Charles Laughton’s humiliating case of mistaken identity aside, here are some more tales from the set of 1960’s Spartacus.
“I’M DIRECTING!”
Spartacus was directed by the legendary Stanley Kubrick, but despite being one of his most famous and well-received movies, Kubrick almost missed out on the director’s chair. Long before shooting began, when the film was first put into preproduction, Kirk Douglas (as both its star and its producer) had initially turned to David Lean to direct, following his earlier success with 1957’s The Bridge on the River Kwai. Lean, however, turned down the project—as did Laurence Olivier, who felt both directing and starring in the movie (as Roman general Crassus) would prove too much. Next, the project was handed over to Anthony Mann, but Douglas quickly dispatched Mann barely two weeks into the shoot. It was only then, with cameras already rolling, that the film was handed over to Kubrick to complete.
“I’M CINEMATOGRAPHER!”
Although he only signed on to direct the picture, Kubrick’s perfectionism and hands-on approach to filmmaking eventually led to him essentially taking over the role of cinematographer too. Russell Metty, who had been hired as the movie’s actual cinematographer, was ultimately left to sit much of the movie out while Kubrick all but did his job for him. Ironically, the movie went on to win the Oscar for Best Cinematography the following year, which Metty collected despite having much of his input on the film sidelined or taken over by Kubrick.
“I’M KIRK DOUGLAS!”
At the end of a particularly grueling week on set, an exhausted Kirk Douglas decided to spend the weekend relaxing at home in Palm Springs. A limousine and driver were called for, and Douglas—still wearing his Roman slave’s costume and grimy makeup—crawled into the back of the car and promptly fell asleep beneath a pile of blankets. Sometime later, the driver pulled into a gas station to refuel, and Douglas woke up and headed to the restroom to freshen up. The driver, meanwhile, returned to the car and, wrongly presuming Douglas to still be asleep on the back seat, drove off—leaving Kirk Douglas stranded in the middle of the California countryside, dressed in rags, and covered in grease and grime, trying vainly to convince the gas station’s owner that he was one of Hollywood’s greatest stars!
“I’M SPARTACUS!”
The famous scene in which countless men stand up to identify themselves as Spartacus builds to a crescendo of voices, all screaming the same two words: “I’m Spartacus!” The effect was created by recording all 76,000 college football fans that had turned up to a game between Notre Dame and Michigan State on October 17, 1959. The fans were also requested to shout, “Hail, Crassus!”, “On to Rome!”, and “Spartacus, Spartacus!” for use in several other crowd scenes in the movie, and were recorded making random shouts, screams, and noises to replicate an army in combat for use in the movie’s battle scenes.
“I’M OUTRAGED!”
To shine a light on the openness of Roman society to homosexuality, the movie originally featured a scene in a Roman bathhouse in which Spartacus attempts to seduce Antonius (played by Tony Curtis) by feeding him snails and oysters—foods widely considered aphrodisiacs. When the movie was first shown to test audiences in New York, this scene caused an outcry—and a Catholic censorship organization known as the Legion of Decency demanded the scene be remade, with Spartacus offering Antonius a decidedly less enticing plate of artichokes. Not wanting to compromise or reshoot the scene, Kubrick eventually cut all four minutes of it from the final movie.