Painstakingly edited from almost 100 unseen hours of director Tinto Brass’ original work discarded by financier Bob Guccione in his infamous 1980 pornographic film release critics dubbed ‘a moral holocaust,’ art historian Thomas Negovan and graphic artist Dave McKean’s new version includes a rotoscoped intro depicting the famed emperor’s life; now playing in theaters.
Though it’s been 44 years, English graphic artist Dave McKean can still recall the shock he experienced seeing Bob Guccione’s edit of Tinto Brass and Gore Vidal’s Caligula. It was supposed to be a work of stimulating dramatic art, a historic triumph in film about the rise and fall of controversial Roman emperor Gaius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, known as “Caligula.”
Instead, it was named by critics as “a moral holocaust.”
“It was absolutely terrible,” remembers McKean, recalling the excessive amount of unsimulated sex scenes, filmed by Penthouse Magazine founder Guccione, and extreme violence that replaced the majority of Malcolm McDowell and Helen Mirren’s serious performances. Guccione, who financed the film, completely neglected literary titan Vidal’s original script and discarded not only roughly 100 hours of director Brass’ footage, but also the director himself. What was promised to be a boundary-pushing, thought-provoking film combining Rome’s history of sexual exploits with cruel, corrupt ruling and strained mental health, unbeknownst to the filmmakers, in Guccione’s hands became a violent, pornographic film that drew picket lines outside theaters, Vidal suing to have his name removed, and both the editor and the composer refusing to be named in the credits.
“But I was vaguely curious about it as well,” McKean admits of the infamous cinematic slaughter. “It seemed like such an odd project. The sets were amazing, and the costumes were extraordinary. There was so much amazing stuff there, and there was an amazing cast list with Peter O’Toole, Helen Mirren, and Malcolm McDowell. These actors are incredible, and I thought they must have known, or had a feeling, that they were working on something reasonably worthwhile. I mean, they couldn't have gone to work every morning to do what we were watching on screen, right? I thought, if someone excavated through the footage, there must be something better than what got released. But when they did recut versions, it just seemed to get worse. And then that was it. It was one of those lost, hopeless, dreadful film car crash stories, until my friend [art historian] Thomas Negovan gave me a call to see if I wanted to work on its restoration and create an animated prologue for the film’s opening.”
Now showing in select theaters across the United States after having debuted at the Cannes Film Festival, Caligula: The Ultimate Cut is a fully reimagined and extensive reconstruction of Gore Vidal’s original script by Negovan. The restored film, distributed by Drafthouse Films, Sunshine Mesa Films and Vitagraph Films, was created through the excavated film footage uncovered in the archives of Penthouse Films International. More than 90 hours of original camera footage was uncovered, location audio was extensively restored, and McKean was recruited to create a beautifully rotoscoped animated prologue of the emperor’s past to help create a new Caligula composed entirely of unseen footage.
“These 96 hours of rushes were about a month away from being in a landfill because they were in a lock-up in Burbank that nobody had tracked, and the new owners of the Penthouse holdings didn't know about it,” says McKean. “But a student in Italy raised the alarm and Tom (Thomas) swooped in to save it. This project has been so close to oblivion so many times and I was thrilled to be part of Tom’s mission to rescue it.”
McKean was responsible for creating an animated prologue that, though part of Vidal’s initial vision for the film, never got made. Vidal had imagined the prologue as a dream sequence that would explain Caligula’s fragile state of mind and eerie family’s history.
According to historical records, Gaius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, third emperor of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, was Roman emperor from AD 37 until his assassination in AD 41. He had been named after Gaius Julius Caesar, but his father Germanicus' soldiers affectionately nicknamed Gaius "Caligula" or “Little boots” when he was 7 years old, after the “caligae” military boots worn when he accompanied his father, a Roman war hero, on military campaigns.
When Germanicus died in 19 AD under mysterious and unknown circumstances, Caligula’s mother returned with her six children to Rome, where she soon engaged in a bitter feud with Emperor Tiberius, Germanicus' biological uncle and adoptive father, who was suspected of killing Germanicus in an effort to further his own ambitions. The conflict eventually led to the equally mysterious deaths of Caligula’s mother and siblings; Caligula and his sister, the sole survivors, went off to live with Tiberius. When Tiberius died in 37 AD, Caligula succeeded him as emperor at the age of 24. Though Caligula’s rule started out well enough, the young emperor is thought by historians to have become increasingly cruel, sadistic and overall, quite mad during his time as emperor.
Caligula’s madness is often attributed, understandably, to the slaughter of his family and time thereafter spent living with Emperor Tiberius. This descent into insanity is what served as the foundation for the animated night terror McKean created.
“The point of the prologue was to lay in several of the themes that you'd be seeing over next three hours, and to show that, like all of us, Caligula was a child at some point and had this bizarre upbringing that turned him into what we see on screen,” notes McKean. “Obviously, the animation had to look like it came from the 70s. But I’ve also been doing a lot of paintings inspired by silent films and Tom has done a couple gallery shows, one in Chicago and one in LA, using those paintings. I think the sort of darkly shadowed German expressionist dream-like and slightly nightmarish perspective in those paintings was the work that Tom immediately saw as being appropriate for this film.”
Drawn in a simplistic, sketch style that leans heavily into line work with only brown, black, and white colored lines to distinguish features of the body and face, Dave used 2D rotoscoping over a hired dancer to capture young Caligula’s “death dance” overlayed on top of an orange-gold background that’s highly textured to look like papyrus paper. This is only the first part of the prologue, and the sequence reflects the dance that McDowell’s adult Caligula performs at the end of the film just before he and his family are murdered.
“Tom always thought the dream sequence should be a series of still images but it would be hard to get across the hard, staccato dance Caligula does in the film and to have it very clearly echo what you would later see Malcolm do if it didn't actually physically move as animation,” shares McKean, who also wrote the music for the prologue, enlisting a cellist friend to play the composition. “Tom and I butted heads on that for a while, and then I did some samples of how I could make it from pick-up shot footage and turn that into a sort of painterly, animated feel. The 70s was pre-digital so nothing could look too slick and polished. Tom wasn’t totally convinced to animate the whole thing, but we compromised by agreeing to fully animate the dance.”
He adds, “Marshall Brickman, Woody Allen’s co-writer, used to say that every morning on a film set a truck full of fresh compromises pulls up. The best way of working is just to roll with it and respond to whatever comes along.”
This was also the first time in over 30 years that McKean had worked with rotoscoping; the only other time was when he was working on a student film in art school.
“Rotoscoping is a very time-consuming technique,” notes McKean. “You spend hours drawing just to see two seconds of animation. But then you see it works and that’s always been one of the great pleasures of animation, seeing these things come to life.”
When young Caligula concludes his dance, the remainder of the prologue consists of animatic-style images that are mostly still but have small, slow movements. However, the animatic section – which appears to be set at Germanicus’ funeral - does include some rotoscoped animation of hooded figures carrying torches in Germanicus’ honor, whispering of murder and foul plots that led to Germanicus’ death. Animated crows caw as the prologue focuses on the face of Tiberius, which morphs from that of a mourning father to a screaming, decaying old man. In the background, crows continue to caw while a woman accuses Tiberius of killing Germanicus. Suddenly a still image of a young Caligula’s face comes up close to the screen, also wide-mouthed, screaming, and mirroring Tiberius’ madness.
“A short film that I always loved is The Tell-Tale Heart, made by Warner Bros. in the 50s,” shares McKean. “It's incredibly beautiful, but it is basically still images with a camera panning over them, with just little bits of motion and little bits of light moving over surfaces. That was my key, really. Moving pictures is always a challenge but it can really set the tone and atmosphere.”
The funeral sequence, both beautiful and frightening, is filled with dark hues of blue and black, in haunting contrast to the warm brown and gold hues of the first part of the prologue. But the textures and jagged shape language are similar, reminiscent of Roman mosaics and pottery.
“I worked on a version that started with the images on the sides of pots,” explains McKean. “I did a fair bit of work developing it before it ended up being rather stripped down and simpler. But certainly, mosaics and banners and whatever emblems I could get access to gave me some inspiration.”
Caligula: The Ultimate Cut has been in theaters since Friday, August 16, and McKean says the response has been overwhelming, with completely packed houses and sold-out showtimes.
“I have not worked on anything like this before, and I don't think there has been anything like this before in cinema,” he notes. “There have been, of course, restoration projects before. Many. And there have been re-cuts and reversions. But there's never been a film that has already been released theatrically and then a new version - made entirely from the rushes and unseen footage without using a single frame from the original - that has been recreated and then theatrically released again.”
The artist even went so far as to say the re-release has been a “healing experience.”
“The sheer dread of seeing the film again initially took over when Tom first sent me a large chunk of footage that he'd been working on with his editors,” recalls McKean. “But it was a pleasure to see such extraordinary material in there and a proper performance. Yes, okay, the madness of Caligula is the theme of the film, and it's foreshadowed in the opening sequence, but it does change. He does change. He is a real person, beginning with fears and trying to cope with this extraordinary situation that he finds himself in. And he does actually cross the border of sanity in the film, rather than starting out nuts and ending nuts. In the original, the whole thing made no sense at all. There was no real development of character. But Malcolm McDowell obviously put a lot of thought and time into how to play this madness and how it would develop, and how you see it in Caligula’s eyes. It was great to finally be able to see all that.”
For those whose local theaters aren’t showing the film, McKean says there are exciting things to come. “I think Tom and the team are planning follow-up releases in other cinemas sometime soon,” he shares. “So, I would tell people to look out for that.”
Victoria Davis is a full-time, freelance journalist and part-time Otaku with an affinity for all things anime. She's reported on numerous stories from activist news to entertainment. Find more about her work at victoriadavisdepiction.com.
