Joe: Cleopatra | The Plot Thickens (S6 E2)
Episode 2 – Joe
While Elizabeth Taylor fights for her life in a London hospital, Joe Mankiewicz begins to grapple with the movie he’s inherited. The script is dreadful, the sets are grotesque, and none of the footage is usable. Joe decides to start over from scratch. A look at Joe’s long career in Hollywood gives some clues as to how he’ll handle this epic production and manage his high maintenance actors.
00:00 – Elizabeth’s Coma
04:19 – Joe’s Big Gamble
10:45 – Growing Up Mankiewicz
16:44 – Joe Goes Hollywood
24:12 – Defecting to Fox
33:20 – All Joe’s Women
41:55 – After the Loss
44:02 – Suddenly Last Summer
His studio was collapsing. His budget was skyrocketing. And his two stars were making headlines for all the wrong reasons. Those were just some of the headaches facing Joseph L. Mankiewicz, the writer and director of one of the most expensive and infamous movies ever made: Cleopatra. With Mankiewicz calling the shots and the luminous Elizabeth Taylor in the title role, Cleopatra should have been a smash. Instead, it was a shoot plagued by medical emergencies, climate disasters, nervous breakdowns, and egos as big as pyramids… not to mention Taylor’s scandalous love affair with Richard Burton. It fell to Mankiewicz to somehow wrest an epic out of chaos. Writing at night and directing during the day, he struggled to stay one step ahead of financial disaster and his own failing health. This season on The Plot Thickens, Ben Mankiewicz digs through his own family stories to understand how it turned out so badly for his Oscar-winning uncle.
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