CALIGULA

WITH A BIG BUDGET AND A HEAVYWEIGHT CAST, IT WAS SET TO BE A HUGE HOLLYWOOD EPIC. BEHIND THE SCENES, THOUGH, WAS A PRODUCER WHO HAD MORE X-RATED AMBITIONS. WITH A WHOLE NEW CUT ON THE WAY, WE REVISIT THE UTTERLY UNHINGED

WORDS ADAM SMITH

Sometime in the winter of 1976, in the smoky dining room of London’s Penthouse Club in Mayfair, Gore Vidal chatted, over the remains of lunch, with Malcolm McDowell. The meeting would have struck anyone — or at least those not distracted by the ‘Penthouse Pets’ dressed in sexy chambermaid uniforms, the magazine’s response to Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Bunnies — to be a significant one. Here were two of the cultural titans of the age, and the project they were discussing, a mooted big-budget Hollywood epic about the rise and downfall of the Roman Emperor Caligula, was, on paper at least, destined to be one of the cinematic events of the decade.

After the success of Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, McDowell was at the height of his stardom, primed to be one of the biggest British movie exports of the time. Vidal was one of the undisputed giants of the literary scene: the waspish author of Myra Breckinridge, famed for his scabrous journalism, liberal politics and epic literary feuds. “It was all quite unusual,” McDowell tells Empire of the strange encounter. “Gore had phoned me up and said he wanted to talk to me about something. It didn’t come via an agent or anything like that. He invited me to the Penthouse Club, which I didn’t even know existed.”

Ruling between 37 and 41 CE, Caligula had, among other eccentricities, declared himself a god. He had slept with his sister, tried to make his horse a consul and burned through vast sums of imperial cash in mere months. On one notable occasion, having run out of prisoners to throw to the beasts of the arena, he had the spectators thrown in instead, giving a new and literal meaning to the phrase “audience participation”. In 41 CE he was finally assassinated by a group of nobles. “I live!” were, quixotically enough, his last words. For the subsequent 2,000 years, his name has been an avatar of chaos, madness, betrayal, weird sex and financial ruin. He was made, then, for Hollywood.

“He proceeded to talk me into doing this movie,” McDowell remembers. “He was an extraordinary man, and he’d really researched it. He told me the story and I was quite fascinated. Then I asked him who was going to pay for it. He said, ‘Bob Guccione.’” Suddenly the unorthodox venue made sense. “I said, ‘The pornographer?’ And he said to me, ‘Malcolm, just think of him as one of the Warner brothers.’ I thought, ‘Okaaay...’