The Accidental Feminist: How Elizabeth Taylor Raised Our Consciousness and We Were Too Distracted by Her Beauty to Notice

Author:M. G. Lord [Lord, M. G.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General, United States, Biography & Autobiography, Biography, Film & Video, Performing Arts, History & Criticism, Entertainment & Performing Arts, Television, Motion Picture Actors and Actresses - United States, Taylor; Elizabeth, Motion Picture Actors and Actresses
ISBN: 9780802716699
Google: 2eJFuaEl_-8C
Amazon: 0802716695
Publisher: Walker & Company
Published: 2012-01-30T00:00:00+00:00

Cleopatra’s problems with narration and structure, however, stem from more than the feminine mystique. The film was made during a painful upheaval in the movie business. By 1960, the studio system was on its last legs. Yet it had to marshal its remaining strength to contend with an unforeseen competitor: television.

In the 1950s, television blindsided the movie industry—stealing its audience and threatening its primacy. Television was free and easily consumed. And shows like Playhouse 90 established it as a medium for intimate, idea-driven drama. To pry viewers out of their homes, movies had to offer what the small screen couldn’t: spectacle—splashy, Technicolor pageants.

Typically, telling a story and creating a spectacle are antithetical challenges. Story gains power from nuance, from getting deep inside the characters’ heads. Spectacle gains power from eye-popping effects, from actions that swirl around the characters.

Mankiewicz was a first-rate storyteller. In such classics as All About Eve, he created complex women characters whose clashes riveted audiences. In Suddenly, Last Summer, he coaxed a strong performance from Taylor. But for Cleopatra, this was not enough.

Life magazine’s 1961 feature on the making of Cleopatra reveals the lengths to which movies would go to upstage television. The piece fixates on color and spectacle: the “army of 4,000 being drilled to fight mighty land battles,” the 1,500 ships “for naval engagements,” the insane vibrancy of Cleopatra’s costumes. (Taylor sports a brassy funereal headdress on the magazine’s cover.) The article doesn’t mention television, but it doesn’t have to. Ads for the rival medium filled the magazine: Philco’s “Cool-Chassis,” Admiral’s “Automatic Picture Contrast Restoration,” Motorola’s “Golden Tube Sentry Unit.”

In principle, story and spectacle should be able to coexist in a film. But few directors balance them successfully. In Gone with the Wind, director Victor Fleming mixed the two, moving back and forth between an intimate love story and a sweeping mural. The contrast captured the magnitude of war: its vast fields of devastation; its tiny shattered lives.

Under different circumstances, Mankiewicz might have realized similar results with Cleopatra. But when he replaced Rouben Mamoulian as its director, the film was already over budget and behind schedule. Plus it had no script. Many people had been paid to write one—Sidney Buchman, Ranald MacDougall, Ben Hecht, among them. But no one could make it work. Mankiewicz had to write the script himself—on an insane deadline—while he directed the movie.

To do this, he filmed by day and wrote by night, battling exhaustion with amphetamine shots. If fatigue dulled his eye for nuance, this served him well. He couldn’t afford to fuss over subtleties. He had to command a navy. He had to bark orders via an interpreter at four thousand Italian extras pretending to be Roman soldiers. He couldn’t even be Cecil B. DeMille; he had to be General George S. Patton.

Not surprisingly, his characters sometimes took a backseat to their lavish world. Cleopatra’s grand entrance into Rome, for example, should have exposed her firestorm of conflicting emotions. She had reasons to feel triumphant: she controlled Egypt’s bounty and was the mother of Julius Caesar’s only son.

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