Episode 4 – La Scandale
Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton’s love affair becomes a tabloid sensation. Richard drinks and Elizabeth cries, they fight and make up, all while trying to keep the affair from their spouses and the public. When the press infiltrates the set and reports on every ugly development, Joe struggles to hold the production together. But as the budget balloons, Joe starts taking the blame for everything that’s gone wrong.
00:00 – Liz Taylor’s Many Men
06:56 – A Love Pentagon
11:57 – Affair of the Century
18:20 – The Procession, Take 2
22:28 – Fox in Freefall
27:13 – Problems in Rome
33:00 – The Black Eye
36:38 – Cleopatra’s Death Scene
39:19 – Joe Explodes
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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