A film watcher's companion: IMDb

So I decided to watch Spartacus Saturday, and is my wont, I checked the trivia section of Internet Movie Database before viewing. I found a some very interesting pieces of trivia.

First, Kirk Douglas made the movie because he wasn't selected to play the title role in Ben-Hur (He was offered but turned down the role of Messala - now THAT would have been interesting!). Needless to say, he was miffed. His ego demanded that he make a biblical epic that he could be the lead, hence, Spartacus, of which he was Executive Producer. "June 2008 (it was) Ranked #5 on the American Film Institute's list of the 10 greatest films in the genre 'Epic'".

And the "snails and oysters seduction attempt" dialog between Lawrence Olivier and Tony Curtis was not in the original release as "The Powers That Be" thought it was too suggestive. Homosexual inference and all that. When it was decided to put the dialog in the restored version, the soundtrack was lost, so they needed to have the dialog dubbed. Curtis was still alive, so he did his part. Unfortunately, Lord Larry had died. However, his wife, Joan Plowright, remembered that Anthony Hopkins did a great impression of Olivier so they asked him to do the dubbing, and he did!

Dalton Trumbo, who was blacklisted earlier during the McCarthy hearings, did the screenplay (Douglas insisted he be given full credit, much to the chagrin of uber right-winger John Wayne). Trumbo made a "sly dig" at the whole blacklisting thing with Olivier's line, "In every city and province, the list of the disloyal have been compiled."

In the restored version, they also added some more violent scenes that were left out of the original release. One is the lopping off of a Roman's arm by having an amputee put on a prosthetic device to be chopped off. The amputee actor was a man by the name of Bill Raisch. An just who is he? Two years later, he would be the one-armed man Dr. Richard Kimble hunted in The Fugitive TV series.

This last piece of trivia is great. The movie was George Kennedy's unbilled film debut. His role? He was one of the men who stood up and said "I'm Spartacus!" I was so looking forward to that moment as I watched the film, and it was great seeing George in a biblical garb, even though it was only about two seconds! Funny stuff...

I really enjoyed viewing it again, especially with the great bits of trivia I got from IMDb.