Wednesday 1 April 2020

penthouse playset

With some ninety-six hours of unused footage to draw from, a group of editors and archivists under the direction of E. Elias Merhiga are planning to produce a restored version of the critically panned, arguably unfilmable 1980 erotic historical drama Caligula that is truer to the original vision of author Gore Vidal, director Tinto Brass and producer adult magazine mogul Bob Guccione.
Though overlapping in some regards and quite distinct in other, this film—mostly rumours thereof rather, I think—occupies the same sort of place in my mind as another soap opera about Roman society that I’ve been enjoying recently. Among the scenes that ended up on the cutting room floor were these incredulous and wildly inappropriate cross-promotional line of action figures—riding off the marketing success of Star Wars, a film with half the budget of Caligula, pitched to Guccione by a company called Cinco Toys—from Adult Swim fame. More to explore at the links above.