Eavesdropping At The Movies

One of cinema's most infamous disasters, Caligula was conceived by producer Bob Guccione, the founder of Penthouse magazine, as an explicit, expensively-made adult film, about the rise and fall of the titular Roman emperor. In pursuing this, Guccione removed director Tinto Brass during post-production, so that he could have hardcore pornography shot and inserted into the film. On its release in 1979, Caligula was critically savaged on both moral and cinematic grounds, confiscated by police in some countries, banned in others, and the cause of lines that stretched around the block. It has remained an artifact of cult interest ever since, and the subject of occasional attempts to reconstruct it in a form that reflects something approaching its creators' original visions - to whatever extent their visions agreed with each other. Caligula: The Ultimate Cut is the most thorough of these reconstructions by far, benefitting from the rediscovery of 96 hours of original material, which had been rushed out of Italy an