Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor spent as much as US$194,800 on makeup and decoration during the filming, including 65 costumes, one of which was made of 24-karat gold cloth.
At the request of Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor, the film was shot using the Todd-AO system. The inventor of the Todd system, Michael Todd, was Taylor’s third husband. He unfortunately suffered a plane crash in New Mexico in 1958. She was killed in the accident, and Taylor became the beneficiary of this invention of course, so obviously she had another income in addition to the salary in the film.
Marlon Brando, who had collaborated with Joseph Leo Mankiewicz in " Gaius Julius Caesar ", was originally one of the candidates to play Anthony, but due to the schedule conflict with the "Rebel on Blood" he participated in at the time, he had to give up.
"Cleopatra" was a product of the Hollywood epic trend at the time. MGM's 1959 "Benxu" won eleven Oscar awards enough to make 20th Century Fox have high hopes for "Cleopatra". In order to attract attention, they abandoned the originally planned heroine Joan Collins and switched to Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor, who was well-known at the time, and publicly declared that they would be given a remuneration of one million dollars. This was an astronomical figure at the time, but it proved later. , The producer paid a heavy price for this choice.
The film almost built a city of Rome, and the final cost of the film was as high as 44 million US dollars, which is equivalent to 400 million US dollars in 2010.
The grand scene where Cleopatra entered Rome was the highlight of the film, but because of lighting problems, the shooting progress of this scene was delayed for several months. When filming of this scene was finally possible, it was discovered that the little actor who was going to play Cleopatra's son had grown much taller and had to be replaced temporarily.
In order to make an epic masterpiece, the producer specially arranged for the gold medal producer Walter Wagner to be the producer of the film, but Walter encountered a career in Waterloo, and this failure even made him completely bid farewell to the field of film production.
When the 20th Century Fox Company planned to shoot the epic masterpiece "Cleopatra" in 1959, they were confident in trying to create another epic masterpiece, but after the official shooting in 1960, the entire filming process until the final box office Beyond their original imagination. In the end, in 3 years, 20th Century Fox created a topical work, but Fox did not get any benefit from it, and even almost went bankrupt.
The scandal between Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor and the male protagonist Richard Burton brought a certain degree of trouble to the filming. During the shooting, Burton and Taylor had faked the act, and gradually became emotional, and there was a lot of trouble. Afterwards, some people thought that this It was a scandal deliberately released by Fox in the 20th century, but the audience showed a certain degree of dislike for it, so much so that some people believed that this had a huge negative effect on the subsequent movie box office.
After the film was released, the box office failed miserably and was criticized by audiences and film critics. As for the Oscars, the film received nine final nominations that year, but most of them were non-performance nominations. Taylor, who was high hopes, didn't get any results, but the lower-key Rex Harrison won the best actor during the filming process. Nominated, the final results of 20th Century Fox are also 4 Oscar awards such as makeup and visual effects, which are obviously not the same as the results of "Ben Xu".
In the 20th century, Fox almost went bankrupt due to the huge investment in "Cleopatra" and the small income, and had to sell 263 acres of location. After that, Zanuk had to lead the 20th Century Fox Company to stabilize its position through low-cost popular movies. In 1965, the cost of "The Sound of Music" was 8.2 million US dollars and won a box office of 150 million US dollars to completely reverse the financial predicament.
When the film was first released, the box office was only more than 20 million U.S. dollars, which was less than half of the investment in the film. In order to recover the cost, Fox had re-screened it many times. By 2004, the box office finally accumulated to more than 50 million.
This is the first time Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor and Richard Burton have co-produced a film. Since then, they have co-produced eleven films including the film and started their love-hate lover career. The two married twice and divorced twice.
