Humor/Entertainment
The Greatest Stories Never Told
A Legendary Hollywood icon shares what really went on behind the scenes while filming The Ten Commandments, Ben Hur, The Sound of Music, and Titanic
Back in the fall of 1954 when Charlton Heston first came to me with an idea for a religious adventure film, I thought he was nuts. After all, I was only five years old at the time and had just started my first year at the prestigious Léman Manhattan Preparatory School.
“Listen, Chuckie.” That’s what he liked to be called back then. “I don’t know the first thing about epic religious dramas. And besides, I just signed a new deal with Isaac Himmelman over at Paramount for Killer Tomatoes From Mars. Not to mention my studies. My parents are dropping over fifty-grand a year and have big plans to get me into Harvard.” But, he twisted my arm and finally talked me into working with him.
The Ten Commandments (1956)
Shooting The Ten Commandments was the most difficult, yet rewarding experience of my long, successful film career. Originally, they wanted to shoot it as a musical-comedy centered around the allure of Las Vegas, but when Oscar Hammerstein got sent to prison for drug trafficking, we had to take an entirely different approach.
On top of everything else, were the never-ending issues with the actors. I had to break up a torrid, three-way homosexual affair between Charlton Heston, Yul Brynner, and Vincent Price. Walter Brennan couldn’t keep his hands off Yvonne De Carlo, so we replaced him with John Carradine who was fresh off a 28-day stint at Hazelden’s alcohol and drug rehabilitation center. But it wasn’t all bad. To make sure I didn’t fall behind in my studies, Edward G. Robinson agreed to tutor me in the afternoons, even though he only spoke Yiddish.
There were a number of settings in the Bible that were impossible to recreate on film. For instance, when Moses is challenged by the Pharaoh’s intractable hold over his people, he besets them with divine plagues like hot hailstorms, endless darkness, and killing all first-born male children. I wasn’t happy with any of them. They certainly wouldn’t work in a modern film of this magnitude. So, I swapped them for hiccups, projectile diarrhea, and Ethel Merman singing her Broadway show tunes.
In the Bible, the Pharaoh ordered Moses to “Take your people, your cattle, your God and your pestilence and get the hell out of here,” but changed his mind and ended up chasing the former slaves to the shores of the Red Sea.
We were disappointed when the location we originally scouted for the film turned out to be the Sandals Montego Bay Resort, swarming with pale-skinned tourists from Cleveland, Grand Rapids, and Le Claire, Iowa. But, through the miracle of technology and camera filters, we were able to use all of them as brown-skinned extras, and filmed Moses parting the lap pool.
Of course, the pivotal scene occurs when Moses descends Mount Sinai with two stone tablets embossed with the ten commandments. Because of Heston’s inflamed tennis elbow, we couldn’t use real stone and had to replace them with ¾ inch plywood painted with a lovely beige pastel. Problems ensued when he attempted to hurl them down on the sinning Hebrews. Instead of crashing down on the crowd, the wind picked them up and whipped them halfway to Cairo. It took twenty-three takes to get the shot right.
The good news is The Ten Commandments went on to sell an estimated 131 million tickets during its run, but the production company went into Chapter 11 for more than $1.18 billion at the U.S. box office, until Netflix finally bailed them out. And we all came back with great tans.
Ben-Hur (1959)
Three years after wrapping up work on The Ten Commandments, Cecil B. DeMille called me while I was noshing with Willie Wyler at The Brown Derby. He asked me if I was interested in doing a musical comedy remake of the 1925 silent film Ben-Hur with Desi Arnaz in the lead role. I hesitated because Desi and I had a falling out after he caught me in bed with his old lady, Lucille. But ultimately we were able to put that aside and I leaped at the chance to work with hot, sweaty horses again.
In the original film, Judah Ben-Hur was a wealthy Jewish prince living in a high-rise condo building in Jerusalem, with his mother, Miriam, and his sisters, Esther, Shakked, and Chasidah Kandelcukier. Personally, I thought it would look more authentic and save us money if we filmed it in Bensonhurst, New Jersey, but the studio balked.
Besides Desi Arnaz, I locked in Andy Griffith, Cary Grant, Jerry Lewis, and Jimmy Durante as the villainous Massala. When I discovered that none of them knew how to tap dance in sand, I was forced to re-write the entire script as a compelling religious adventure story, and hire a bunch of third-rate actors that included Chuckie Heston, Hugh Griffith (the older brother of Andy), Sam Jaffe, and Mickey Rooney as the evil rapper, “Lil Jesus.”
Only three members of the large cast could speak English. The rest spoke over 140 different languages and dialects, including Chalcatongo, Diegueño, and three variations of Native American Choctaw. Being fluent in all of them, I had to act as the production’s principal translator.
I personally read with more than thirty actresses vying for the role of Esther, including Carol Channing, Joan Rivers, and Phyllis Diller, but eventually settled on a big-breasted Israeli actress named Tatiana Federman, a relative newcomer to the film industry.
The nine-minute chariot race remains the centerpiece of the film and is one of the cinema’s most famous action sequences. At the time, the score I composed was the longest ever written for a film until I wrote the music for the infamous fight scene in Amra Ekta Cinema Banabo in 2019, which still stands at twenty-one hours and thirty-nine minutes.
While the budget for Ben-Hur was initially $7 million, when adjusted for inflation, it ended up being over $135 million in today’s dollars. But it was all worth it. At the 1960 Academy Award ceremonies, Ben-Hur swept eleven categories, including Best Picture (me), Best Chariot Race Starring Charlton Heston (Charlton Heston), Best Supporting Actor (Yedidyah Bashevis, playing the one-legged drummer boy who befriends Ben-Hur), Best Use of Natural Sand in a Drama, Best Underwater Sound Effects, Best On-set Drug Use, Best Film Editing, Best Color Costume Design and Best Special Effects Using No Electricity.
The Sound of Music (1965)
Coming off the successful shooting of Lawrence of Arabia, I felt like I wanted to make a more intimate, romantic film to balance the action and adventure-oriented tone of my previous work. So, I was off to Austria to film The Sound of Music, an entertaining romp through the snow-covered Alps in the years just before World War II.
The film was based on the 1949 memoir, “The Amazing True Story of the Andreas Quattlebaum Family Singers, Their Escape from the Cleveland, Ohio Sex Trade, and How They Established the First Pastafarianism Commune in Rothenburg-ob-der-Tauber, Bavaria.” Concerned that there wouldn’t be enough room to fit the entire title on theater marquees, we decided to shorten it to “The Sound of Music.”
The film is about a young Austrian nun who is sent to the villa of a retired naval officer and widower in the slums of Salzburg, to be governess for his seven children: Sebastian, Pollmacher, Habich, Gertrude, Nottelbohm, Hochheim, and Gluck. Originally there were supposed to be eight children in the film, but Billy Bob was doing 8 ½ to 15 for armed robbery at Black Citadel Maximum Security Prison.
The film got off to a rocky start when James Stewart, Sammy Davis Jr., and Toshirô Mifune started bickering over screen time. We eventually had to replace them with Dick Van Dyke, Flip Wilson, and Julie Andrews who were lesser-known actors at the time, but more willing to follow directions and work for non-union wages. Of course, Dick Van Dyke went on to make the fabulously successful comedy series, The Gunndór Hólmgrímsson Show using his real birth name.
From the beginning, production was plagued with mishaps. Like the fiasco shooting Julie’s solo, Do-Re-mi. The scene was supposed to be shot in the middle of an Austrian snowstorm, but the special effects technicians couldn’t get the snow making cannons to work. So, we moved it into Gertrude’s bathroom, where the kids sat around Julie sitting on the toilet. And, because of the severe drought, the location scout couldn’t find any open fields of green grass and wildflowers for shooting Julie’s famous number, The Sound of Music, so we had to rent 5,000 acres of AstroTurf from the Pittsburgh Steelers, then return the whole lot before their opening game at Soldier Field on September 19th.
The Sound of Music ultimately won five Academy Awards: Best Picture (me, again), Best Director (Robert Wise), Best Actress in a Leading Role (Samantha Zipple), Best Costume Design Using Discarded Window Dressings (Zlatousek Simonov), and Best Special Effects (L’ubomír Mráz for Julie’s sex scene during the Austrian earthquake of 1945). The Sound of Music eventually sold over 157 million tickets, equivalent to $34.50 when adjusted for today’s ticket prices.
Titanic (1997)
Thirty years passed before I was blessed with the opportunity to work on a film of the magnitude of Titanic. It was my first foray into making an underwater-love-action film since passing on Operation Dumbo Drop in 1995. I wasn’t about to let this opportunity slip through my fingers.
In preparation for the magnum epic, I’d considered locations all over the world but ultimately settled on remote Tristan da Cunha. To get there we had to fly to Cape Town and jump on one of the local fishing boats that passed by only three times a year and took five to six days to reach our destination — not including transporting our equipment. We chose the island because we needed a coastline big enough to carve out a massive 35-million-gallon water tank to hold the Titanic and accommodate my expanding ego.
To keep costs down, I had to build an exact, miniature replica of the Titanic and hire 450 “little people” as principal actors and extras.
For those few of you who haven’t seen the film Titanic, it’s based on a true story about how American Jack Dawson (played to perfection by Academy Award nominee, Billy Barty), wins a fabulous, all-expense trip for two on the RMS Titanic during a dockside card game. Dawson spots the society girl, Rose Dewitt Bukater (played by newcomer Kiruna Stamell) who is on her way to Philadelphia to marry a rich, Amish snob, Salathiel Petershwim.
Rose feels helplessly trapped by her situation and waddles her forty-two-inch body to the aft deck, contemplating suicide until she is rescued by Jack. Jack ends up spiriting Rose off to third-class for an unforgettable evening of dancing, and shooting heroin, coming within moments of stealing her virginity. Rose asks Jack if he’d be willing to sponsor her for immigration, once they reach Ellis Island. He agrees and begins drawing her in the nude, which because of her size, takes less than fifteen minutes when the Titanic collides with an iceberg in the dead of night.
I knew I wanted Billy Barty to be the movie’s central character, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to be Jack. Up until then, he’d only played roles like the amphetamine-addicted Jim Carroll in 1995’s The Basketball Diaries, and Arthur Rimbaud in The Sedracrians from Space series. He also struggled with his sexual identity. He was one of the first little people I met who identified themselves using gender-neutral pronouns “they/them.”
Kiruna Stamell confessed that she and Billy Barty were “the naughty children on the set.” While filming long scenes where Jack and Rose waited, submerged in ice-cold water for the lifeboats to return after the ship’s sinking, Stamell would sometimes say to Barty, “Sweetie, sweetie, I gotta take a dump.”
Barty said, “So do I.”
So, hand in hand, they surreptitiously slithered off to pinch a loaf in the far end of the water tank.
When DeMille and Paramount Pictures saw the rough cut of the completed film featuring leprechauns Billy Barty and Kiruna Stamell, they went ballistic. “We can’t make a million-dollar action thriller using midgets! You’ll need to start over again.” So, against my better judgment, we re-shot virtually all of the principal photography, hiring Leonardo DeCaprio and Kate Winslet and edited them into the rest of the film. Having two “tall people” walking around a miniature Titanic, amidst a sea of little people looked strange to me, but hey! What did I know? Apparently, it didn’t seem to hurt the box office results.
When it was finally released, Titanic skyrocketed to the number one movie in the US for fifteen consecutive weeks, until was bumped off by the newest James Bond movie, 007 Showgirls — Shaken Not Stirred, and would go on to earn $2.2 billion worldwide.
At five hours and twenty-four minutes, Titanic’s length was bad news for movie theaters, Blockbuster Video Rentals, and men over fifty with small bladders. It meant theaters had to schedule fewer showings and sell fewer tickets than they could with “normal” movies, as well as scheduling two bathroom breaks. When it was released on video in September 1998, it had to be split across fifteen VHS tapes.
Siskel & Ebert labeled Titanic a “bloated leviathan,” a “behemoth,” and a “tiresome epic.” Washington Post’s Desson Howe said it left viewers thinking the unpardonable thought, Alright, alright. Sink already!
On the night of the 70th Academy Awards ceremonies, Titanic won eleven awards: Best Underwater Picture (me, once again), Best Underwater Actress (Kiruna Stamell), Best Underwater Supporting Actress, Best Underwater Original Score, Best Underwater Director, Best Underwater Visual Effects, Best Underwater Cinematography, Best Underwater Film Editing, Best Underwater Costume Design, Best Underwater Sound Mixing, Best Underwater Production Design, Best Underwater Sound Editing, and Best Underwater Makeup and Hairstyling.
I’m in my seventies now and retired from the movie business. Few people can look back at their career and boast that they’ve had a chance to do everything they’ve dreamed of from driving chariots with half-naked actors to being immersed underwater with 450 midgets in the freezing Atlantic. But, I have.
