In the months leading up to the premiere of Cleopatra, my uncle Joe Mankiewicz took a break from the drama. According to his diary, he went golfing. Thursday, April 4th, Ohio, California. Nine holes after lunch. The next day, Friday, April 5th. Nine holes in AM. Nine holes in PM. Saturday, April 6th. Crowded golf course, but still, nine and nine. Dinner in room. Red Edward Albee plays. Clearly Joe needed a break, and at least on the fairway, no one meddled with his shot. In May, a month before Cleopatra's premiere, Joe had to meet with reporters. To prepare, he got a haircut, and then, suggesting he might be a bit on edge, he got another one eight days later. He sat down for interviews with the New York Posts, The New Yorker, The New York Times. Joe told Newsday, I still feel strongly that Cleopatra could use more running time. The finished product, he said, is a compromise. It's Joe making nice with Daryl Zanick in the press. We are originating part of our broadcast from the Rivoli Theater here in New York City on Times Square, where Cleopatra is premiering. June 12th, 1963. Opening night for Cleopatra. It's quite a mob scene over there. Johnny Carson's Tonight Show did a broadcast from the premiere. Johnny played to his studio audience, while Burt Parks, the popular TV announcer, beamed in from the scene. Hey, John, you ever heard a car door is opening, but nobody's in it? Outside the theater, four out of six lanes on Broadway were shut down. Limos idled, while thousands of spectators pressed against barricades. More than 100 police officers, on foot and horseback, patrolled the streets. Rex Harris is on the outside there, Burt. Yes, I see. And you know this is going to take a while. Clearly, Johnny's studio audience was enjoying this. Believe it or not, the movie's two biggest stars didn't show for the premiere. Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton were tied up with projects in London. No doubt sick of the circus the movie had become. The third star, Rex Harrison, was there. Mr. Harrison, sir, Burt Parks, a great pleasure to welcome you here. I'm nice to have you with us. Would you come in, please, and face our cameras, which are right here? Yes. Always. I want you to meet Johnny Carson, our host of the Tonight Show, Mr. and Mrs. Harrison. I understand that you are just magnificent in the picture. Thank you very much. I haven't seen it. Actually, none of the actors had seen the film. Cleopatra hadn't even been test screened with an audience. Xanac wanted it in theaters so quickly, Fox scrapped the test screenings, which meant Joe had no idea how an audience would react to his movie. Mr. and Mrs. Mankiewicz, they are right here and I want to introduce them to you. Joe arrived with his new wife, Rosemary. May I just ask you, have you seen Cleopatra? Yes, I have seen Cleopatra. Are you impressed as everyone else is there? Very much so. You sort of have to say that. Rosemary wore a pearl necklace and matching earrings. She looked polished at ease. Next to her, Joe was kind of a mess. His tuxedo was rumpled. His bow tie lopsided. You, sir, congratulations. Thank you. Wonderful, wonderful achievement. Well, you must know something I don't, but I must tell you, I do. Come in, please. Come in, please. Don't go away. Don't go away. That's the night when I want to say first of all, ask you whether or not you are personally going to control the sound on the showing of Cleopatra tonight. That's been the room. No, I think everything connected with Cleopatra is beyond my control at the moment. How does it feel now that the film is in the pan? Is some of the tension gone? Is some of the, you feel a little more at ease now? No, I feel as though the guillotine were about to drop. I'm your host, Ben Mankiewicz. We're listening to season six of the Plot Thickens, a podcast from Turner Classic Movies. Each season, we bring you an in-depth story about the movies and the people who make them. This season, Cleopatra. Now, in epic production pushed my uncle to his breaking point. This is episode six, wildly successful and much maligned. I was strangely awake, I feel, as if living had been just a long dream. On premiere night, Cleopatra clocked in at four hours and three minutes, at the time, the longest running film ever released by a Hollywood studio. But now, we'll begin a dream of my own. Joe spent most of the movie pacing in the lobby. Inside the theater, Cleopatra finally said her last lines. She lay across her tomb in gold Phoenix wings. The camera zooms out. And the Roman asked, was this well done of your lady? As befitting the lust of so many noble rulers. Then credits and the closing score. The lights flickered on. The audience applauded. Then stood to file out. The radio announcer William B. Williams was outside the theater. The New York Times didn't find it boring. Bosley Crowther, the influential film critic, had seen Cleopatra at a press screening the day before. His review went to press in the middle of the premiere. But I must say, he raved about the film and in particular raved about your performance as Caesar's. Mr. Crowther said, Caesar played stunningly by Rex Harrison. He is a statesman of manifest wisdom, shrewdness and magnanimity. Mr. Harrison's faceted performance is the best in the film. Well, that's wonderful. I'm very happy about that. More newspapers chimed in with positive reviews. The L.A. Times called Cleopatra magnificent and Liz Taylor a revelation. Variety ran the headline Cleopatra conquers New York. A few good reviews, brisk ticket sales. Maybe Cleopatra wouldn't be a catastrophe after all. Then came the rest of the critics. Our own reviewer, Seymour Peck, he calls it a major disappointment, heavy, slow-moving and generally unexciting. Mr. Joseph Mankiewicz is a fine director, but he is neither Shakespeare nor Shaw. The spectacles are bloodless. The script is literate. Joseph Mankiewicz is more interested in his characters than in the action. Some choppy battle scenes leave us longing for more. Although the pace of the film sags badly in the last two hours. The actors have few real scenes to play. Everything is for the eye. Very little for the mind or heart. Words like dull, gaudy and disappointing cropped up again and again. Rex Harrison earned praise, but the critics were not kind to Liz and Richard. The trouble with Ms. Taylor seems to be that of immaturity and a lack of vocal authority. A little girl quality, which is a miss in the role. Burton has trouble with his role and seems all too Welsh for a Roman warrior. But if you're looking for something special as the result of five years of fuss and fury, you'll find as I have that the mountain of publicity has produced a mouse. Judith Chris, New York Herald Tribune. Joe called the critics professional assassins. The guillotine had dropped. I think the most devastating moment came when reviews were terrible. Joe's agent, Robbie Lance, says the critiques of the screenplay in particular deeply depressed Joe. When you open the morning paper and you are Joe Mankiewicz and well known for being so angry and so concerned with the quality of language. And you read in the Herald Tribune some terrible review about your writing. It's not cheerful. Not cheerful. Definitely not cheerful. But Joe put on his game face. He went on the Today Show where he defended Liz and Richard against the critics. What some of the critics have done, what means almost an unforgivable sin as far as the role of the critic is concerned, which is to confuse the personal antics of personal life of the artist with his work. In a later interview, Joe took aim at Fox Studio head Darrell Zanuck. Joe blames Zanuck for the decision to make Cleopatra one film instead of two. I made two rather good films that no one ever saw or ever will see. You always felt that in a way it had been cheated. That's Joe's son, Chris Mankiewicz. He had been cheated and the public had been cheated because so much of the wonderful work that he had done on the film was not seen. To some, all that cutting to get Joe's six hour version down to four had hollowed out the movie. Where was the energy, the passion? Or, as the actor Martin Landau put it, that trademark Mankiewicz wit. Unfortunately, a lot of the clever dialogue that usually permeates a Joe Mankiewicz film was removed because when you take two hours out of a movie and it's a big spectacle, something has to suffer. David Kamp, who wrote about Cleopatra for Vanity Fair, says Liz Taylor eventually saw the film in London. She went back to her suite at the Dorchester Inn as she told me. I threw up. They just made it into a parade of costume changes. It had such potential of being a classy film. In the months after the premiere, Joe's son, Chris, got married. Actually, one of the actresses from the film. She played one of Cleopatra's handmaidens. Joe relaxed in Sands Point, a village on Long Island that inspired the great Gatsby. Joe participated in the March on Washington and saw Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech. And apparently, he did a lot of nothing. Many pages in his diary are blank, or they have just one word, golf. The fact is, after Cleopatra, Joe couldn't shake the feeling of humiliation. I've never been ridiculed in my life, and that was something I just couldn't take. And that completely immobilized me. But with real, I wouldn't... they didn't want to see people. Joe was pretty much a broken guy after Cleopatra. My cousin, Nick Davis, says Joe entered a particularly dark period. It took a tremendous amount out of him. Hume Cronin said that he was really worried that Joe was actually going to die. He didn't die, but there was a sense afterwards that he was never again going to be the same man. That his career had taken an unrecoverable hit. That's coming up after the break. The Ripple Effect from Cleopatra hit the others too. For better and for worse. Critics continued to praise Rex Harrison. The forgotten man, Mr. Rex Harrison, brings to Caesar dignity, strength, a world weirdness, and a sense of irony and beauty. Rex rode the wave of those reviews all the way into a hit movie the next year. My fair lady. The indisputable first choice for the role of Professor Henry Higgins was Rex Harrison, the man who created the character. It won the Academy Award for Best Picture of 1961. The first film to be released in the United States was The Man Who Created the Character. It won the Academy Award for Best Picture of 1964 and earned Rex and Oscar for playing Henry Higgins. I'll make a duchess of this dragletail gutter snipe. We'll start today, now, this moment. Rex, however, never stopped being proud of his work in Cleopatra. Here he is in a 1971 interview. What is the part that's given you most satisfaction? I think really of all the parts that I've played, I've enjoyed Caesar the most. I think Caesar gave me more satisfaction than taking Higgins. The producer, Walter Wanger, the man who came up with the idea for a Cleopatra movie and put the entire production together, didn't fare so well. After he was fired in 1962, Wanger didn't know what to do with himself. So he put together a tell-all memoir. He called it My Life with Cleopatra. Walter writing My Life with Cleopatra, publishing it that it was unheard of in the early 60s. Matthew Bernstein, who wrote a biography of Wanger, says the memoir was the first of its kind from a movie producer. He didn't even wait until the film premiered. He published it like a month before the film opened. People were stunned that he was willing to tell all this. The book made waves in Hollywood. Spyrus Scurus sued Wanger for libel. But the director, John Ford, wrote Wanger a fan letter thanking him for telling the truth about studio meddling. But even with the book, Cleopatra left Wanger feeling like a failure. Must I at my age again start at the bottom to proclaim my independence and to have some self-respect? Wanger sank into a deep depression. In his diary entries, he described it as a prison cell. My mind is like a lot of mush. Good God, in three years, if I'm dead, I'll be 70 years old. How ridiculous can a human comedy be? I suppose there are no limits. No limits at all. Five years after Cleopatra, Walter Wanger died of a heart attack in New York. He was 74. And the lovebirds of the production, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, they got married. Elizabeth asked Cleopatra costume designer Irene Sheriff to design her gown, a modern take on the outfit Cleopatra wore in the first scene Liz and Richard shot together. What are you doing in Mexico? Several months into their marriage, a reporter stopped the newlyweds at the airport on their way to Mexico. How do you feel, Dick? Liz says she's never been happier in her life than with you. Yeah, I feel the same way. It'll last a while. A while? Watch it. It was a ten-year marriage, but a chaotic one. All right, George, what do you want? An equal battle, baby. That's all. You'll get it. I want you mad. I'm mad. Get madder. Don't worry about it. It's not a stretch to say they played out aspects of their relationship on screen. It's easy to talk about Warner Brothers' new motion picture, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. It's hard to tell about it. Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf? In 1966, Liz and Richard starred together in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. An adaptation of the Edward Albee play. It traces a rowdy night in the home of a drunken, volatile couple. Flood and sorrow! George, stop it, mama. I hope that was an empty bottle, George. You can't afford to waste good liquor. The film was a hit. Liz's performance earned her a second best actress Oscar. David Camp says Liz's next films were disappointments by comparison. She even starred in a few less-than-memorable movies with Richard Burton. He's kind of cheesy international jet-set movies. Yeah, like the VIPs and Boom and the comedians. Titles alone, Ben, say it all. Yeah, once divorce is, divorce hers. Yes, yes. A match set of films about divorce. Why did we get married? No, seriously, why? People in love, I thought. Elizabeth and Richard might have been making films about divorce, but their star power as a married couple was unmatched, and they relished it. What does 6.9.4 carats really mean? What it means is the most expensive diamond in the world. That's what it means. You're always giving Elizabeth presents like that bit of ice cube you have on your finger there, dear. What's to keep me cool? That's a beauty. That's the big one, isn't it? That's not small, is it? No. Sure. He became so famous, so rich, so photographed, there was a kind of vulgarity about it. Nancy Schoenberger wrote Furious Love, a book about Liz and Richard. She said the couple became tabloid celebrities, the public more interested in their private lives than their performances. At one point they were so famous they had to live on their yacht. They were too famous to live on land. In a way, Richard had been asking for celebrity life the minute he pursued Liz. Somehow, he knew she'd make him millions. That's what he told my uncle Joe. Here's Joe in a 1988 documentary. Burton said when he got very young, I'll use her. The phrase, I'll use her. She's going to make me millions. Where's he going? I think that as a result of my marriage to Elizabeth, I became a far more important actor than I was before. Though it's not very easy for me to say that. Liz was used to having cameras in her face. She'd grown up with them. Years after Cleopatra in a BBC interview, Richard marveled at how immune she was to the paparazzi frenzy. Elizabeth used to have a kind of private veil that she put on in public, where she didn't seem to notice photographers or journalists or whatever. She walked through them all as if through a vacuum. Richard never quite figured out how to handle the attention. Burton was really a kind of quiet, bookish man. He traveled with a suitcase full of Shakespeare's plays. He liked his solitude and he did not know, in his words, he didn't know how to be private in public. At one point, the great actor Lawrence Olivier sent Richard a telegram. It said, make up your mind. Do you want to be a household name or a great actor? Richard replied, both. They may not be mutually exclusive, but in Richard's case, they were. He himself felt that he had, in a sense, sold his soul to the devil. He was drawn to the Faust myth. He saw himself as Faust. Faust sold his soul for Richard's fame, knowledge, and the most beautiful woman in the world. And so Richard totally identified with that character. Richard's critics said he wasted his talent failing to live up to his full potential as an actor. How does he handle it? Well, he was a big drinker and the drinking got worse and worse throughout their marriage. In 1974, Liz and Richard divorced. Then a year later, they married again, followed soon by a second divorce. Still, they remained close to the rest of Richard's life. In 1984, Richard Burton died from complications caused by a lifetime of alcoholism. He was only 58. Just days before he died, Richard wrote Liz a letter. The contents have never been made public. But we know that Liz kept it in her bedside drawer until the day she died. I want to be free of you, of wanting you, of being afraid. That Caesar would not permit it. Liz finally watched Cleopatra in its entirety in the 1970s. She watched it with her kids. After the movie ended, she apparently shrugged, then said, The film's not all that bad. The story of Cleopatra, the bloated budget, the affairs, the illnesses and so on. Those stories have been told and retold. And with each retelling, every detail gets toddlerier, every tale taller. Now it's the stuff of legend and myth. Some of what gets repeated about Cleopatra just isn't true. I ran some of the myths by David Camp so he could tell me which were true and which were false. First, Cleopatra was a failure because in the end, it cost the studio $40 million. False. Cleopatra actually ended up turning a profit. And this is where Spiros Scuros deserves credit because his background was as an exhibitor. He was good at drumming up enthusiasm for it. So much enthusiasm that moviegoers paid a premium price for exclusive screenings around the film. By 1966, three years after the premiere, the movie broke even. When Fox sold the TV broadcast rights to ABC for $5 million, a record at the time. The other narrative is that Cleopatra is not a good film. False. I think Joe Mankiewicz had his worst experience on Cleopatra, but the movie is not a bad movie. Despite the reviews, Cleopatra became the number one film at the box office for 1963. It earned nine Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, plus a Best Actor nod for Rex Harrison. It ended up winning four Oscars, Best Cinematography, Art Direction and Special Effects, as well as one for the elaborate costumes. And the final narrative that I think sticks with a lot of people, even movie fans, people who love movies is that Cleopatra is the movie that destroyed a studio. False. It was kind of a bridge movie in terms of turning a profit to 1965, two years after its release, when the sound of music came out, and when the sound of music came out, that kind of saved Fox. And that's why Fox is still around today. Patrick Humphries says Cleopatra did mark a shift in the movie business. The transition from old Hollywood to new Hollywood was underway. I think Cleopatra was one of the nails into the coffin of the old Hollywood. It's like a kind of beached whale, you know, it lies there. It's sort of somehow symbolic of the end of an era. Old Hollywood thrived on a system where the studios called the shots, controlling everything from casting to editing. They could make or break stars. But by the mid-1960s, the landscape had shifted dramatically. Independent filmmakers were gaining ground, and the studio system was changing. They put out movies like Bonnie and Clyde. We Rock Thanks. Easy Ride. You got a helmet? Oh, I've got a helmet. And The Graduate. Mrs. Robinson, you're trying to seduce me. These were made on infinitesimal budgets compared to Cleopatra. Probably what they spent on coffee on Cleopatra was probably the entire budget for the graduate. The content of the movies was also different. These were smaller in scale, gritty and sexy, with stories that reflected a younger generation. I'm walking here! I'm walking here! What people wanted was motorbikes, sex and drugs and rock and roll. We who make films, members of the Academy, are terribly proud of the filmmakers and their product. Each year films are more widely accepted as a really true art. Here's Liz Taylor at the 1970 Oscars, only seven years after Cleopatra. She was presenting the award for Best Picture of 1969. The winner is Midnight Cowboy. That is how the decade ended, with Elizabeth Taylor, a queen of the studio era, presenting the Oscar for John Schlesinger's Midnight Cowboy. It was an X-rated film that just a few years earlier would have seemed far too controversial for major awards. This was a brave new Hollywood, which leads me to wonder, where did Joe Mankiewicz fit in? That's coming up after the break. So we opened my dashboard for the only positive-sounding metric I had. Impressions. He was angry, he was humiliated and he was depressed. The biographer Sidney Stern says he lost the passion for making movies. He wasn't used to public appropriation. This felt like a failure to him. And he was also so run down physically as well as psychologically. But Joe did get back in the director's chair. He made three movies in pretty quick succession. The first for TV, then a post-modern comedy, and an ironic Western. Unfortunately, none of them were hits. And this, as they say, is where the plot thickens. Then in 1970, Joe caught a break. He and Rosemary went to see a play in London's West End called Sleuth. Immediately this seemed like good material for Joe to make a movie out of. The story was a mystery thriller, a showdown between a man and his wife's lover. It was safe territory for Joe. A two-hander, heavy in dialogue and intrigue. He had said after Cleopatra, he wished he could make a movie with two actors and a telephone booth after dealing with the cast of thousands. So with Sleuth, he kind of got that. Joe cast a couple of top-notch actors. Lawrence Olivier and Michael Cain. It's a good thing I am pretty much of an Olympic sexual athlete. Yes, I suppose these days you are concentrating more on the sprints than on the long-distance stuff. Both were nominated for Academy Awards and Joe for Best Director. Sleuth was an unalloyed success, so it was very gratifying to Joe and very validating to Joe. Joe was 62 years old when he directed Sleuth. Arguably, he had at least another 10 years to make films, maybe more. But after Sleuth, there was nothing. No more Joe Mankiewicz movies. He stopped cold. Hello, cousin. Hello, cousin. Hello, cousin. My cousin Alex was born after Cleopatra in 1966. She only knew her dad in his later years. Alex says she grew up in a cozy home, a fire in the fireplace, Joe in a cushy leather chair, surrounded by books and dogs. A golden lab named Brutus, a black lab named Cassius, and a terrier named Portia. All named for Shakespeare characters. There were sort of two or three movie nights, probably a year, where the old projector was gotten out and there was a screen came down at the end of the living room or whatever. And a few people were invited over and I got to be the projectionist, which was totally useless skill, but one I still have. I thought you had developed a big protective feeling. Even though Cleopatra was off limits, never to be mentioned, Alex saw evidence of the toll it had taken on her dad. I remember wrestling with him as a kid and he had these like absolutely leathery upper shoulders, the outside of his shoulder muscle was just like hard leather. And of course that's where he injected the stimulant. Joe's family was a bright spot. Post-Cleopatra, he emerged as a family man, the type that his older children rarely saw. Here he is in 1973. I met and married Rosemary, who was the single best human being I have ever met in my life. I have a seven year old daughter, more I am absolutely dotting about. I'm dotting about both of them. I have the happiest life I've ever had. It's comforting to hear that Joe was content in his personal life. The last 20 years was pretty much torture. But Alex says her father was unhappy professionally. He pretty much had a writer's block for close to 20 years, which was largely fueled by a sense that he should have done something other than make movies. Joe believed he should write a novel or a play. And in the years after Sleuth, he insisted on trying. He never sort of got up and said, you know, I'll just read today. It was, I've got to get to work. There was never letting himself go and go, you know, I don't need to work today. For years, Joe would wake up, go to his desk, sit down and stare at his typewriter. Joe's writer's block was something I heard a lot about in my family. My dad told me about it. My cousins talked about it. Now that I have a fuller picture of what happened to Joe during the making of Cleopatra, I wonder if he was suffering from work related PTSD. Like the welts on his hands, the writer's block was kind of a mental symptom of extreme stress, one that haunted him for years. People often see writer's block as a frustrating obstacle, a wall between you and your work. But I wonder if somewhere deep down, my uncle thought the wall isn't only blocking me, it's keeping me safe. Good evening. I'm Carl Molden, president of the Academy. On May 6, 1991, the Samuel Goldwyn Theatre in Beverly Hills was sold out, a packed house. On behalf of my fellow governors and the members of the Academy, I'm pleased to welcome you to tonight's special tribute to one of the true legends of American filmmaking, Joseph L. Mankowicz. Joe was 82 years old when the Academy of Motion Pictures honored him for his work. He watched from the audience as scenes from his films played on the big screen. I believe in myself and I am answerable to myself. I will not live according to printed mottos like the directions on a medicine bottle. The witty dialogue. But whether or not she thinks she's listening, she's being penetrated. The good thing she didn't hear you say that. The sharp humor and the sophistication. It's about time the piano realized it has not written the concerto. Friends and colleagues took the stage to salute Joe and to thank him. At one point, Roddy McDowell, who played Octavian and Cleopatra, walked to the stage. He praised Joe's career and described their most famous collaboration. The last of the truly great film spectacles, the subsequently wildly successful and much maligned Cleopatra. Since starting this project, that line, wildly successful and much maligned, is perhaps the best summation I've ever heard of Cleopatra. The last decades of Joe's life, a portrait of his father, Franz, hung on the wall of his study. Alex remembers Franz's disapproving eyes. That portrait looked down upon Dad every day of his working life in his personal study, watching over his work or non-work. I have no idea where it is now. I know where it is. It's in my house. Oh, you've got it now. One of my cousins passed the portrait on to me a decade or so ago. I thought of it only as a family heirloom, a testimony to my great-grandfathers' proud but judgmental personality. Looking at the Franz portrait now, I can see what it might have represented to Joe, a feeling of inadequacy about a career in movies. Which is at the root of what has now become kind of the infamous distillation of our entire family, that Hollywood was not enough. My father died before I did anything, really. In an interview later in Joe's life, he opened up about his relationship with Franz. I'd like to have somebody achieve. You wrote that well. You wrote that well, you did a good job. You're a whatever the hell it is. If Joe wanted to hear that, man, I wish I'd gotten the chance to tell him. I said as much when I spoke to my cousin Alex, and then she told me this story about Joe. I walked into his study. I can see him. He was sitting at his typewriter, staring at it. His writer's block had gotten to the point of not only could he not type anything, you know, he couldn't write a Christmas card. Anyway, so he's sitting at his typewriter and he said, I'm having an epiphany. And I said, what? I'll come back later. And I did. And I came back with my mother, not necessarily expecting any elaboration, because sometimes we talked in that way, but certainly he wasn't someone who just, you know, constantly opened up his inner thoughts. And he said, you know, I've been sitting here and I've been thinking and looking out at this property and these beautiful trees and the house. And he said, you know, I've done well with my life. I have this house and it's life. And my mother and I just sort of, we don't want to move at this point. And he said, you know, I've made some really good films. I've touched a lot of people with them. I've done well. The next morning with his assistant, he started answering correspondence. They started working on notes for his memoir. Joe Mankiewicz died three months later on February 5, 1993. He was 83 years old. I looked up Joe's obituary, fearing he'd be remembered for the nightmare that was Cleopatra. After all, my family so often framed it that way, comparing Cleopatra with Citizen Kane, written by my grandfather, Joe's older brother, Herman. I was relieved by what I found. This is the first line of Joe's obituary in the New York Times. Joseph L. Mankiewicz, a writer, director and producer, who was one of Hollywood's most literate and intelligent filmmakers, died yesterday at Northern Westchester Hospital in Mount Kisco, New York. Cleopatra isn't mentioned until the ninth paragraph. To this day, Alex is grateful for her father's epiphany. So am I. The tragedy would have been had he been dead without that realization. And just such a clear example of how you have to make peace with yourself. After two decades of struggle, it's pretty remarkable to think the turning point for Joe Mankiewicz happened on just an average day at home. A breezy afternoon on the farm. And my Uncle Joe, sitting at his desk, ready to work. Angela Carone is our director of podcasts. Story editor is Rob Rosenthal. Yako Friedman is our senior producer. Script writing by Yako Friedman, Natalia Winkleman and Angela Carone. Research and fact checking by the indispensable James Sheridan. Audio editing and sound design by Mike Volgeras. Mixing by Glenn Mutulo. Production support from Liz Winter, Allison Fire, Matthew Oenby, Julie Bitton, Emma Morris, Jordan Chips, Nicole Hill and David Corwin and Patches. Thanks to our legal team, John Renau and Kristen Hassel. The following TCM staffers help us get the word out about our podcast. So thank you to Alina Novick, Katie Daniels, David Byrne, Diana Bosch, Caroline Wigmore, Michelle Height and Stephanie Tames. Our executive producer is Charlie Tabish. And a special thank you to the Archivists at the American Film Institute, the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research and Boston University. We could not make these podcasts without the work of Archivists around the country. Special thanks to my family, especially my cousins, Alex Mankiewicz and Nick Davis. I regret that I never got to interview my cousins, Tom and Chris Mankiewicz. They died before we started production. Thomas Avery of Tune Welders composed our theme music. This has been season six of The Plot Thickens. They podcast from Turner Classic Movies. I'm Ben Mankiewicz. All of us at TCM are so glad you found us and really glad you listened. Thank you.
