Season 6 Trailer: Cleopatra

The Plot Thickens

TCM Podcasts

Tv & Film, Film History

4.8 • 4.8K Ratings

🗓️ 2 July 2025

⏱️ 4 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

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 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 and nervous breakdowns… not to mention Taylor's scandalous love affair with Richard Burton. This season, Ben Mankiewicz digs through his own family stories to understand how it turned out so badly for his Oscar-winning uncle. Cleopatra, a six-episode limited series, begins July 17. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	There was a line I heard a lot growing up.
0:02.9	Family members used to say it.
0:04.7	The line was that my grandfather wrote the best movie ever made.
0:09.2	Rogue Spurt.
0:11.2	Citizen Kane, and my great uncle directed the worst movie ever made.
0:17.0	I am Cleopatra, queen, daughter of icy.
0:20.4	Cleopatra was the most elaborate, most disaster-prone production of the 1960s.
0:26.6	The budget started out big and just kept growing.
0:31.6	A $40 million movie Cleopatra, the most expensive ever made.
0:36.6	The sets were the size of a city.
0:39.6	The movie took years to shoot, and when they cast Elizabeth Taylor...
0:44.3	Liz Taylor playing perhaps the greatest role of her career.
0:47.4	The press lost their minds.
0:50.8	Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra.
0:53.4	Well's best highly paid film star.
0:55.0	The Hollywood signing of the exotic Elizabeth.
0:57.0	On your knees.
0:59.0	No actress had ever been paid a million dollars for one movie before.
1:03.0	Ha ha ha ha!
1:05.0	And I'm just getting started.
1:08.0	Everything that could go wrong on a movie set did go wrong on Cleopatra.
1:13.6	There were medical emergencies.
	...

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