Excavating Hollywood

034

035

In 1937, Hollywood costume designer John Armstrong was working on I, Claudius, a film version of Robert Graves’s novel set in first-century A.D. Rome. Asked to design costumes for the Vestal Virgins, the six priestesses of the Roman hearth goddess Vesta, Armstrong meticulously researched the clothing they wore—long, modest veils and robes, as were appropriate to women who took a vow to remain chaste during their 30-year period of service.^a When Armstrong showed his designs to the film’s director, Josef von Sternberg, the latter exploded: “I want sixty [women] and I want them naked!” Armstrong obliged, creating new bikini-like costumes that, he later recalled, “looked lovely … but had nothing to do with Roman religion.”¹

Von Sternberg never finished shooting his I, Claudius (though an excellent version, with Derek Jacobi playing the emperor, was produced by the BBC in 1976). But Armstrong’s story captures the paradox of Hollywood’s relationship with ancient Rome. On the one hand, moviemakers 036have always been fascinated by the Roman world, lavishly recreating it in pictures like Ben-Hur (1959), Spartacus (1960) and, more recently, Ridley Scott’s Gladiator (2000). On the other hand, they sometimes go to absurd lengths—like dressing a Vestal Virgin in a bikini—to make ancient history appeal to a contemporary audience raised on sex. Often a story lifted from the annals of Roman history gives a filmmaker the freedom to break current taboos without offending viewers. After all, immoral behavior depicted on screen can be put down to “Roman decadence.”

Surprisingly, the creators of these movies are, for the most part, well versed in archaeology—today, John Armstrong’s labors are par for the course. Directors and designers pore over scholarly books in hopes of making their scenery and props as authentic as possible. Their concern for accuracy is highly selective, however. Inconvenient or unsavory historical facts tend simply to be brushed aside. Characters in Mervyn 037LeRoy’s Quo Vadis (1951), for example, play chess, although the game was not invented until the seventh century A.D., six hundred years after the time Quo Vadis is set. In The Fall of the Roman Empire, we see Rome’s most glorious temples and monuments, but not the cramped, squalid quarters in which most of her early residents lived.

The first great Roman film epics originated in Italy and were propagandistic in nature. When Italian troops invaded Ottoman provinces in Libya in 1911, filmmaker Giovanni Pasterone responded with The Fall of Troy (1910) and Cabiria (1914). Although the plots of these two films were ostensibly based on events that occurred during the Punic Wars between Rome and Carthage (264–146 B.C.), they were intended to drum up support for Italy’s modern military adventurism. Cabiria, the story of a Sicilian girl sold into slavery in Carthage during the Second Punic War (218–201 B.C.), celebrates Rome’s victory over decadent, disorganized Carthaginian forces.

One episode of the film is set in Carthage’s Temple of Moloch, where the girl Cabiria is about to be made a human sacrifice. The film’s exotic-looking temple—its exterior shaped like the gaping head of Moloch—038has no basis in archaeological fact. But the Bible refers to the sacrifice of children to Moloch just outside of Jerusalem (see, for example, 2 Kings 23:10), and classical sources mention the Carthaginian practice of child sacrifice. For example, the first-century B.C. historian Diodorus Siculus writes: “There was in their city [Carthage] a bronze image of Cronus, extending its hands, palms up and sloping toward the ground, so that each of the children when placed thereon rolled down and fell into a sort of gaping pit filled with fire” (Library of History 20.14.6).² Diodorus, like Cabiria, stretched the truth; although no great bronze flesh-eating gods have been found at Carthage, excavations in the 1970s by the American archaeologist Lawrence E. Stager revealed that hundreds of children were buried in a sacred precinct called the Tophet, giving support to the tradition that Carthaginians engaged in child sacrifice.^b

Cabiria had a grander set, a larger cast and more sophisticated photography than contemporaneous American movies, which were typically short films geared to the tastes of working-class audiences. In the years before World War I, however, American distributors began importing Italian “art” films and showing them in Broadway theaters. An early production of Quo Vadis (1912), by Enrico Guazzoni, interspersed action scenes with elaborate tableaux derived from famous historical paintings—in particular Pollice Verso by the late-19th-century French artist Jean-Léon Gérôme. Pollice Verso depicts a gladiator standing astride his fallen opponent in the arena. At right, the Vestal Virgins give the “thumbs down” sign, urging the gladiator to kill the man. A frame in Guazzoni’s film shows a gladiator astride his victim, saluting the emperor Nero in the royal box— nearly a mirror image of Gérôme’s painting.³

During the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, the historical spectacles of Cecil B. DeMille dominated the American box office. These movies, especially Cleopatra (1934) and Samson and Delilah (1949), 039capitalized on an unbeatable combination of sex, violence and stylish Oriental sets. With The Sign of the Cross (1932), the story of the debauched emperor Nero (54–68 A.D.) and his wife Poppaea, DeMille brought his trademark “sex, nudity, arson, homosexuality, lesbianism, mass murder and orgies”⁴ to ancient Rome, in a production starring Charles Laughton and Claudette Colbert. Laughton’s Nero, curly-haired and jowly, bears more than a passing resemblance to ancient depictions of the emperor. While his empress soaks in a tub of asses’ milk, Nero sums up DeMille’s vision of the Roman Empire with a leer: “The food, the wine, the delicious debauchery!”

For four decades, DeMille’s fleshy, sybaritic Rome prevailed in America’s film industry. But in the tense years following World War II, with the United States and the Soviet Union locked in a not-so-cold war, explicit political messages crept into historical pictures. The 1951 big-budget remake of Quo Vadis helped usher in a new age of ideological spectacles. Based on Henryk Sienkiewicz’s popular novel of 1896, Quo Vadis reveals the moral corruption of Nero’s Rome principally through the eyes of a fictional Christian maiden. Cheering the victory of Good (plucky Christian America) over Evil (the authoritarian and godless Nazi Germany and Soviet Union), the movie greatly exaggerates the threat posed by Christianity to Roman rule in the first century A.D. (In fact, Christian sects were only one irritant among many for the imperial government at that time. In the fourth century A.D., the empire became officially Christian.)⁵

Yet the creators of Quo Vadis tried to re-create the city of Rome as accurately and splendidly as possible. An Oxford-educated historical consultant hired by the studio filled four volumes with his notes on first-century A.D. Latin 040texts by Suetonius, Tacitus, Juvenal and others.⁶ At Rome’s Cinecittà studios, where Quo Vadis was filmed, a quarter-mile stretch of the Appian Way was rebuilt with the actual structures that once flanked it, all for a single parade sequence.⁷ Director Mervyn LeRoy learned firsthand the difficulty of orchestrating Roman circus games while shooting a scene in which Christians are sacrificed to a pack of lions. The lions on the set, LeRoy found, could not be enticed out of their enclosures by any means. He ended up having to fake the scene. “I still don’t know how the ancient Romans staged their bloody circuses,” he later admitted in his memoirs. “I am probably the only living soul who ever tried to coax a lion into eating somebody, and I tell you they just won’t do it.”⁸

Following close on the heels of Quo Vadis’s box-office success was 1959’s Ben-Hur, based on the 19th-century novel by General Lew Wallace. Although not overtly political, the film is steeped in Cold War anxieties. A patriotic Jewish nobleman named Judah Ben-Hur (Charlton Heston) clashes with his childhood friend Messala (Stephen Boyd), a Roman tribune who brutally suppresses Jewish nationalism in first-century A.D. Jerusalem. With the help of a certain carpenter from Nazareth (clearly Jesus, although we never see his face), Ben-Hur ultimately defeats the totalitarian rulers of his homeland.

First and foremost, Ben-Hur is a crowd-pleaser. Its climax is the chariot-race between Ben-Hur and Messala in the Jerusalem hippodrome—the most expensive set Hollywood had ever built, despite the fact that the precise location and appearance of the historical hippodrome are unkown. Yet in at least one detail Ben-Hur is scrupulously authentic: When director William Wyler needed a document written in Hebrew to be used as a prop, he contacted an expert at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, who copied onto a parchment an excerpt from the Dead Sea Scrolls thought to have been written in the first century A.D., the time when Ben-Hur is set.⁹

The co-mingling of Roman history and Cold War politics reached its zenith with Spartacus (1960). Producer and star Kirk Douglas recruited the young Stanley Kubrick to direct the film, based on the legend of a young Thracian slave who mounted a revolt against Roman power in 71 B.C. Since very little is known about the historical Spartacus, the moviemakers had the freedom to take the narrative in any direction they wanted. Spartacus’s designer, Saul Bass, read up on the Roman military before planning the film’s battle scene. The geometric arrangement of the Roman troops as they approach the rebels’ camp reflects tactics Julius Caesar used during his campaign in Gaul.¹⁰ Less faithful to the history books, however, is Kirk Douglas’s footwear—in one scene he sports very un-Roman white tennis shoes.

Spartacus represented a profound shift from previous historical films produced during the Cold War. The film used Spartacus’s unjust enslavement as a thinly veiled metaphor for America’s ongoing suppression of leftist dissidents. With a story line based on a novel by Howard Fast (a member of the Communist Party who had been imprisoned for refusing to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee, or HUAC) and a script written by Dalton Trumbo (one of the “Hollywood Ten” who appeared before the HUAC in 1947 and who was eventually blacklisted by the film industry), the very making of Spartacus was an act of political defiance.

Beginning in the early 1960s, the studio system entered a period of economic and artistic decline, losing audiences, money and influence to television. The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964) was long considered the last of Hollywood’s great ancient epics. A somber tale of imperial decay, the film reflects American cultural anxiety following the Kennedy assassination and the social upheavals of the mid-1960s. The first quarter of the film is set on the empire’s bleak northern frontier, dominated by a drab, imposing military fortress. Even when the action moves to Rome, The Fall of the Roman Empire “persistently burdens [its characters] with a sense of foreboding and doom,” writes classicist Maria Wyke.¹¹ Nonetheless, the studio hyped its eye-boggling Roman Forum set, which comprised 27 three-dimensional architectural structures, 350 statues and 1,000 bas-relief panels. Jaded audiences weren’t impressed, however, and The Fall of the Roman Empire hastened the decline of Hollywood’s fascination with ancient Rome.

After more than 30 years, computer technology has now breathed new life into the “sword and sandals” genre. Although Scott’s Gladiator (2000)—a near-remake of The Fall of the Roman Empire—takes many historical liberties (such as the tyrant Commodus’s death in the ring), it pays exquisite attention to its ancient setting. The episodes of the film set in Rome were shot on the island of Malta, within the ruins of limestone barracks built by the 041British in 1803. Gladiator’s designers were able to incorporate parts of the old fortress into their magnificent sets of the ancient city.¹²

The burden on the movie’s construction crew was partly relieved by computer-generated imagery. Instead of building a replica of the entire Colosseum, the crew erected one section of the arena at only half its original height (75 as opposed to 150 feet). The visual-effects team then “raised” the height of the section using computer-generated graphics. Also, a small portion of a Roman velarium—a canvas shade that protected spectators from the sun—was made using authentic materials and techniques, then scanned into a computer and copied so that it covered the “whole” arena.

042

Director Scott drew inspiration for Gladiator from a familiar source: Jean-Léon Gérôme’s Pollice Verso, the 19th-century painting that inspired so many earlier directors of Roman epics. “That image spoke to me of the Roman Empire in all its glory and wickedness,” Scott has said. Although it has no religious overtones, Gladiator does recycle the key element in Roman epic films of the 1950s and 1960s: a melodramatic plot based on a black-and-white conflict between good (represented in this case by the noble-minded gladiator Maximus) and evil (embodied in Commodus and his cronies). The film grossed nearly 043200 million dollars at the box office and won seven Oscars in 2000.

Has Gladiator revived the Roman film epic? Hollywood is certainly trying to copy its success. For his third directorial effort, Mel Gibson is currently re-creating Roman Jerusalem in The Passion, the story of Jesus’s final 12 hours on earth.^c (Pushing authenticity to its limit, The Passion’s characters will speak entirely in two dead languages, Latin and Aramaic—allegedly without subtitles.) Action star Vin Diesel is rumored to have taken the role of Hannibal in a forthcoming Punic War picture. Some filmmakers are traveling further back in time, to the heyday of classical Greece: Next year (2004) will see the release of Baz Luhrmann’s biography of Alexander the Great (starring Leonardo DiCaprio as the famed conqueror) and Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy, an adaptation of Homer’s Iliad with Brad Pitt as Achilles. How long will it be before Caesar crosses the Rubicon on movie screens around the world?

In 1937, Hollywood costume designer John Armstrong was working on I, Claudius, a film version of Robert Graves’s novel set in first-century A.D. Rome. Asked to design costumes for the Vestal Virgins, the six priestesses of the Roman hearth goddess Vesta, Armstrong meticulously researched the clothing they wore—long, modest veils and robes, as were appropriate to women who took a vow to remain chaste during their 30-year period of service.a When Armstrong showed his designs to the film’s director, Josef von Sternberg, the latter exploded: “I want sixty [women] and I want them naked!” Armstrong obliged, creating new […]