Kirk Douglas made Spartacus after losing Ben-Hur to Charlton Heston
Kirk Douglas wanted the lead in William Wyler's Ben-Hur and watched Charlton Heston get it instead. Soon afterwards he paid out of his own pocket for the rights to a novel about a gladiator who defies Rome, then raced Yul Brynner, who had a rival gladiator picture in the works, to get it filmed first.
The book was Howard Fast's Spartacus of 1951, which Fast, himself blacklisted, had been forced to publish on his own. Edward Lewis, a vice president at Douglas's Bryna Productions, a company named for the actor's mother, brought it to him. United Artists passed because Brynner and director Martin Ritt were already preparing The Gladiators. Brynner turned down an offer to merge the projects, but Dalton Trumbo finished a script in just two weeks, and Universal agreed to pay once Douglas recruited Laurence Olivier, Charles Laughton and Peter Ustinov. Brynner's version stalled over European weather, and he went off to make The Magnificent Seven.
Production was bumpy. Jeanne Moreau refused the part of Varinia rather than be parted from the man she was seeing back home in France, and her German replacement lasted two days before Jean Simmons took over. Douglas fired director Anthony Mann three weeks into the shoot and brought in Stanley Kubrick, with whom he had made Paths of Glory. It became the one Kubrick film over which the director lacked full artistic control.
Trumbo was one of the blacklisted Hollywood Ten, and Douglas announced publicly that he had written the film. President John F. Kennedy then went to see it, walking past American Legion pickets, which helped bring the blacklist to an end. The best-remembered scene has the captured rebels shouting one after another that they are Spartacus rather than give up their leader.
Released in 1960, the epic took four Oscars from six nominations, among them Best Supporting Actor for Ustinov and Best Cinematography, and won the Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture – Drama. No Universal release earned more until Airport arrived in 1970. In 2017 it joined the National Film Registry, chosen for preservation by the Library of Congress.
Source: Spartacus (film)
