-minute version or something like it. If there was, my basic question remains unanswered: What was in that extra hour? Could it have been the Temple of Jupiter? The Consulship of Incitatus? More of Tiberius’s torture ward? More of Tiberius’s sex slaves? Caligula’s massage? Caligula’s destruction of his own statues? Some other long-missing sequences? The answer is definitive: NO NO NO NO NO NO NO! The negatives of those scenes had never been edited, the music had never been composed, the dialogue had never been revoiced. Those sequences were NEVER shown prior to late 2007, when excerpts from work prints and rough cuts and raw footage were allowed out of the vaults. Besides, the edited movie NEVER ran much over two and a half hours. So what on earth would this have been? A padded version, maybe, with another 54 minutes of porn, shot by Guccione, spliced into a print of the film? To say the very least, that does not seem at all likely. Considering all the information above, it would seem reasonable to conclude that the longest version of Caligula ever screened anywhere was 156 minutes, and that any claims of longer editions are so suspect that they should be dismissed. Indeed, I am quite certain that the Cannes version was the same one that you and I saw in the cinemas in 1980 — no longer, no shorter, no different in any way. BUT... along comes some different information, which we were not expecting, and it comes from a reliable source. Before we look at what this reliable source said, let us look at what his nemesis said in a UPI wire story by Kenneth R Clark:
So... Malcolm had been clamoring to get a screening prior to release, and Bob Guccione continued to refuse as late as late January 1980. The UPI wire story above probably appeared on the Teletype on Monday or Tuesday, 28 or 29 January 1980. So now, with that background, let’s look at some interviews given by Malcolm McDowell over the following year or so:
So far it looks like he’s exaggerating, to say the least, because there are only about six minutes of hardcore in the movie, and the editors in London never — NEVER! — included more than about six minutes of hardcore in any copy of the film, no matter how rough or early or preliminary. But when did he catch this “private showing”? Certainly after about 28 January 1980, and certainly before 7 April 1980. There had been private trade screenings beginning in November 1978 (an unfinished print in London), and then in Cannes (May 1979), and here and there in the US (beginning in May 1979?). So Malcolm saw a PRIVATE showing of the movie as early as the tail end of January, possibly in February, possibly in March, or in the first few days of April at the very latest. Would there have been private screenings between January and early April 1980? Apparently so. By January 1980 the film had already landed a distributor, Analysis Film Releasing Corporation, and once that happened, exhibitors would want to take a look before booking the film for extended runs. Further, international distributors would also want to take a look, and their deputies were stationed in and around Hollywood. At least we now know from this quote a detail we never had before: McDowell’s agent, David Wardlow, accompanied him. But then years later McDowell added a statement and changed his story, and with this the pieces begin to come together:
What on earth does that mean? There were no sneak previews. Bob Guccione was adamant about never sneak-previewing the film and about never permitting press screenings. So as we surmised above, McDowell must have crashed a private trade screening (for distributors, exhibitors, and select VIPs). The Penthouse people would certainly have been gatekeepers at all the trade screenings, and they certainly would have wanted to keep a gate-crasher out. Guccione would also have been at most or all of the trade screenings as well. This begins to make some sense! But how did the “twenty minutes of porn” suddenly become “two 20-minute segments of hard-core porn”? Simple. Ten years had passed, and McDowell’s memory was acting up. He remembered that there were two porn sequences, and he remembered something about twenty minutes. He merely conflated the two memories. Either that or he was misquoted. Even more confusing is his statement that the “second time around they had taken out the porn and it was much better.”
What was this second time around?
Was he talking about the
Now at last we can begin to understand. He had gate-crashed a private trade screening in the first few months of 1980 in Hollywood, but he could not possibly have “anted up at the boxoffice” when he saw it that day, because boxoffices are closed for private trade screenings. Admission to trade screenings is free but not open to the public. So what was this about anting up at the boxoffice to purchase a ticket? He “anted up at the boxoffice” when he went to see a public screening the “second time around,” and the “second time around,” as we can see from the date of the article, was in the first part of 1980, prior to 7 April 1980. That’s when “they had taken out the porn and it was much better,” though still not at all good, if we are to judge from his other statements. Caligula had not yet opened in Hollywood by 7 April 1980. Its first public screening in Hollywood was on 18 April 1980 at the Holly Theatre. So that means that there were only three cinemas anywhere in the world where McDowell could have seen a public screening of the movie: The Penthouse East in Manhattan NY, the Lumiere in San Francisco CA, or the Georgetown in Washington DC. Considering that he and Mary Steenburgen were living in an apartment in NYC in 1980 because he was soon to appear off-Broadway in Look Back in Anger (previews began Friday, 6 June 1980, opened Thursday, 19 June 1980, ran through Sunday, 12 October 1980), he probably saw the movie at the Penthouse East, though that is by no means certain.
If that reconstruction of events is correct, and I don’t see any way around it, that means that Guccione, who was licensing a cinema and who could therefore have shown anything he pleased, chose to run the 156-minute final cut, while he was still attempting to entice domestic exhibitors and international distributors with a padded edition. No, that doesn’t make any sense at all. But then, nothing about Caligula makes any sense. We need to wonder about something else too. McDowell saw a private trade screening and was horrified by it. Why then, shortly afterwards, would he stand in line and purchase a ticket for a public screening? The most likely reason is that, at the trade screening, some Penthouse representative explained to the exhibitors and distributors in attendance that what they were about to see was a version somewhat different, somewhat stronger than the one currently being shown to the public. Admittedly, that’s just my guess, but it’s an educated guess and a reasonable one. That’s precisely the sort of introduction that would induce McDowell to see for himself precisely what those differences were. Let’s do some arithmetic.
The usual 156-minute version has about six minutes of porn.
If McDowell saw 20 minutes, and if the print was like the usual one in every other way, then it ran about 170 minutes.
If McDowell’s claim is, in essence, correct, then in the first part of 1980 there was a trade-show print
with an extra 15 minutes or so of the lesbian tryst and the Imperial Brothel.
That would mean that after editing had been completed, and after the final 156-minute version settled upon,
Guccione would have hired a fly-by-night editor to go to Joinville-le-Pont to run off a padded print with extra materials.
Since the dialogue and music and effects tracks had never been recorded for a padded version,
in all likelihood the soundtrack was artifically lengthened for the extended sequences.
That would not have been at all difficult.
The lesbian tryst had no sound to speak of,
and the ominous music could easily have been extended by repeating passages;
and as for the Imperial Brothel,
it would have been easy to We should be interested to discover that, as a matter of fact, there was indeed a claim of “170 minutes,” though by itself it doesn’t mean anything. Chicago critic Roger Ebert was perhaps the first person to publish a claim of such a running time. But he did not see the entire film, and so he could not have timed it. He was relying on other information. But what other information? The publicity materials he had been supplied with gave the running time as 156 minutes. So why he provided a running time of 170 minutes is anybody’s guess. Perhaps this was a typographical error. Perhaps Ebert was so depressed that he neglected to double-check his sources. Or perhaps this was a carry-over of some information from the trade screenings. Who knows? For whatever it’s worth, here it is:
Thanks to researcher extraordinaire Tom Ryerson of the Caligula SuperSite, we discover a repeat of Ebert’s claim in The [Vancouver] Province of Monday, 4 May 1981:
Now that doesn’t mean anything either. It is the most common thing in the world for running times to be misquoted, and this anonymous reporter may well have just cribbed his info from Ebert’s review. But Tom found more than just this. Take a look at The Vancouver Sun of Wednesday, 24 June 1981. I highlighted the most interesting paragraph:
That begins to make sense of Ebert’s claim as well as of The Province’s claim, doesn’t it? It also makes sense of McDowell’s claim of “twenty minutes” of porn, most of which was removed by the time he stood in line and paid for a ticket. Yes? The problem, of course, is that making sense of contradictory claims is not sufficient. We need physical evidence, and we do not have any. NOW FOR INSANITY TIME. The only known review of the print shown at the Cannes Trade Festival appeared in a British skin mag called Fiesta. The Cannes screenings were strictly off-limits to the press, and so we have to wonder how Fiesta journalist Bobby Dupea gained admission. Or did he gain admission? I suspect he was simply playing a trick on us. Something is wrong here, and you probably didn’t catch on. Don’t feel embarrassed about that, because nobody caught on. “Bobby Dupea” was the name of Jack Nicholson’s character in Five Easy Pieces, an upper-class concert pianist who chose to make a career of working with lower-classmen on an oil rig. “Bobby Dupea” is also the stage-name of current young actor/rock star/heartthrob Robert Thomas-Pattinson, who idolizes Nicholson. So I’m certain that Fiesta’s “Bobby Dupea” was a nom de plume masking the identity of someone in the film-distribution business — surely someone on the “respectable” side of the business who pseudonymously moonlighted for the “adult” side. Essentially, this “Bobby Dupea” seems to have been a double-agent of sorts, reporting on events to which journalists were not permitted. Interesting, yes? Do any of you know his real identity? (Definitely a his, not a her.) Do any of you know how to get in touch with him? Anyway, this “Bobby Dupea” wrote a scathing attack on censorship, condemning the BBFC for demanding cuts and condemning Guccione twice as much for going along with them. He compared the British release version with the “original” that he claimed to have seen at Cannes, and which he assumed — assumed — was identical to the edition released in the US.
Mr “Dupea” made a further claim, which I find puzzling, and which makes his other claims a little less easily acceptable: “I first saw the film when [Guccione] first unveiled it to the world during the Cannes festival of 1979. I’ve also seen the version he’s running in Paris which is, give or take the odd snippet, the same as is now unleashed upon Britain.” Now, unlike Mr “Dupea,” I have not seen the original French version, but I have read the wildly conflicting stories about how much it was chopped (36 minutes, 25 minutes, 20 minutes, 14 minutes, 12 minutes). Despite all that, I know definitively that it was chopped by 20 minutes and ran a mere 136 minutes. (That was partly an economic decision, as violence would raise the VAT from 7% to 33%, but it was also a business decision, as Paul Rassam of AMLF calculated that a shorter version would allow four screenings per day rather than three.) The French version, in 1980, was 13 minutes shorter than the UK version, and that should count for more than “the odd snippet.”
What do we know about this “Bobby Dupea”?
Well, he knew that the uncredited Russell Lloyd had originally edited the film,
which is not something that the average critic could possibly have known.
He wrote that Vidal’s “script is better transferred to the screen than the over-campy
Hollywood version of his Myra Breckinridge book was.”
How could he possibly state such a thing unless he had read Vidal’s script?
So it seems he had enough insider contacts to get access to some draft of the screenplay.
Also, he had exclusive interview quotes with Tinto Brass.
Though he does not take credit for conducting the interview
(using the phrases “he says” and “he has stated”),
he either interviewed Tinto in person or hired a colleague to do so for him.
So he was definitely in “The Biz” aka “The Industry,” no doubt about it.
But did he see Caligula at Cannes?
Maybe. Here’s a quote that makes it seem he actually did see it at Cannes:
“Not an event I can easily forget. Friday May 11, 1979, was one helluva day:
Apocalypse Now in the morning... Caligula in the early evening!
You could go blind that way....”
But did he see a “close on three hour” print of Caligula?
How could he have?
If he saw it at Cannes, he saw a print just over two and a half hours, not nearly three hours.
If he did not see it at Cannes, then he certainly saw something!
What did he see?
Was he at the seedy London pub that Noel Bailey described?
Probably not.
Here’s another possibility — maybe.
An uncensored Caligula was scheduled for the London Film Festival,
which ran from How much can we rely on these third-hand sources, anyway?
Todd McCarthy, in “Penthouse’s $16 mil ‘Caligula’ Done but | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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In his commentary track on the Imperial Edition DVD, former Penthouse journalist Ernest Volkman claimed that the trade-show print, from the very first, had run four hours, with the extra 84 minutes consisting only of porno padding. He is certainly wrong about that. The first trade screenings in London in November 1978 were essentially the movie as we now have it, though minus most of the music and with a few scenes in a different order, and I doubt that Volkman was in attendance. If we are to give Volkman the benefit of the doubt, then he probably caught later trade screenings, and years afterwards he must have misrecalled what exactly he saw where and when, after which his imagination took over. His tale also took over the imagination of the satirical writers of the “China Daily Show,” as you can see by clicking here. It’s a joke, folks. Why do I have the premonition that this joke will spawn yet more wild claims? Yet none of the above correlates to the claim of a 210-minute print shown at Cannes in May 1979.
Variety is not known for inaccuracies, not even small inaccuracies.
Yes, the Variety people are human, and they make mistakes, and they have been fooled at times,
but a running time is not something about which Variety would normally make an error.
But as we see, not only did Variety make an error with Caligula’s running time,
Variety made TWO errors!
We just might have the missing piece of the puzzle, though.
Nobody from Variety was at the Cannes screening,
and so unbeknownst to its staff writers,
the Cannes screening included the preliminary version of Giancarlo Lui’s behind-the-scenes documentary.
That little bit of information was never known until documentation concerning the screening program was unearthed in the vaults.
(I would love to see that documentation with my own two eyes,
but, alas, those documents are still locked away in the vaults,
and I’m still locked away outside of the vaults.
I have to rely on the word of a trustworthy colleague who saw those documents.)
The release version of Lui’s documentary runs 61 minutes.
The complete version of Lui’s documentary ran 66 minutes,
but it has never been seen by the public and may no longer exist.
The So, if we are to trust Malcolm McDowell’s word (and I do), there was indeed a slightly longer padded version floating around in early 1980. Was this padded version shown at Cannes? Probably not. Did the 16mm bootleg that Noel Bailey saw derive from the padded version? Quite possibly, but maybe not. Can we find this padded version? I am not too sanguine about the prospect. There is now no trace of any version longer than the usual 156-minute version in the Penthouse vaults. The whereabouts of the trade-show print are unknown. The 16mm bootleg in all probability was a one-off print directly from a 35mm CRI. If there were more than one 16mm print, that would have required the creation of a 16mm dupe neg from a 35mm interpositive, and I doubt that an employee at the GTC-CTM Lab would have had the luxury of creating such while under the not-so-watchful eye of a supervisor. He would instead have quietly run off a 16mm pos from a 35mm CRI while working on other projects, and then developed it and breathed a sigh of relief at not having been caught. There is a possibility, of course, that further 16mm copies were derived from the 16mm bootleg, though they would have looked awful. The print that Noel saw has probably been chewed to oblivion by now, or it’s in the closet of a collector who doesn’t realize exactly what he has. If you have any clues as to where any work prints, longer prints, the trade print, the print sent to Customs, or the bootleg print might be found, please write to me! Many, many thanks! P.S. There are persistent claims that prints circulated showing an extra moment in the beauty-cream sequence, in which Ennia mimes pouring the goblet over her face. As far as I can tell, that is only a rumor, an urban myth that eventually saw its way into print in Tom Dewe Mathews’ Censored: A History of British Film Censorship (1994). Unless someone can find that footage and demonstrate that it ever existed, we would do best to ignore the story, as there is no good evidence for it anywhere. Also, a misprint has been replicated for far too long. Regardless of what Tom Milne published in the BFI’s Monthly Film Bulletin (47 no 563, December 1980, pp 232–233), the print that the BBFC received from Penthouse was exactly the same as the print shown in the US, 155 minutes and 52 seconds (14,029' and 7 frames). It did not run 160 minutes. The claim of 160 minutes was just a typographical error, nothing more. NOTE ADDED THURSDAY, 1 NOVEMBER 2007: Maarten van Druten of UltraGore Pictures is actively on the lookout for more Caligulan footage and for any trade prints that may have been different from the versions now available. He has even devoted a web page to this material, which is no longer in the Penthouse vaults. |
Click here to read what the performers had to say about Caligula
Click here to read excerpts from critical reviews of Caligula
Click here to read about the various video editions of Caligula
Click here for the cast and other credits
Click here to see our Caligula bibliography
Click here to see our continue to the next chapter (post-Caligula)
Well, to put it mildly, I was flabbergasted!
If this report is true, then the print must have been made by some employee
of the lab that had performed the negative cutting and was currently holding that edited negative,
