LOS ANGELES—Mission: Caligula, a new documentary by Alexander Tuschinski featuring never-before-seen footage from the film Caligula will have its world premiere at the Hollywood Reel Independent Film Festival on Monday, February 26. The documentary will reveal the existence of Tinto Brass' newly-discovered workprint of Caligula that was presumed lost for more than 40 years and which has developed a quasi-mythological status among film fans.
The documentary details Tuschinski’s 10-year quest to research Brass‘ original ideas for the film and reveals the discovery of the workprint and entire raw footage. Penthouse Global Media, the rights holder of Caligula, will later this year produce a new cut of the film, having Tuschinski complete the workprint and edit the remainder of the film following the original style and structure as Brass filmed it in the 1970s.
After the screening, Kelly Holland, CEO of Penthouse Global Media, and Tuschinski will discuss the project during a Q&A.
Caligula was produced by Penthouse, under the leadership of Bob Guccione, in the 1970s, and originally directed by Brass, who wanted the film to be a political satire. Brass was dismissed during editing by producer Guccione, and the film was afterwards re-edited from scratch, without Brass’ participation, as a drama containing pornographic scenes. Brass subsequently sued to have his name removed from the credits, and no released version of the film resembles his vision or style. Tinto Brass in the 1970s was an avant garde filmmaker with a very unique style, whose films were considered experimental and groundbreaking, and received critical praise.
For years, the raw footage of Caligula was presumed lost, making proper reconstruction of the film that Brass wanted to make impossible. Tuschinski’s research—which led to him writing his Bachelor's thesis at Stuttgart Media University—helped Holland locate the footage in 2016. Holland calls this "One of the most unlikely and incredible finds in the history of film. The footage was forgotten in an archive that somehow, over the years, Penthouse lost track of. Had we not found it in time thanks to Alex's research, it might have been lost forever."
All the filmed material—more than 100 hours of 35mm print—survives, along with more than 10,000 production stills, many versions of the soundtrack and Tinto Brass‘ workprint of the first 84 minutes—a very unusual archive for a film from the '70s. The workprint had never been seen by anyone after Brass was dismissed in 1977. The workprint was found cut into almost a thousand pieces, presumably by Guccione’s editors after Brass left. Penthouse sent those to Germany, where Tuschinski painstakingly pieced them back together—and it revealed a very different first half of the film:
"Tinto Brass' ideas for Caligula were very different from any released version," Tuschinski noted. "Any version of the film you find today is based on the cut that was done by the producer’s editors without consulting Tinto’s ideas. There is a common misconception that the producers only changed Caligula by adding hardcore pornography. This is entirely incorrect: Tinto would have used different takes, shots, edited more elegantly, would have used entirely different music, and entire subplots, dialogues and scenes were changed or deleted. The way it was envisioned, Caligula would have been a highly provocative political satire on the nature of power, which had a deep message as well as a surprising structure. If you only know any released version, you could impossibly guess what the film as envisioned by Tinto Brass would have been. Tinto’s film ends in outright slapstick scenes, features surrealistic scenes, nudity that is shocking but not placative. I believe it is impossible to overestimate the differences of this new version. It will, in my opinion, be regarded as a very important artistic milestone of Italian cinema of the '70s. To find the CEO of Penthouse sympathetic to the project, to recreating a film based on Tinto’s ideas and style, was an incredible surprise."
Mission: Caligula was directed by Alexander Tuschinski, a German avant-garde filmmaker whose experimental comedy feature films have received numerous awards in the United States. He has been writing scholarly works on Tinto Brass' early films and was called “the foremost scholastic authority on Tinto Brass (and Tinto Brass’s version of Caligula) in the world today” during a retrospective of Brass’ films in Los Angeles in 2012.
Mission: Caligula has a runtime of 40 minutes and features new interviews with Kelly Holland and Bonifacio Brass (the son of Tinto Brass) who tells never-before-heard anecdotes from the set. The film will screen at Hollywood Reel Independent Film Festival on February 26, at 4:30 p.m., at Regal Cinemas LA Live, 1000 West Olympic Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90015. Tickets can be bought online here, or at the special festival box office.
Tuschinski’s revised Bachelor's thesis about Caligula can be found here.
Mission: Caligula can be found on IMDB.
