Hacker Cinema
Cleopatra
1963 · Film · 251 min
Directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz
Determined to hold on to the throne, Cleopatra seduces the Roman emperor Julius Caesar. When Caesar is murdered, she redirects her attentions to his general, Marc Antony, who vows to take power—but Caesar’s successor has other plans.
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12 comments on Hacker News
Recently, the movie "Cleopatra" was on TV. I was watching it with the sound off while I did other things.
There was one scene where Rich Burton and Elizabeth Taylor were arguing with each other. I watched their lips move, and somehow I heard Burton speaking his lines in his voice, and Taylor her lines in her voice. I had to do a double take to see that the sound was actually muted, but my mind re-created it anyway.
Er, do you have more details on that? From my understanding, Cleopatra (the 1963 film with Elizabeth Taylor) was filmed primarily in Italy and I don’t recall seeing any actual pyramids in it.
A major archaeology project went on in Mexico to excavate a pyramid.
Not a ziggurat-style Mayan temple.
An Egyptian pyramid. Built for the movie Cleopatra.
But films without CG are clearly superior and it’s not even in contention.
Lawrence of Arabia or Cleopatra alone have incredible fully live shot special effects which can not be easily replicated with CG and have aged like fine wine, unlike the trash early CG of the 80s and 90s which ruined otherwise great films like the last starfighter
That's a legit assessment, though I didn't feel as if De Laurentiis had in fact preserved the mythology. Again: far more time would have been required.
Checking, it appears that among the longest-running mainstream films of all time were Cleopatra (243 minutes, or 4h8m), Gone With the Wind (238 minutes, or 3h58m), Lawrence of Arabia (222 minutes), and Ben Hur (217 minutes).
Gandhi, which I recall being remarkable at the time and including an intermission, ran only 191 minutes, or 3h11m.
The full Lord of the Rings trilogy runs 9h17m.
<https://wegotthiscovered.com/movies/the-top-15-longest-hollywood-movies/>
> Why would anyone hire 20K people for a movie today?
To make better art. I've seen most of the films in that list are they're incredible films that stick with me and give me a sense of awe today. Watching 1000s of real life people in a scene just creates a sense of spectacle that is just not achievable with current CGI - the brain is just not fooled or impressed like it is when you watch those old films and see the amount of work and effort that must have gone into them. Sergio Morricone hired the Spanish army to build the cemetery at the end of The Good, The Bad and The Ugly and it took them several days to make. Nowadays it just takes someone a few clicks of a mouse but it fucking shows as well. Maybe with AI we'll actually get to a point where the brain can be tricked because it gets the lighting right, but at the minute it just doesn't and the films are worse because of it.
Just look at how incredible this location is:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QpVaoA8RfIk
It's even more awesome when you watch the film in it's totality because it builds up slowly, with bigger and bigger scenarios until it culminates with this.
And even in potato cam resolution, how impressive is this scene from Cleopatra:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_rLwuVP9Zw
They just hit different when they're actually real.
What's hilarious is that the execs still don't fucking see it. Christopher Nolan is one of the only ones out there still pushing for practical effects and he rakes in the money at the box office more consistently than just about any other director other than Cameron or Spielberg. It's because the films are actually worth watching. Before Oppenheimer, what was the last big film? Top Gun, which also used a ton of real life flight footage.
If I want to watch an animation, I'll watch an actual, awesome animation that takes full advantage of the medium like Into The Spiderverse or something from Studio Ghibli. If I want to watch a movie, I want to watch a real flesh and guts movie. Yet 99% of the stuff Hollywood puts out is some weird hybrid shit that is the worst of all worlds.
If Hollywood starts making better art, people will start going back to the movies. But they've got greedy. In any other industry, if you made a product, and you got 100% more for it than what it cost to produce you'd consider that a success. But these arseholes don't. They want 2x, 3x, 4x, 5x and they want to milk it for all it's worth and turn it into a fucking "universe" until it just collapses into a heap of shit and no-one even remembers why they liked the original.
It briefly shows one person saying that their grandma said it. There's no suggestion that any particular claim about Cleopatra's appearance is endorsed by the documentary as definitely true. In general, as I'm sure you're aware, it's misleading to say that a documentary "says X" if X isn't a claim that the documentary itself is endorsing.
> they could at least show a bust of her
Are you sure that they don't? This is just the trailer.
Perhaps they could use this racially ambitious 1862 depiction of Cleopatra by William Wetmore Story: https://smarthistory.org/seeing-america-2/william-wetmore-story-cleopatra/ (The 1860s were, of course, a notoriously 'woke' period of American history.)
> name a big up and coming director
Villeneuve! Bladerunner and Dune were both beautiful and highly stylized, and his work is enough to sell me on Cleopatra and Rama. Yes he's also in his 50s,but at least that means he's getting huge budgets to do what he wants now.
Wes Anderson is a similar story, though he's been doing it for longer because his films don't need as big a budget. Most people I know would go to see "the new Wes Anderson" sight unseen.
Although I haven't seen his earlier acclaimed work, Bong Joon-ho certainly does not seem to be at "the tail-end of his career".
I think the reason these directors are all in their 50s is that studios aren't willing to trust younger directors as much, but that just means there ARE up and coming directors in their 20s and 30s who are making low-budget short/art films, who have not yet found public appeal.
Expanding to TV series, Alex Hirsch is not technically a director but his name is a major stamp of quality assurance.
Edit: Ari Aster is 36. Jordan Peele is 43 but just beginning his directing career. Roger Eggers is 39. Damien Chazelle is 37. I'm using age here as a metric for being at an early point in their career.
Lawrence of Arabia is also one of the most expensive and most insanely massively epic films ever shot
Yes, Lawrence of Arabia was one of the most expensive at the time. The budget was $15 million, which adjusted for inflation would be $138 million today. The most expensive movie was released the same year, Mutiny on the Bounty, which had a budget of $17 million.
Cleopatra blew that away the following year, with an estimated cost of $35-44 million. Which goes to show you money doesn't buy you a great looking movie.
Elizabeth Taylor famously demanded and got a million dollars to star in "Cleopatra", the biggest contract ever at the time.
But it was darn well worth it. The movie was a huge hit, and a big reason for that was Taylor's star power.
I'm sure they could have gotten an endless supply of starlets who would have done it for free, or even paid to play the role. But that wouldn't have been a good business decision for the producers.
film maudit means a 'cursed film', ex the 1963 film Cleopatra which was massively expensive, had to be cut from six to three hours, and panned at the time. The article begins by setting out some boundaries for the term, details some 40s and 60s film maudit, and concludes that the www allows any film to find some audience to redeem it.
"Bigger", as in IMAX, did not come from Expo 67. It came from a long line of attempts to make really wide screen films. Cinerama (1952), Todd-AO (1953), Cinemascope (1953), etc. The really wide screen systems required custom theaters and very elaborate machinery, and never really caught on. Cinemascope requires just a lens adapter for an ordinary 35MM projector, and it went mainstream.
What to do with widescreen cinematically was a big problem in the early days. Roller coaster demo reels introduced Cinemascope [1] and Todd-AO.[2]. 3D was tried in the same time period. Theaters were trying to do things TV could not do. But how do you tell a story on a huge screen without the screen getting in the way of the story? Most of the time, the screen won. (See the ending of "How the West Was Won" (1962).[3]) Michael Anderson (Around the World in 80 Days), not Kroitor, seems to be the director who figured that out. You make big-budget spectacles, with a plot in glorious locations. Ben-Hur and Cleopatra followed.
That's still the problem with IMax. The giant screen wins over the story.
[1] https://player.vimeo.com/video/266574534
[2] https://youtu.be/MU76gdjr-Dk
[3] https://youtu.be/8t_qToyqiOU?t=76