Lawrence of Arabia

and action 525,600 minutes that's how long Lawrence of Arabia is hello I am Chris winner power here with my co-host Lizzie Bassett to discuss a movie that said seven samurai hold my beer I have to cross the desert of the food as Lizzie I will just lambast you relentlessly because you got mad at me in jest over how long seven samurai was and promptly through Lawrence of Arabia on schedule I thought this is a three hour movie no this is a four hour movie and I loved every minute of it as always I'm Chris winner power joined by Lizzie Bassett Lizzie how are you doing today let's get into it I am so excited I too love every minute of this movie and I can't wait to talk about it with you because boy is it interesting from the real life subject matter the man himself all the way through the making of it as you can probably imagine given the fact that they're in the desert it's insane like when you watch this movie you're like okay so I know that CGI doesn't exist so they're just doing all of this so I can't wait to talk about it because it is truly an incredible undertaking Chris had you seen Lawrence of Arabia before and what was your experience upon watching it again for the podcast I've seen Lawrence of Arabia before I think I've seen it twice once when I was young and did not have an appreciation for it at all and then I did see it again in film school honestly still didn't have that strong an appreciation for it so I didn't remember it super well we rewatched it and it is remarkable for a number of reasons it feels extremely modern in many ways although dated and a couple of important ones the cinematography is amidst the best you'll ever see one of the reasons for that is it's shot on I believe either 65 millimeter or 70 millimeter film yep and as a result when you do that transfer the amount of detail and the tonal range of that film is so impressive that aside from the lighting techniques it feels like it could have been shot today and so some of the shots of the desert really are unparalleled it's like shooting medium format film as the movie which is incredible I think it is so unique in the way that it approaches its hero who is a very interesting person that I'm sure we'll talk about T.E. Lawrence yep and it is such an interesting non-traditional hero in so many ways and the way in which O'Toole brings that to life and I'm excited about that I generally really like Peter O'Toole's performance although I do think it can veer on somewhat melodramatic in certain moments which I know is very much of the time but I will say that upon rewatching it aside from all of the technical elements the movement of the camera which is incredible and David Lean does that throughout his earlier filmography the two things that really felt truly timeless to me three things Maurice Jar's score yes I mean it's amazing and you can feel the way it influenced like John Williams for example yeah wait wait till you hear about the score because your mind's gonna be a blown and then Omar Sharif's performance yes and Claude Reigns yes those two in particular I also think Jack Hawkins is really good as General Allenby but in particular Claude Reigns and Omar Sharif I thought wow these guys are so subtle they are so modern they feel so timeless so more than anyone else those two performances jumped out at me and I loved it and I went back and I watched Summertime which I'd never seen with Catherine Hepburn that he directed a couple movies before this and then I watched Bridge on the River Quay and that's the three movie you know Run and then obviously did Dr. Javago I didn't have time to rewatch that but what's so cool I think if you watch those two into Lawrence of Arabia is you can feel David Lean coming into his own as a director with the way he moves the camera and you know he moves from a traditional film ratio in Summertime which is a lovely little movie into Cinemascope and then into 70 millimeter and it really just feels like he's expanding his palette with every instance but the last thing I'll say is like I know he's known for directing epics but what he's really doing is he is directing epic character studies and you can see that with Hepburn in Summertime you can see that with Alec Guinness in Bridge on the River Quay, Colonel Nicholson and then you can very much see that with Lawrence in Lawrence of Arabia so I love it I think it's a lovely movie I'm sure we'll talk about some of the dated elements and things that obviously wouldn't be done today like Brown Face for example but I'll save those for when we get to that in the production. Beautifully said Chris I couldn't say it better myself you're hitting the nail on the head it is remarkable because yes in some ways it is simplifying T. E. Lawrence a little bit or at least uncomplicating him but in many other ways it chooses a bit of a warts and all approach to this person and I think that that is unusual A for the time B as we're going to learn because of how T. E. Lawrence had been positioned historically at that point and C just because you know this is not the way that we typically like to consume our heroes exactly and they really don't shy away from it I think Peter O'Toole's performance in this is wonderful but I am with you the person that stands out the most to me in this is Omar Sharif for many reasons we will talk quite a bit about him in this episode but I do just want to call out at the top it was not unusual at this time at all to have white British actors with blue eyes playing Arab characters which with a couple of notable exceptions is what you see across most of this movie you know Alec Guinness is the big call out here and as what there is you know Jose Ferrer is in this Anthony Quinn is Mexican American and wearing a massive prosthetic nose but the thing that struck me the most about watching this is that A I am not condoning this at all I think Alec Guinness actually does gives a relatively lovely performance he's an amazing actor and I think he does the best he possibly could with this but I gotta tell you the second he is on screen opposite Omar Sharif it just highlights every single reason why you know obviously racism aside you shouldn't do this because it is distracting to have a white British man with blue eyes in the role of Prince Faisal he doesn't look right he doesn't carry himself the same way as soon as Omar Sharif enters you are on location you are in this world you are dropped in and the second these other guys show up it takes me out of it a little bit every single time so we're going to talk about how Sharif got cast spoiler alert he was not the original person cast for this role the thing about this movie is like yes it's doing this it is doing brownface that's something that was extremely common at the time but what it also does is it highlights the importance of actually casting for people's real ethnicities and why from an artistic perspective that is important yeah no exactly the way I was thinking about it as I was trying to process it is you know there are two vectors right along which it's obviously wrong to do blackface in particular but obviously brownface and Hollywood would do redface etc everything every kind of face yeah the the most obvious vector is the one you mentioned which is that it can veer into horrible stereotype and demeaning performances along that vector this movie actually I think does a decent job in that Guinness is giving a dignified performance I actually looked up photos of Prince Vaisal Guinness is actually on just a photographic basis right he's kind of a dead ringer for Prince Vaisal but I agree with you he simply does not bring the knowledge of culture etc right that Omar Sharif brings when he shows up and so obviously like that hamstrings the movie in certain ways despite Guinness's performance and then as you mentioned Lizzie what's more actually important is the denial of work to people who should be getting these roles and then you have the perfect example of that in this movie which is Omar Sharif goes on to become an enormous star movie star yes which he should be and he would maybe wouldn't maybe would not be had he not gotten a role like this he definitely would not have been in Hollywood exactly so like Guinness didn't need this role I could have been someone in the prince Vaisal role that not only could have been artistically even a little bit better and that is no shade against Guinness's performance but you nailed it I couldn't explain it better than you there's just a feeling yeah it's just not right and then it's the economic opportunity that's being denied somebody else we don't need to be a dead horse but this is why it's so important to give these opportunities to the folks who should you know be getting the opportunity to represent the culture that's being represented on screen yes that is really the only shortcoming of this movie and it's something that was very much of its time I'm so glad you mentioned Claude Reigns we're not really going to get into him in this episode because not a ton went wrong with him he's so good in this movie he's wonderful he's so sort of slimy and inscrutable and just can kind he just he goes whatever way the wind blows and his performance is so small and detailed I really love him in this me too all right let's get into it Lawrence of Arabia is of course directed by Sir David Lean with a screenplay by Robert Bolt and Michael Wilson cinematography by Freddie Young who I want to call out because there is a lot to cover here we're not going to have time to get into too much but Freddie Young cinematography in this is unbelievable and he was not even the first second or like third choice for cinematographer and he is just it's stunning can I emphasize right here when you see Christopher Nolan shooting with IMAX cameras these 70 millimeter cameras I believe are bigger than those these things are like the size of camels basically and he is doing dolly shots in the middle of the desert with these things it's crazy it's insane it is edited by Anne Coates who we will talk about a little bit and it stars Peter O'Toole Alec Guinness Anthony Quinn Jack Hawkins Anthony Quayle Claude Reigns and of course Omar Sharif and you'll notice not a single lady we'll talk about that as well don't think Lawrence was interested he was not the budget was around 15 million dollars today worth around 160 million so yeah this is a wapa yeah the IMDB logline as always is the story of T. E. Lawrence the English officer who successfully united led the diverse often-warring Arab tribes during World War I in order to fight the Turks let's say successfully is debatable depending on how you interpret it so let's actually talk about the real T. E. Lawrence because I think it's important I'm kind of obsessed with him after this yeah so Thomas Edward Lawrence was born in 1888 in Wales into a pretty unusual family I don't know if you know this Chris but he was the son of nobility a baronet but his father had actually cast aside tradition and his marriage in order to be with his mistress he was like you keep the money ma'am I just can't do this I'm gonna be with the woman that I love and they remained legally married which meant that he never legally married Thomas Edward Lawrence's mother so Thomas and all of his four brothers were illegitimate even though his parents did remain together for the rest of their lives and Lawrence was an adopted name that they used as sort of a cover I believe it was a family name on his mother's side now he was very very smart he was obsessed with medieval military history in fact his thesis at Oxford involved a walking tour through Syria where he walked a thousand miles by himself to study crusaders castles and after graduating he decided he wanted to be an archaeologist so he headed back to Syria and while he was digging up Hidite settlements World War I of course was brewing now Germany was determined to get the Ottoman Empire on their side and a key piece of that strategy was the Baghdad railway which was planned to run from Istanbul to Baghdad to be clear this is not the railway that he ends up blowing up British intelligence obviously wanted to know what's going on in this area so they recruited some intelligence officers one of them was of course Te Lawrence and he was perfect because he had the cover of being an archaeologist in the area he has a legit reason for being there he speaks Arabic he's familiar with the landscape so before Lawrence was Lawrence of Arabia he was a spy and that is important to remember in August of 1914 Britain declared war on Germany and many were obviously drafted into combat but not Lawrence do you know why Chris I know he was very short that's it he was five foot five because I knew O'Toole was much taller than Lawrence actually was yeah he's six two yes so that is one of the biggest complaints about Peter O'Toole's casting is that he does not actually look outside of the the shots of him in the traditional garb where he actually does look quite a bit like Te Lawrence in the face physically he does not yeah however as soon as the Ottoman Empire officially entered on the side of Germany the Brits were like hype be damned get this little guy on our side because again he's fluent in Arabic I don't know how many of those are floating around yeah he was brilliant I've always wondered if someone like Indiana Jones was slightly modeled as like an Americanized you know what I mean version sure to Lawrence or something because here's this guy he's an archaeologist he's effectively an ultra marathoner yes his greatest strength is his endurance and like his masochistic ability to withstand pain I mean the guy's just such a fascinating person he really was and so England started to get nervous that the Ottomans might be able to take control of the Suez Canal they at this point began backing an era of uprising against the Ottomans and they sent Lawrence to basically be their like envoy to Prince Faisal and in exchange for support the Brits were of course promising an independent Arab state after the war now as we learn in the movie they never really had any intention of making it a truly independent state how much Lawrence knew about England's intentions is somewhat up for debate although I will say he almost certainly knew about the Sykes-Picot agreement pretty early on of course in the movie he finds this out much later and that is the kind of initial agreement planning out how the Ottoman controlled portions of Arabia would be divided between France and England after the war so a little bit more on that later but keep that in mind now this is all a massive oversimplification but he did indeed help bring previously warring tribes together to blow up the Hajjah's railway take Aqaba and eventually Damascus and just an example of how smart he is to your point Chris do you know why he blew up the tracks and not the trains so that the tribes could pillage the trains in order to stay motivated nope okay then he's smarter than me clear his argument was we shouldn't destroy their fleet of trains we should just destroy the tracks because the tracks can be repaired and that will keep them running out to all the different areas that we're attacking it will cause their forces to dissipate and it will scatter them right it's very smart yes so his whole idea was for the Bedouin army that he had assembled to make these disparate attacks so the Turks felt like they were fighting all over instead of just fighting on one front and of course it worked I mean that's guerrilla warfare 101 right yeah you could argue he kind of in some ways came up with it so well certainly at a time when like trench warfare right seems to be the norm across western Europe here's this guy who's doing guerrilla tactics in the Middle East yeah I shouldn't say he invented it he popularized it or modernized it right turn it into a real fun time yeah as you see in this movie he's loving it he did not so he did try and arguably mostly fail to help gain the Arab independence that he and England had been promising and then of course the war ended I made a point of mentioning he's a spy and that is very important because he kind of lied to everybody so it's a little tough to know what was going on and what his motivations were during the war though he had met an American war photographer named Lowell Thomas now in the movie they've changed the name to Jackson Bentley but that's who this is he had followed Lawrence around taking some of the most famous photos that we still have of him today and when the war ended Thomas was trying to figure out how to make a living so he decided to tour around New York and London with what was basically a PowerPoint presentation on steroids the T.E. Lawrence traveling low-growth show which did not actually involve T.E. Lawrence it was just a live show set around the photos that he had taken of him in Arabia that told Lawrence's story or at least Thomas's version of it I bet you it was pretty exciting oh people loved it apparently it was pretty like cheesetastic it had like a dance of the seven veils and it did also paint Lawrence as a morally pure brave and utterly uncomplicated war hero which makes sense that's what people wanted you know they're exiting World War One which unlike World War Two arguably didn't really have as clear motivations for a lot of people so yeah World War One shouldn't have happened I think we all kind of generally feel about that yeah France Ferdinand why'd you die? Well that wasn't his fault. You could have held on. Lean left so this show was an enormous hit it gave people what they wanted they wanted to see a war hero here they had it yeah so much so that a feature film adaptation of his life felt pretty much inevitable but there's just one little problem the actual Lawrence wanted nothing to do with this he was pretty embarrassed by it especially by the way that it was painting him and he had used his newfound fame to his advantage initially when negotiating some terms on Faisal's behalf I believe but Lawrence was mostly pretty depressed and this oversimplification of what he had tried and again kind of failed to do was really not helping him and the only thing worse than a film adaptation of his life Chris would be a film adaptation made by an American and his biggest fear about this was that it would insert a love interest so he kicked that can down the road but in 1934 he had a change of heart and he did enter into negotiations for a film about his life with producer Alexander Cordo but he had two conditions one it had to be historically accurate any guess is what the second condition might have been is it no love interest more specifically it's no women oh yeah man yeah can I ask you one question about him because I've heard this but I don't know if it's true yes did he turn down a knighthood it is true he he did refuse a knighthood in person from King George the fifth and that had to do both with I think him being frustrated with the way that he was used during the war but more so that the British government had not lived up to the promises that they had made during the war mm-hmm so the no women thing brings us to a question that I think we were all asking after watching Peter O tools let's say flamboyant performance in Lawrence of Arabia which is where exactly did Thomas Edward Lawrence land on the Kinsey scale and the answer is as with all things about this man very complicated at Matalan get up to 50% off across women's men's and kids styles as well as home where perfect for all your long weekend plans discover the sale at your nearest store today or head online to matalan.co.uk season seas apply it had long been an assumption that T.E. Lawrence was gay and I think that was probably a pretty common assumption at the time that the movie was made right now I want to call this out you may see people calling him a pedophile because of an extremely close and yes potentially romantic relationship he had with an Arab teen when he was working as a young archaeologist this is before anything that we see in the movie very sadly this boy who was known as Daum passed away from Typhus when World War one broke out I think he was only 18 or 19 years old it's I think pretty safe to assume that this relationship was romantic on some level given that Lawrence seemed to have dedicated his book about his time in Arabia seven pillars of wisdom to Daum with the following opener quote I loved you so I drew these tides of men into my hands and wrote my will across the sky and stars to earn you freedom that seven pillared worthy house that your eyes might be shining for me when we came so as far as I can tell he's basically saying I backed the Arab uprising and tried to win their independence because I loved you and I'm sorry that I couldn't get it for you while you were alive but how old would Daum have been during the relationship like 16 I mean it's a bit yes but it depends on I don't know what the age of consent was I'm not condoning it I'm just saying it's a little it's potentially more complicated than it seems certainly more complicated than calling him a pedophile I think I agree I don't think that that is a fair representation of him at all based on what I've read and it's also quite possible this relationship was never sexual because Chris you may know this well I've heard people say that they believe he was asexual and homo romantic that's correct and from what I understand that is probably the most accurate representation of him based on his own writings outside of a sexual assault that may have occurred while he was imprisoned by the Turks which we sort of see hinted at in the movie hinted pretty strongly I would say yes for the time at least yeah he never wrote about engaging in any kind of sexual acts and in fact wrote explicitly about having no interest in it whatsoever one of the people he was writing to frequently was em forester who was a known gay man he was not uncomfortable with forester sexuality at all there's kind of no reason to think that he wouldn't have discussed his own so I think this reading is accurate but more on the film's take on his sexuality a little bit later so shortly after his change of heart on the biopic about his life Lawrence had another heart change he got cold feet and he tried to pull out of the negotiations but then he died yeah in 1935 as you see in the beginning of the film he died following a motorcycle accident in which he swerved to avoid two boys on bicycles lots of theories people thought he was assassinated people thought perhaps he had died by suicide you know perhaps he wasn't dead at all and he's living on an island with Tupac as with everything else in his life we're never really going to know what he was thinking if you want to learn more about te Lawrence himself and his part in the development of the modern political climate in the Middle East I highly recommend listening to the four-part series on behind the bastards about him it's wonderful all right let's rewind the clock back a couple years to 1926 remember Lawrence's book seven pillars of wisdom it was not widely released commercially until after his death but in 1926 there was a very limited release a subscribers release if you will of the autobiographical book and one copy landed in the hands of someone we talked about in our african queen episode and that is producer sam spiegel I had forgotten he's a crazy person spiegel and then I remembered your african queen stories and I thought oh my god sam spiegel the desert with david leon and also spiegel did bridge on the river quay which was also a crazy location shoot anyway yes he is a very interesting man he's an insane person uh for more background on sam spiegel go listen to the african queen episode here's a little refresher of really all you need to know for today he was born around the turn of the century in the polish region of the austral hungarian empire very fascinating early life he narrowly escaped to pogrom eventually made his way to hollywood then got sent right back to europe to function as a translator for the german and french versions of universal films being produced there 1933 he flees berlin because it's not a good time to be a jew in berlin and he made his way to london he kind of conned a millionaire into backing a film ended up just disintegrating into a series of bounce checks he actually searched prison time for that and then he smuggled himself back into hollywood by 1948 as we discussed he had teamed up with john houston for the african queen though of course their professional and personal relationship would sour very much and disintegrate after that film much to john houston's chagrin because of what happens next and then spiegel goes on to make on the waterfront in 1954 in 1957 he produced the bridge on the river quay with director david lean and since this is the first time we've also covered david lean here's the little bit of background that you need on him he was born a quaker i did not know this in 1908 in the suburb of south london now due to his parents quaker faith he was not allowed to attend the cinema as a child but he did it anyway he was obsessed with the movies and at 19 years old joined the gomot film studios as a dog's body do you know what that is like a film courier or something like a messenger it's just like the worst position you could possibly have at the studio it's like anything anybody else wants to do the dog's body will do you said pa you're just the lowest of the pa i know but you don't have to call a pa a dog's body british people well they were a dog costume too okay it's a it's kind of a thing yeah so then he landed a job in the cutting room eventually working his way up to the position of editor and by the end of the 1930s he was the highest paid working film editor in british cinema this makes sense yes it does but in 1942 playwright noel coward brought lean on deco direct in which we serve this was lean's debut and it went so well that coward then hired him to direct his next three films the last of which brief encounter earned lean the first ever oscar nomination for a british director in 1945 no coward who had also been a spy everyone was a spy yeah along with roald doll we'll discuss next week on willy wonka you know what we should actually do is we should write a musical about the interactions between roald doll noel coward ean fleming and david olby yeah there's gonna be a lot of women uh i'll just let you know now and they're gonna be having a lot of sex with these men because that's all they were doing well that's all they said they were doing the women confirmed it okay fine there's a lot of letters about this so next he directed great expectations and oliver twist which starred a young alex genus as fagan and in 1955 he directed summertime which you referenced it starred catherine heppern and this was notable because a it was in color yep and b it shot on location in italy yeah shot in venice yeah in venice his first time really getting to do this um and he loved it it's beautiful it's much more sweeping in scope even though obviously smaller than where he will end up but it's where you begin to see his style really materialize and then as we said in 1957 he directed the bridge on the river quay which of course also starred alex genus and which was shot on location in srilanka and it was a massive commercial success it became the highest grossing film of 1957 in the us and canada it was also a critical success so obviously lean and spiegel are eager to get another project together that one went pretty well even though you know there was some crazy stuff in the chute but end result a plus yeah we're gonna cover it it's amazing it has maybe one of the greatest most tense third acts ever put on film it's amazing by the way spiegel had literally bought himself a yacht and a park avenue penthouse thanks to bridge on the river quay so they first turned to the idea of a biopic about mahatma gandhi and they eventually dropped this because they thought it would be presumptuous to try to cram his life into one movie nobody tell richard adin burrow i was gonna say richard adin burrow said hold my beer yep and according to lean spiegel also quote didn't think a picture about an indian would be box office that's probably because spiegel had his heart set on one man and maybe always had since he received that manuscript back in 1926 and that was of course te laurance spiegel said quote he was a man of highly controversial character who actually became a legend in his own lifetime the hardest problem in the conception of our film was to transpose his self contradictions not to resolve them using a script basically compounded from laurance's own seven pillars of wisdom a book of such fascinating detail you could make a dozen pictures it's an embarrassment of riches lacking that blue thread of continuity every picture must have and a lot of cul-de-sacs on like describing camels well he spent a lot of time on him he's detailed writer yeah so spiegel made lean a very important promise for this movie they would not start shooting without a finished script yeah around 1958 or 1959 spiegel and lean cleared the first major hurdle they secured the film rights to laurance's 1926 edition of the seven pillars of wisdom and that was not an easy task the rights sat with laurance's brother aw laurance te of course was long dead at this point and aw put up a pretty serious fight and sat through many meetings with lean and spiegel but he finally gave in on two conditions one he would have total script approval and two he had the right to veto title use if he didn't like what he saw to which i say good luck buddy yeah i was gonna say sam spiegel's like come at me in court bro you know yeah and the push that finally got him over the edge was actually a script analysis by michael wilson now wilson was one of many screenwriters who was blacklisted in 1951 when he refused to testify before huac the house on american activities committee of course led by joseph mccarthy right before his blacklisting actually took effect he won an oscar with his collaborator harry brown for a place in the sun he then spent eight years in france he's working on productions outside the studio system including 1954's salt of the earth and most crucially after lean hated the initial screenplay for the bridge on the river quay by carl foreman foreman suggested bringing in his friend michael wilson but you might notice when the film won the bet oscar for best screenplay at the academy awards the award went to neither foreman nor wilson it went to pier bull who had written the book on which it was based why chris foreman was also blacklisted wasn't he correct both writers were blacklisted he wrote high noon yes which was viewed by many as almost anti-american and its sensibilities and john wane hated that movie and he made real bravo as a response to it and i believe it's rumored that john wane was in part responsible for carl foreman's blacklisting in particular i can't speak to michael wilson because john wane was very tied into to huac oh john wane we're coming for you just you wait we're coming for you well so because wilson could not actually receive an oscar for the work that he had done on that film lean offered him kind of a consolation prize and it was writing the screenplay for laurence of arabia now it's interesting that laurence's brother responded positively to wilson's treatment because it doesn't seem like wilson liked te laurence all that much here's what he had to say in a document dated september 20th 1959 called elements and facets of the theme quote in trying to serve two masters laurence betrayed them both part of laurence's tragedy was his intellectualism with his inheritance of western culture he could never really hope to suburb himself in an alien culture did he not serve to introduce into the arab world the very evils from which he had fled he was a man who fleeing blindly from a deadly disease to a healthy land himself afflicts it with the plague it's a great analysis but i wonder if laurence recognized that ultimately perhaps in himself a little bit and i wonder if his brother saw it too and i wonder if the honesty of that treatment what what would be most offensive to laurence would be a hagiography right at this point in time and his brother would know that and what's so interesting is i think that bridge on the river quay is oddly such a great warm-up to establishing this character because colonel nickle son played by alex guiness is very much the man who tries to serve two masters and fails them both in bridge on the river quay in that he wants to both maintain his britishness and then build this bridge and yet he is doing it for the japanese at the same time and you know what i'm saying in the end he says what have i done is his last line before he dies much like te laurence yes there's such an interesting thematic through line here and that analysis is pitch perfect i agree i think as we're going to get into obviously some things change there's another screenwriter who is brought on who will talk about as well i'm a bit sorry that we don't totally get to see wilson's take on this because i think he nails it and i think he also was more interested in this sort of political climate around laurence as well than this movie is i think it's still there on the margins it is it is you get like 75 percent maybe 50 to 75 percent of it right because you're seeing and you're wondering is laurence just deluding himself how can he not see that claude reigns is going to backstab these people you know what i mean immediately well the reality is he does know which we will get into exactly so i think the movie it splits the you know baby a little bit but i still think it does a pretty good job oh it does but aw laurence apparently agreed with this and granted them the film rights for 22 500 pounds or about 335 thousand dollars today and just six days after wilson had turned in his first draft columbia pictures held a press conference at clareages in london announcing the next sam spiegel david leen production you've all been waiting for it it's going to be the seven pillars of wisdom and it's going to star who any guesses not peter atul no it's not peter atul in fact it's someone who was in a movie that i already mentioned that sam spiegel produced someone who's come up on the podcast multiple times most recently in the american history x episode he came up and no but it's not humphrey bogart that doesn't make any sense who came up tell me tell me it's me t.e. lorence really marlon brando i mean look one of the greatest actors of his generation playing a brit he doesn't look right at all he doesn't look right he's got the what atul does bring i would argue it's actually less than its flamboyant and it's more that it's fey his performance right there's actually a david bowiesc quality it's almost androgynous it's a little otherworldly he seems untouched by the things around him which makes it such a wonderful reveal when it's shown that like this guy's ultimately an endurance athlete right the ruggedness of brando is so wrong for that well it's not even the ruggedness also brando is like young brando which this would have been he's like pretty beefy and hot which definitely is not right yeah he would have to probably lose a good amount of weight i mean atul is like rail thin in this movie yeah peter atul is literally said in interviews like i just can't gain weight i'm just real thin we're like good for good for you peter good for you good for you shut up peter um so i don't know how attached brando really was certainly not attached enough to announce it because he dropped out shortly thereafter to make mutiny on the bounty who another one we got to cover i know reportedly telling spiegel quote i'll be damned if i'll spend two years of my life out in the desert on some fucking camel which i mean he nailed it way to know yourself yeah so spiegel turned to his second choice a then relatively unknown british theater actor albert finney oh oh really yes yes what did albert finney look like young i'm gonna hold that thought okay because in august of 1960 david leon spent four days in a rumored 100 000 pounds shooting screen tests with finney and i would like to show you albert finney as laurence of arabia can you see this oh yeah i mean he looks like he's in star wars he's very surly yes he's very surly same problem i have he doesn't quite like in terms of the face peter otul actually looks quite a bit like i think so too i've seen some photos of t lorence because he's kind of delicate even though he's tall albert finney is not you know who they needed they needed spike jones you know what i mean like a smaller center honestly edward norton you know what i mean the early 90s edward norton and he's too tall but yeah no finney i love albert finney he's great it's actually this is closer to what i would imagine from brando weirdly just despite how different their physicality is yeah i agree interesting so this was a massive undertaking as you just saw from the photos that i showed you there were sets costumes there are other actors they really thought that they had their laurence and sam spiegel agreed he offered finney the role on one condition he had to sign a five-year contract with spiegel and this was a no go for albert finney yeah come on sam i know who said quote i hate being committed to a girl or a film producer or to being a certain kind of big screen image and david lean even was like yeah this was a terrible deal that's a david oselsonic deal that's not a good deal yeah yeah oh he'll show up later too so david lean took matters into his own hands and he started his own search for laurence and he found him while watching a movie called the day they robbed the bank of england he said on screen i saw this chap playing a sort of silly assed englishman with a raincoat casting for trout and this was of course peter otul now otul was of scottish and irish descent but he had grown up in leeds he studied at rada the royal academy of dramatic arts which if you don't know is like the drama school he was 28 years old when lean saw him and had just finished a first season at the royal shakespeare company so massively classically trained actor he also came with a strong recommendation from katherine heppern but he had a bit of a reputation that preceded him and it wasn't good he was known as a hard partying unreliable heavy drinker and sam spiegel was super duper not a fan here's why when they had been auditioning actors many years earlier for suddenly last summer peter otul had come in and he had read for a role now during the screen test in which he was apparently playing a brain surgeon he turned to camera spiked the lens and said quote it's all right mr spiegel but your son will never play the violin again it's very funny it's funny sam spiegel really didn't like it i was you know when you mentioned he was a hard partier big time what is he he was 30 years old when he shot this movie yeah about yeah he can he at times looks a lot older yeah it'll age you i think generally he he has bags under his eyes that make him look a little older and he's a gaunt per you know but he looks a little weathered which i so i'd forgotten that at the beginning credits which i love that opening shot with the motorcycle you know off frame and they do the title card that way when it says introducing peter otul i thought i was i had totally forgotten that because he looks older yeah he has he looks older but he was actually a little younger anyway it's just an interesting interesting time indeed david lean was like this is it this is our laurence so sam suck it up get it together and also tick tock we got to get this show on the road can we please please just cast this drunken crazy person and sam spiegel's like fine but he asked anthony nutting a former british diplomat who was serving as an advisor on the film to have just a little sit-down chat with ol pete and nutting told otul quote if you don't stay sober you're going to leave jordan on your ass you're the only actor we've got and if you get bundled home then there's no film that's the end of the film and that's probably the end of you and i have to imagine peter otul said cheers but he agreed to do it in november of 1960 he was offered the part for a fee of 12 500 pounds which is nothing well i'm guessing this movie took a long time to shoot too so yeah it straight up took two years marlon brando was correct yeah i was probably making like two pounds an hour yeah yeah it was also nothing compared to what some other people were being paid on this hosey ferrer who played the turkish bay which as you remember is a very small role almost a cameo basically it is a cameo he was paid double and i'm guessing guinez and even like oh yeah quinn and stuff and jack hawkins was one of the biggest british actors of the 50s i'm sure he got a lot everybody was paid more than peter otul and omar shareef everyone everyone was paid like their salaries put together basically right so otul was also required to learn how to ride a camel before showing up to set and he only had a couple weeks to do it now speaking of extremely not arab people playing arab people sir lauren salivier was originally cast as prince feisel but he dropped out i would say thank god uh i find his athelo particularly difficult to watch and this led to alex guinez getting the role instead now guinez as we've mentioned frequent david leon collaborator at this point he'd been in great expectations all of her twist and of course the bridge on the river quay for which he won a bafta golden globe and oscar but here's the thing he and david leon really hated each other on that movie that's yeah hated each other there's a great shot where he's on the bridge and he's pouring his heart out it's like at the end of the movie to general sito behind him or commander sito or whatever his name is and the camera's just pushing on his back and it's incredibly modern right nowadays you wouldn't blink an eye and my understanding the story i've always heard is that alex guinez was like why is the camera not on my face because this is my big moment and yeah i don't think they liked each other a ton they did not see eye to eye on this to your point i think david leon had a much more modern interpretation of how to tell stories and how to develop character and move the camera yeah and move the camera and alex guinez really wanted to bring more character he wanted to bring more depth more humanity and david leon was like nope pull it back more more more boring and dull please alex you're not doing it right at one point they didn't speak for 48 hours and guinez later wrote that leon quote surrounds himself with sycophants and has no sense of humor probably true but i think david was doing but guinez agreed to give it one more go and he did sign on to laurence arabia fun fact about alex guinez i don't know if you know this he had actually played te laurence in a theater production of the play ross by terrence radigan which was also about te laurence ross was an alien that he used later in his life and at one point this was an early rival production to laurence of arabia but sam spiegel had threatened legal action against them if they pursued a feature film so they were not able to get financing this seat i mean this actually doesn't seem that shady to me considering spiegel had the film rights to seven pillars i actually think young alex guinez would have been an exceptional te laurence i agree he was just too old at this point yeah so anthony quinn as we mentioned was brought in to play auda who i believe was a real person and of course anthony quinn he is mexican-american he is not of middle eastern descent that is a wild prosthetic nose on him he was one of the biggest movie stars in this movie at the time and he was kind of brought in as like the big american movie star also remember that yacht that spiegel bought well he put it to good use for a year leading up to production while casting was happening leen spiegel and wilson lived on the yacht floating around europe and working on the script now do i want to be on a yacht for a year yeah maybe do i want to be on a yacht for a year with my co-workers no no i don't think you want to be on a yacht with me either one i want to say one of your co-workers is your husband i hope that's on the yacht with you so you're picking out one person you don't want to be on a yacht with no i met more my phone like my office co-workers you don't count you're my friend so this is your job what co-workers are we talking about it's okay i understand it's true so nutting the guy whose job was partially to yell at peter o tool was also negotiating film locations and he managed to convince king hussain of jordan that the movie would help boost tourism if he let them shoot there and david lehm was thrilled because he always wanted to shoot on location and this happened mostly in and around jordan sam spiegel encouraged him to consider the cost-saving benefits of southern california but the reality is he was very concerned about being able to even get into the country if they filmed in jordan because he was jewish and he was correct there was a very good chance at this point due to the political climate in the region that he would not even be allowed in but nutting was like no problemo i'll just get you a visa that lists your religion as anglican and bing bang boom you're in and spiegel was pissed he was like no i'm not anglican i'm not ashamed of my religion to which nutting apparently replied sam just shut up here's your bloody visa which does suck but as the start date drew near david lehm and sam spiegel came to an unfortunate realization as they floated around on their yacht they really hated michael wilson's script according to lehm it was too american to which i say what does that mean brother based probably lines like that based on where they land i wonder if they felt like it had maybe i don't know humanized him too much or like veered in a cowboy direction what i'm imagining i'm imagining george w bush as laurence arabia we're gonna go in there we're gonna teach these teach them about teach them about democracy make sure they don't get them nuclear weapons and uh it's gonna be great mission accomplished like did you see laurence just walking with a banner of this mission behind him yeah great and then omar shriek throws his shoe at his head great all right so they unceremoniously fired michael wilson and in his place they hired robert bolt who was a playwright who had just premiered a man for all seasons he would go on to of course write the screenplay for this so he started rewriting wilson's script and he was a staunch anti imperialist and pacifist who viewed military leaders like laurence as just not great guys all around in fact he described laurence as a quote romantic fascist and also rewrote the character to be a lot more flamboyant than wilson had now they would come around to a slightly more sympathetic portrait of laurence by the end of production but this is where bolt kind of started sounds great but there was one major problem which is that robert bolt was taken a sweet ass time with a script that needed to shoot in like a month and so sam spiegel realized he's gonna have to break the promise that he made to david leane and break probably the top what went wrong rule of all time they would start shooting without a script it's it's the number one rule it's the number one rule we've come across gonna do it next week with willy wonka can't wait you just can't do it but they do it it's to buy a fume cake it's never worked for anyone else but maybe with us so they were supposed to start filming in jordan in february but it actually started three months later in may and they still didn't have a final shooting script now i'm sure it's getting hotter and hotter oh my god it is so hot david leane's plan was to shoot mostly in chronological order partially to give peter otul's performance a sense of discovery so he could you know discover the character but i also suspect it was to buy some time because they didn't have a finished script so for the first month of shooting there were only three actors on set peter otul zaya moya dean who plays taffas laurence's guide at the beginning of the movie and morise ronnet a french actor who was playing sheriff ali now here's the thing when you look at a picture of morise ronnet he doesn't look all that different from peter otul he had a little bit darker hair but he had green eyes and is clearly a french white guy and even with this small cast shooting was off to a rocky start the first thing they filmed was the first time we ever see laurence traversing the desert it's that crazy beautiful shot of the dunes and the tiny little camels coming over the ridge and to capture this two 65 millimeter panavision cameras had been dragged up in almost 90 degree 500 foot slope on a makeshift ski lift just to get the shot right but seconds before they started rolling the first ad screamed halt there was a paper cup visible somewhere in the desert in frame game of thrones style yeah well can i just mention yes so this movie which has been restored right liz you were like i bought the blue k but it's shut up i bought the blue ray it's incredible it is no it's incredible it looks amazing but what's so remarkable is we're watching it on a 4k television right through blue ray and laurence is about 12 pixels tall right in this screen you can barely see him imagine you are looking through an optical viewfinder it's a mirror system through a lens and telling your director i think we can see laurence right because leon has to decide is he gonna bring his actor like 100 yards closer you know what i'm saying for these shots there's no you can't punch in digitally there's no way to verify no they're doing a lot of guesswork in this it's crazy it looks so good it blows me away so they just went out and removed the cup no big deal right chris uh can you think of any problems with what might happen if you need to go out into this shot and remove the cup footprints in the sand bingo footprints in the sand so they had to have people go out there with little wool booties on and these were i believe they're like snowshoes or something you know till i get down they had 300 betoans wearing sandals who had to go out in the desert with palm fronds and wearing like wool sandals and sweep away any footprints anytime anybody went out there you need legolas walking on the snow yeah you well they didn't have them uh and thus began one of the biggest pains in the ass of the entire production so cast and crew also had to wear goggles because of the sand unless you're on camera then you're out of luck or unless you're david lean who said the goggles disturbed his train of thought he will come to regret that umbrellas had to be brought in to cover the cameras between takes so that they wouldn't melt the film because it was like 120 degrees it was actually so high that sometimes that thermometers couldn't read the temperature and they had to cool down the thermometers and the camera is a metal box with a magnifying glass on the front like it's an it's an oven in an oven it's crazy yeah and this particular location jebel to beck i might be mispronouncing that i'm sorry was 150 miles away from the nearest well and had not been inhabited since the seventh century ad when a bunch of monks abandoned their monastery there and speaking of things not going quite right lean was less and less pleased with morise ronay his performance wasn't right neither was his accent both of those things could maybe be fixed but his green eyes could not and they really bothered david lean yep it was at this point that a novel concept popped into david lean's head what if we cast someone who's actually middle eastern it's kind of the equivalent of location shooting for david you know in a sense for it's like then it's the next evolution he needs to make as a director candidly so they can morise ronay and they start hunting through headshots of basically every egyptian actor available and when david lean saw omar shareef he said if he speaks english bring him here i mean he's amazing his eyes like and he's gorgeous he's got these huge eyes and then these incredible eyebrows i know and so expressive yes and very like sweet eyes yeah but also scary but brutal yeah and scary but he's pitch perfectly cast in having the opposite seeming moral arc of lorenz yes and i love it right now so like we meet him from our western perspective murdering a man for drinking from his well and by the end of the film lorenz is the warped moral monster and shareef is the one who we know understands the world for the way that it is and it's so good it's amazing so omar shareef was born michael dmitry shalub in alexandria egypt in 1932 to syrian and levinese parents and by the time he was cast he was already a very established star in egypt he'd been acting professionally since he was 22 he was married to one of egypt's biggest movie stars aton hamama and it was around the time that he married her that he had changed his name to omar shareef and converted to islam and he didn't just speak english chris he spoke arabic english french italian and spanish how i'll tell you how his mother here's what he told the guardian about his childhood quote i was a fat little boy when i was 10 years old my mother who didn't speak any english at all said i know the only thing is to put him in an english boarding school the food will be so horrible that he'll lose the weight that's how i became an actor there was also a theater at the english school i went to so i lost my weight i became thin i learned to become an actor and i learned english very well all this was because my mother didn't like looking at her fat son he's very funny by the way so very dolly in preludes in x-weeks episodes yes very fun so david leans pitch to shareef was not amazing it was basically uh hey can you come and do a screen test for a pretty small part in this movie it's not really written yet also you're gonna have to travel to jordan for it now normally omar would have said no but it was david lean and that name alone convinced him now shareef later said to the guardian quote when he took me from egypt he didn't know me he just said i want an arab person to play this laurence of arabia thing i want a real arab who speaks english all this happened because i had been to an english school in kairou so he called me and i went to the desert and he loved me he actually liked me very much i was one of the only actors he actually liked in all his life he hated them you can feel it he'd be like shareef that becomes the central relationship of the movie i mean it's so interesting that you say it was not the script was not finished because that's the only relationship that actually they wrote a lot more in for him i would say that tethers us in the back half of the movie and you mentioned again kim cassey and arab actor one of the things that works so well about bridge on the river kawai is obviously like general sito and the other japanese characters are actually played by japanese and asian actors and then you compare it to something like breakfast at tiffani yes comes out a couple years later and obviously like that movie is a little hard to watch and very hard to watch yes for mickey runes performance so yeah well in june 1961 he officially replaced morise ronay he was only paid 8 000 pounds and was required to have a mole removed off his face by a plastic surgeon before arriving on set he was also given barely a week to learn how to ride a camel for his iconic entrance let's talk about this entrance briefly it is one of the greatest entrances in film history where he appears out of a mirage it is so good he had to enter from over a quarter mile away according to omar shareef it may have been more like two miles away i believe that i do two he said two to three miles it was hot as shi because lee needed a very high sun for the shot now you may notice what looks like camel tracks kind of extending from the well towards where shareef is that's actually spray paint on the ground it was both to sort of guide your eye in that direction indicate that it's a you know a traveled like a game trail or something yeah that's kind of what i thought yeah it was also to help him know where to go because he's coming from you know one to two miles away right now to obscure shareef before his entrance crew had to drive trucks in circles in front of him to kick up the sand so it looks like he's entering from a sandstorm it's amazing and they used a very special lens that david lean commissioned for this shot specifically i believe it was a 482 millimeter lens i've also seen 450 millimeter i'm inclined to believe a more specific number you pointed this out earlier but almost impossible to see what you're looking at in the viewfinder with this thing especially because he is so far away here's the thing too on a 450 millimeter lens if you touch the camera while it's rolling oh you're going to completely fuck up the shot it will vibrate so hard that it'll look like he is jumping from the top of the frame to the bottom of the frame and the camera's running film through it so it is actually vibrating when you are using it so like again i just don't know how they technologically did this it's incredible it's amazing and they have to commission that lens because again it's a 70 millimeter piece of film which is larger than 35 millimeter by like at least two maybe four x and so they have to make a lens that can create an image circle big enough to cover that you know what i mean it's incredible a huge shout out to freddy young on this the cinematography in this movie is like it's unmatched but let's go back to the camels chris they hurt everybody's butts peter otul said quote i found after a while my bottom was bleeding from bouncing up and down on this snorting great dragon so he made a little trip to beirut on one of their days off and he bought some pink sponge rubber that he shoved into the saddle to try and make it more comfortable and it turns out everyone else thought this was a really good idea including the beto and extras who kept asking him to go out and get more of the sponge rubber so they could jam it into their saddles as well they ended up calling him the father of rubber in arabic they really appreciated it you see the miscommunication on set when they're saying if you need a rubber go to david otul peter otul yes peter otul excuse me and it's a good thing that otul figured out how to get comfortable on those camels because he was on them a lot he told mpr's fresh air quote i had a stunt man doing all those shots that are miles and miles away and david lean said look through the lens peter look at the stunt man so i did and he said you see no poetry so i found myself being the poet and i was the one bouncing up and down miles and miles away but it was all right i had a transistor radio plugged into my ears and i had a cigarette going and i had a little bottle of something in the saddlebag i was quite comfy so that is him in those shots that are like two miles away it's peter otul just bouncing around on the camel drunk with a cigarette and 120 degree weather yes having a ball so they spent nine months in the desert in jordan according to otul living intense they would shoot for 10 to 12 days straight and then they would have a few days off which naturally peter otul and omar shreve spent in jerusalem or beirut spending literally all of their money at the poker table they did this multiple times they lost everything that they made on this movie like over and over again this is my favorite quote from him on this he said we weren't sober but neither were we unconscious we were fully aware of the pain and agony of watching all of our pennies go down the swanee sounds like a great time that's the thing in case you can't tell omar shreve and peter otul became very good friends during the filming of laurence of arabia as we discussed david lean not much of a director for actors he doesn't really care about them that much he's not particularly encouraging so they really leaned on each other and i think you know very much loved each other by the end of this and this shoot was a slog according to sam spiegel they were trying to capture at most one minute of footage a day in september of 1961 robert bolt who was still not done with the script was arrested in london he had been demonstrating on a campaign for nuclear disarmament when he was arrested and basically the authorities are like hey if you just publicly apologize and take everything back that you said we'll let you go but he refused and so he remained in prison and it turns out that legally at that time anything he wrote while imprisoned would have become government property which meant he could not work on laurence of arabia as long as he remained behind bars so september 28th production now and it's a 117th day was shut down and sam spiegel paid a little visit to bolt in prison this is what bolt had to say quote and then all hell broke loose sam spiegel just went absolutely mad so have these people got to lose their jobs and lose thousands of dollars just so that you can go to heaven when you die was his line which is an amazing argument so after a fortnight i bound myself over and came out i felt that although there were very good reasons why i should i knew that ultimately i should not have come out and it was simply because sam had built up the pressure to such an extent that i couldn't hold out so bolt apologized walked back his statements and was released however he quickly realized that he had been pretty heavily manipulated it turns out production had been shut down anyway because they were running out of scenes to shoot in the desert and spiegel knew that they hadn't planned to resume shooting until december and they had budgeted accordingly bolt called it quote the most shameful moment of my life and never forgave or spoke to spiegel again after the film was completed i suspect what happened here is that spiegel didn't want the bad press of him being in prison and probably also was in a hurry to get the script done but still this is so shitty on december 18th 1961 filming picked back up in severe spain and this is where they shot all the scenes that are supposed to be kairos, jerusalem, demascus anything that had like modern architecture that's severe so david leon was not happy to be leaving the desert and effectively recreating these locations versus finding more authentic ones but he did not have a choice it was way cheaper to film in spain plus a lot more comfortable for cast and crew and sam spiegel had frozen assets there that he could only spend in spain so hooray but it was not easy they had to ferry all the camels over from jordan to the new location and next they moved to amoria spain which is where they filmed the two most incredible set pieces in the movie laurence's attacks on the hegeas railway and the siege on akaba and by the way this movie basically transformed amoria it was just a tiny fishing village and afterwards actually became a pretty major filming location cool in fact the location scout and property master eddie fowley who was like david leon's right hand man loved it so much that he opened his own hotel there which became the stomping grounds for many movie stars and you can still stay there today it looks beautiful so let's talk about akaba first because this sequence is mind-blowing it is not historically accurate yeah i know i gave braveheart a lot of shit for the battle of the bridge not having a bridge this is a similar situation uh but i don't care i don't care it looks amazing so the entire set was built on a beach called playa del algorubico and when i say built i mean they built all of those tiny little structures most of them were just facades and they could only be shot from the land side if you're wondering how they safely shot this absolutely bonkers sequence i would like to turn to a scene from yellowstone to best explain their plan ripp if you figured out how to do this without all this getting trampled best we came up with series like fuck it there you go that's essentially the plan i feel like that's also how they shoot yellowstone it is yes it was a mile and a half long charge down a hill of shale there were 100 camels at the front with omar and peter leading the charge and behind them 500 stallions now they'd done a rehearsal the day before it went okay but everybody was aware of the fact that like this was a rehearsal it doesn't have the same energy they would stop and start they're all really scared about how it's going to go on the day and here is peter o tool on turner classic movies explaining how they actually did it we were all very nervous and i went into this little tent where we were to start the charge and omar was sitting in a chair and he had his his black uh kafir on but he didn't have the little thing around it and uh and he had his worry beads and he looked like a nun with a moustache i said what are you what are you doing omar he said peter i've been working out the odds or what what odds omar whether the camel will fall over or i would fall off the camel and what do you decided that there's more chance of me falling off the camel than there is of the camel falling over i said i see and what do you intend to do he said i'm going to tie myself to the camel and i said well i'm going to get drunk um and omar said oh i'm going to get drunk too i loved peter i've been working out the odds i just i love the uh sardonic sense of humor of those great he seems like so much fun they just seem like they were having such a good time together and despite it being disastrously unsafe insane yeah yeah peter otul later laughed at a critic who mentioned his quote look of messianic zeal in this sequence because he was really just terrified and hammered drunk and if you watch the clip again knowing that it's like yeah and by the way by the time the camels hit the water peter otul had a broken thumb he did not know how it had happened and omar shareef was still tied to his camel so that part of his plan had worked but unfortunately he was tied to it upside down because the ropes ropes had slipped and he was just dangling under its belly in the ocean it's just i mean horribly unsafe but also i know but it's amazing yeah so when it came to the train derailment sequences the first thing lean noticed was that the desert didn't look right the sand was the wrong color and there were little shrubs all over it so they hired hundreds of locals to come pick out the shrubs and poor eddie fowley had to import massive amounts of yellow sand to try and match the color of the desert and we should mention they probably destroyed a local ecosystem for sure you cannot remove those plants like there is it like deserts have incredibly delicate ecosystems yeah absolutely they're like dump more yellow sand eddie yeah exactly yeah the lizards are like for the love of god stop please stop the production team built a mile of train tracks and they trucked in two early 20th century german and belgian trains in order to get the scene where the train completely explodes and derails they knew there was one way to do it and that was to completely explode and derail a train so that is what they did that's crazy yep i like at first i thought oh maybe this this must be miniature no but then it's a full-size train like it's clearly not yeah sam spiegel not happy about this because you only get one shot to get this right and it's very expensive they did do a lot of planning to try and ensure that it happened the way that they wanted they actually placed greased metal plates underneath the sand where they were trying to encourage the train to derail so it would sort of shoot down that direction which worked and they figured it would take 10 pounds of gunpowder to cut through the rails another 10 pounds to push the train car off the tracks so they set that up and when it came time to get the shot the train conductor had to start up the train get it going and literally jump out of the train before it exploded i mean and david lean blew up the goddamn bridge the end of bridge on the river quay too i mean it sure did he loves to blow up a bridge or a railroad trestle now in the other train scene with all the horses they were supposed to obviously catch the horses after they get loose but if you watched the movie like i didn't thought how the fuck did they catch the rest of those horses the answer is they did not most of them ran off into the spanish desert and were never seen again bye wow yep one shot at that one too because you lost all your horses but it quickly became clear to everyone that spain could not provide a vast bleak enough desert for the turkish massacre scene so they moved production to morocco and morocco was a nightmare king hasan the second had pledged a lot of help to the crew and it did provide a ton of camels and the actual royal moroccan army to serve as extras in this sequence but every day brought a new problem there weren't enough camels the water supply was contaminated with salt the troops wanted more money or as we'll learn any money it was hot as balls and in fact the troops just wanted to get paid period but somehow their wages had vanished into a bank account in paris by some reports not sure who's they got so pissed that at one point they started firing live rounds over the heads of david leen the cast and the crew okay not great not great they also realized the camel riders in morocco didn't look anything like the riders in jordan so they had to have all of the saddles remade and teach all of the extras how to ride the camels everyone was pissed everyone also got sick malaria and to right as just random rashes morocco was not fun plus it was taking david leen forever to capture the shots he was apparently averaging 24 seconds of usable footage a day here and when you're making a movie that's ultimately going to be close to four hours yeah and you're gonna it's hundreds of shooting days it's just it's crazy i mean every frame is the painting it's beautiful you can't argue with the results but i cannot imagine how frustrating that process would be insane sam spiegel apparently flew in to give everyone a pep talk that basically amounted to you're doing great sweetie but can you please for the love of god go faster it's the same as kurosawa you know what i mean all these guys like they're getting the notes like please hurry up please hurry up looks good looks so good good job good job make it faster also i didn't even get to this but sam spiegel apparently would like fake heart attacks throughout this production when things weren't going the way he wanted them to and at one point was actually flown across the desert strapped to a gurney by the red cross he was fine anyway it's like a jody foster faking appendicitis uh 20 colette 20 colette that's what it was on your movie fights sorry yes yeah yeah and finally after 313 days of shooting production wrapped that's crazy the shoot had lasted almost as long as the actual arab revolt itself i mean what was the shining 185 days and that's always got nothing on david lean yeah and they weren't in the desert although it seems like peter otul and o marsher you've had a better time than anybody on the shining did so back in london as post production was about to commence david lean who didn't wear his goggles actually had to have an operation on his eyeball because he had sand embedded behind his eyelid david turns out you need your eyes oh you're a director yeah post production began in september of 1962 and remember that date because sam spiegel had already planned to premiere the film at the royal film performance which was attended by the queen and was scheduled for december 10th of 1962 well good thing your director is an editor well he also had an absolute legend to lean on by his side and that was an coats she had been working as an editor for about 10 years at this point though she actually started off as a nurse at a plastic surgery hospital and she was looking for work when she ran into a friend who was working on albert finney's screen test lean hired her to cut the early screen test and was so impressed with her work he hired her to cut the entire movie she would go on to edit everything from murder on the orient express elephant man lady jane what about bob erin brokowicz unfaithful in her final credit was actually 50 shades of gray interesting she had a lot of range yeah i mean this we should mention this movie has one of the most famous cuts in the history of film chris that is thanks to an coats can you explain what you're talking about there's a moment well can i briefly mentioned also the only great part of prometheus is michael fastbender's obsession with peter otul's character in laurence arabia and like the trick is not minding that it hurts um but there's a moment where peter otul has led a match and they're discussing his mission you know which is going to be insane and it does a close-up where it's almost a two shot of the profile of peter otul's face in the match and it's perfectly positioned in the frame so that the match is about a third of the way up the frame and he blows it out really quickly and you smash cut on that action to a landscape shot a telephoto landscape shot of the desert with a blood red sky as the sun is just breaking the horizon and it's one of the most breathtaking modern feeling match cuts yes i would say like almost like a stream of consciousness match cut because there's no actual action being matched right there's no geography being matched and yet it is so it's so wonderfully transports you to a time and place and it feels so magical that there's really nothing like it it's amazing it takes your breath away even watching it today you have and coats to thank for that that was her idea she introduced david lean to the idea of smash cuts and this particular edit was i believe her doing it's amazing yeah she and david lean worked from 9 a.m to midnight seven days a week in order to edit the 31 miles of footage they ran into quite a few problems some of the negatives had been damaged by fingerprints they actually fingerprinted the entire crew to try and figure out who had done this it turned out it was someone from the lab there was a bunch of stuff the sand that they had brought in to like post-sync the edit got dumped outside in england where it got rained on turned into a pile of mud and according to coats the original cut was of course compromised by the speed at which they were forced to do it she said we cut it very very fast for a three hour 40 minute version to open for the queen we could have done it with another couple months to get it really trimmed down maybe by 10 minutes i love that i was gonna say yeah yeah you can't cut much out of this if you're an electrician amendment 4 sounds like more paperwork paperwork let's make it painless with cef tech talks this may to july 26 free live events across the uk partnered with the iet get the regs so you don't break a sweat at inspections parking breakfast and 3.5 hours of useful cpd all free come for the knowledge stay for the bacon roll cef you're electrical experts find your nearest tech talk and register free at cef.co.uk at a j bell we believe every customer deserves brilliant service which is just one reason we're rated excellent on trust pilot and we all trust pilots with their smooth captainly voices that make you feel like you'd let them land anywhere they like sorry where was i right a j bell rated excellent by sexy pilots i mean trust pilot i'm a flight risk a j bell feel good investing the value of your investments can go up or down now you talked about the score and i am so excited to tell you about this chris lean wanted to use the same composer he had used from the bridge on the river quay but spiegel had another person in mind and the biggest problem was that neither of these guys they felt were capable of pulling off the arabian themes they were both british so they're like okay the brits will split the british themes and will hire soviet composer aram kachaturian for the arabian themes but the two brits screened the film and they thought it was hot trash so they declined to be involved leaving lean with kachaturian on the arabian themes benjamin britain on the british themes and a young french composer named morise jar who would be coordinating the efforts between the two but morise started writing a little bit of music under everyone's noses just in case he might get the chance to contribute lucky for him kachaturian could not get permission to leave the ussr and britain said he needed at least a year to score something of this scope so jar thought surely now it's my turn and spiegel said nope i am hiring richard rogers instead oh wow yes of rogers and hammer's wow yeah yeah well and the sound didn't you do the sound of music well they wrote the sound of music yes i mean that's yeah yeah but i'm saying like the the the music feel i know i know he's not right i'm just trying to think of examples that are not oklahoma sure try to justify this the king and i the king and i there we go thank you but richard rogers turned in some theme options and david lean was like what what what is this what is this trash you're serving up to me and then as they were going over what he had turned in one of the pianists who was in the room playing the music pointed out uh this is actually an old military march i know this one it's not even an original piece of music and david lean was pissed so finally he turned to good old morris jar who had been sitting in the corner the whole time and said what do you have and he walked over to the piano and played what would become the main theme of laurence of arabia and david lean was thrilled he insisted that jar get the job immediately jar was thrilled i would assume until he found out that he had six weeks to score the entire film and he did it it's crazy in a 1984 interview jar said of the experience quote i don't want to bore you with the story but i barely survived this experience from the physical point of view having to do everything in six weeks i was only sleeping about two or three hours a night i don't want to have this kind of experience too often here's what i'll say so having just watched bridge on the river quay and this movie back to back there are two ways in which this movie feels more timeless to me than bridge on the river quay overall one is obviously the filming technology they use 70 millimeter film yeah and the other is marie jar's score it's so good i mean bridge on the river quay is an amazing music movie and they use a military theme as score in that movie as well like a whistled theme by the british soldiers it's very effective but it feels dated in a way that this movie does not and the other thing that helps i believe because he only had six weeks they probably underscored it a little bit for the time yeah and that is so effective because it just allows the desert to be quiet and a lot of scenes and the dialogue scenes can just play as dialogue scenes oh marsharif's entrance there's almost no music underneath the first few minutes before that and then it's perfect yeah so i think it weirdly worked in their favor i feel i feel terribly for marie's jar but wow what a score yeah and of course he would go on to score dr schivago which is like one of the most beautiful film scores of all time and many many more but this was his big break and a passage to india i think he did david leon's last film as well yes he did so this would indeed premiere on december 10th 1962 in front of queen lizzie herself six days later it had its new york premiere where it received a standing ovation but david leon received a warning from i promised he would come back david oh selznick oh selznick told him quote they will do to you what they tried to do to me on gone with the wind they will try to make you cut it don't let them i refuse to let them cut gone with the wind which they said was going to be hopeless if it wasn't cut because of the length they could only get two shows a day it's made more money than any film ever made don't let them touch laurence selznick was right on the money cinema owners began complaining about the length immediately saying would only allow for one screening a day they can't make their money back so in january of 1963 speagold ordered an additional cut of around 17 to 21 minutes off of the movie according to a 1989 la times article quote the most controversial of the truncated scenes suggesting laurence's homosexual and sadomasochistic tendencies gained mythic proportion after it was trimmed the restored and very subtle scene proves an industry churrism where there's smoke there's often just smoke is the suggested scene when he's being tortured by the turks yes and for our audience if you're unfamiliar if you haven't watched the movie in a while it's he's strapped down his shirt's been removed and he's being whipped and he seems to be able to handle it better than at first they're expecting but then the guard smiles at him and he looks back and he sees the turkish general or commander right with his shirt open watching from the next room and there's a suggestion it's sexual it's sexual and i think that they're based on what i know of te laurence it's suggested to me that maybe he's going to be raped 100 yeah and that's how i read it well he writes very specifically in his own works that he was yeah and so that i feel like they're trying to suggest that when they can't this is obviously before deliverance right no one's done this and so they can't put it on screen but i feel like that's what they're suggesting it is yes yeah but it's very subtle it's not like a protracted scene that's the thing it did not need to be cut at all and in fact and it's an important scene because it kind of helps with the motivation that he goes into the next turkish massacre with without it it's a bit weird i think it's too subtle actually that's why i the last third of the movie feels a little rickety to me in terms of tracking where he is emotionally but you know again that may just be me so in 1971 an even shorter version was released theatrically and it seemed that all hope for david leane's original vision had been lost but in 1986 a film restore named robert harris pitched columbia on a restoration now he couldn't get it done due to contractual issues but laurence super fans martin scorsese and steven spielberg could they rescued the project and in 1989 a fully restored version premiered in los angeles new york and dc now one person who was not in love with laurence of arabia was aw laurence it turns out he actually hadn't seen the final shooting script that bolt had been writing until july of 1962 which was way too late to address anything and he really really didn't like it he felt it had been turned into an anti-war movie which was not what he had agreed to nor was it what he had intended and he fiercely denied that there was any way his brother had taken part in the turkish massacre even though it seems like he almost certainly did but there is one historical distortion that many say does harm the movie a little bit and i am inclined to agree in the film it's implied that laurence doesn't know about the sykes-picolt agreement until it's effectively too late and he's already made all these promises to prince phaisal in reality he almost certainly knew about it long before any of this happened at the very least he knew that england was not being genuine in terms of the arab independence that they were offering and he probably always knew that he's a spy like he he is very aware also the sykes-picolt agreement i believe was basically public by many accounts this tormented him deeply and he may have actually given phaisal a heads up about it early on which is also interesting because that would have been some kind of treason i would think on the part of the british it's one of the few instances in which leen and bolt seemed to want to uncomplicate te laurence and speaking of another instance of this as promised i want to come back to the homoerotic undertones of this movie when asked by the washington post in 1989 if the film is quote pervasively homoerotic david leen said yes of course it is throughout i'll never forget standing there in the desert once with some of these tough arab buggers some of the toughest we had and i suddenly thought he's making eyes at me and he was so it does pervade it the whole story and certainly laurence was very if not entirely homosexual we thought we were being very daring at the time laurence and omar laurence and the arab boys now this in and of itself is another oversimplification and sensationalization of te laurence i want to say again laurence was almost certainly asexual the only sexual experience he seems to have had was not consensual it took place when he was imprisoned by the turks i'm not knocking david leen here he made a really phenomenal movie um yeah i think if anything he's actually kind of misstating what they did in my opinion because i actually feel like what's so wonderful about his relationship with omar shreef it's a romantic relationship it's romantic but it is in like a camaraderie sense right in that they are like it is a romantic brotherly love and their estimation of each other grows and their affection grows across the movie and it is homo romantic but it's not presented as sexual and that's really important distinction and i'm glad they don't tip it in that direction you know what i mean in the movie because that's not honest to the character yeah it just feels like a quote that's not actually representative in my opinion of the final film i agree i actually really like the on-screen relationship between laurence and ali in this movie and between you know i think omar shreef and peter atul definitely leaned into it in a way that i'm not sure everybody would at the time and it is a very romantic relationship totally in the end laurence of arabia won seven out of its ten oscar nominations and remains i think it's safe to say one of the greatest films of all time that ends our coverage of laurence of arabia there's so much more that we could have gotten into i don't have time but i really loved this movie i loved diving into it and i want to learn more about te laurence he's extremely fascinating chris what went right well thank you lizzie for driving us through the desert on this one it's an amazing story it's an amazing movie david leans an incredible director so i and i actually don't really know his filmography i've seen um great expectations i think was the one that i've watched that he did but i don't know his filmography pre summertime very well yeah i want to watch some of the earlier the null counter stuff i would like to see yeah exactly i've seen you know summertime through a passage to india i think i've seen including ryan starr but anyway i want to give mine to just the two actors that i thought transcended all of this and that is omar shreef and claude reynes and mostly omar shreef because he's the bigger character in this yeah he's great and you can just tell he's a star the minute he shows up and what a performance and good job on the production for realizing that you go in a different direction but just kudos to omar shreef for like he took a small part and then he turned it into a huge part and that's really cool yeah and became arguably one of the first middle eastern hollywood movie stars ever and he was wonderful i have to give it to david lean i just think you know the the dedication to detail you said every shot is like a painting it really is and he was willing to go live in the desert for he was there for like three years because he was there a year before everybody else was it's just so beautiful and i very much admire his even though he didn't as omar shreef said he did not like actors i very much admire his willingness to explore unlikable characters in the way that he does without trying to stand off some of their rougher edges for the most part i love this movie i'm so glad i owned it on blu-ray we must get some kind of projector so that we can watch this on a big screen because it is phenomenal well that wraps up our coverage of larry of arabia or in friends laurence of alabia as the name the oh god baby sister of the movie season chris if people would like to support this podcast how can they do that cross the desert of new food and tell a family member or friend what went wrong pretty good give it a listen number two leave a rating and review on whatever podcast you're listening on number three subscribe on that pod catcher so that you're getting our episodes every monday and occasionally friday number four you can now get bonus episodes through apple or spotify sign up for our five dollar special features program and you will get at least one bonus episode every month these tend to be reviews of new releases we just did project hail mary we've got a bunch of fun stuff coming out for you guys over the next few months with the summer releases number five if you would like even more from us you can join our patreon head to www.patreon.com slash what went wrong podcast and for five dollars you get the bonus episodes you get an ad for your rss feed you get newsletters extra credit posts musings from us and for fifty dollars you can get a peter otulian shout out just like one of these adrian pen career angeline renai cook betricks airheart ben schindleman blaze ambrose brian donahue oh my god i do not sound like peter otul britney morris brook cameron smith c grace b chris leal chris zucker david friscolanti darin and dale conkling don shybel m zodia evan downey felicia g film it yourself frankenstein galen and miguel the broken glass kids the cast and crew of winner trip to brown town how far away from received pronunciation is this probably pretty far grace parter half gray hound james mackervoy jason frankle jj rapido jory hillpiper jose emilano salto del georgio kareena canaba kate elrington cathleen illson amy elgashlager mccoy lazy freddy lena lj lydia haws mark bertha mariposa's humans matthew Jacobson michael mcgrath nate the knife rosemary southward roger that's the only one that sounds all right with this terrible accent sadie just sadie scott osheater somon chynani steve winterbar susanne johnson the provost family the o's still sound just like o's and there is no spoon thank you all so much and i'm very sorry for this i'm sorry for that offensive british accent well i mean there were no women for you to play so we had to go with that well lissy why don't you tell us what we have coming next week a journey into pure imagination that's right we have i believe an oft requested film coming up we have willy wonka and the chocolate factory and we have a very special guest expert joining us on this episode so come back in a week for that yes and learn how shooting in a studio can be just as unsafe as shooting in the desert we're very excited thank you guys so much for listening until next week this has been what went wrong bye to support what went wrong and gain access to bonus episodes subscribe on patreon apple or spotify for five dollars a month patreon subscriptions also come with an ad free rss feed you can also visit our website what went wrong pod.com for more info what went wrong is a sad boom podcast presented by lizzie bassett and chris winterbauer post production and music by david bowman this episode was researched by laura woods and edited by h connelly do