Excavating Hollywood - The BAS Library
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Excavating Hollywood

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 […]

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Footnotes

1.

See Melissa Barden Dowling, “Vestal Virgins: Chaste Keepers of the Flame,” AO 04:01.

2.

See “An Odyssey Debate: Were Living Children Sacrificed ot the Gods?” AO 03:06.

3.

See “Jesus in Italy,” BAR 29:01; and “Ancient Aramaic Lives!” in Jots &Tittles, BR 19:03.

Endnotes

1.

George MacDonald Fraser, The Hollywood History of the World: From One Million Years B.C. to Apocalypse Now (New York: Ballantine Books, 1989), pp. xv–xvi.

2.

Diodorus Siculus, vol. 10 (trans. Russel M. Geer), Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1962).

3.

Maria Wyke, Projecting the Past: Ancient Rome, Cinema and History (New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 120–122.

4.

Wyke, Projecting the Past, p. 93.

5.

See, for example, the entry “Christianity” in the Oxford Classical Dictionary, Third ed. (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1996), pp. 325–328, especially p. 327.

6.

Wyke, Projecting the Past, p. 139.

7.

Mervyn LeRoy and Dick Kleiner, Mervyn LeRoy: Take One (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1974), p. 179.

8.

LeRoy and Kleiner, Mervyn LeRoy, p. 173.

9.

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer publicity book Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (New York: Random House, 1959).

10.

Vincent LoBrutto, Stanley Kubrick: A Biography (New York: Donald I. Fine Books, 1997), pp. 172–173.

11.

Wyke, Projecting the Past, p. 187.

12.

Ron Magid, “Rebuilding Ancient Rome,” American Cinematographer, May 2000. [article on the Web at www.theasc.com/magazine/may00/prod/index.htm]