Philip Rubenstein
I’m Spartacus! The Making of an Epic
Summary
The film’s first director, leading lady and screenwriter were all sacked. Contentious co-stars, on camera injuries, and fatal miscasting plagued the production. Forced by the censors to make multiple cuts when they were already millions of dollars over budget then the studio got cold feet. The director never rated it, and a film critic tried to destroy it:
The story of Spartacus – a great Hollywood epic, in spite of everything.
Philip Rubenstein
Philip Rubenstein was director of the Parliamentary War Crimes Group, which, in the mid-to-late 1980s, campaigned to bring Nazi war criminals living in the UK to justice. Philip was also the founder-director of the Holocaust Educational Trust and played a role in getting the study of the Shoah onto the national school’s curriculum in the UK. These days, he works with family businesses, advising on governance and continuity from one generation to the next.
It was Bryna Productions, which was Kirk Douglas and his partner Eddie Lewis. Okay. Nancy Con says, Cressus was a king of Lydia, different from the Roman Crassus.
Well, I mean, you know, it’s interesting that Dalton Trumbo had a big role for David the Jew, but Kubrick went cut, cut, cut, cut. And he didn’t like the way that Dalton Trumbo had done it. So it just wasn’t something that he wanted to emphasise.