My old pal Tom Negovan is the proprietor of the Century Guild, a Los Angeles-based art gallery, publishing company, fine art print maker and private museum specializing in Art Nouveau & Symbolism. He has what I, and many other people, consider to be one of the most unusual art businesses anywhere in the world. His interests are esoteric to say the least, and his talents for finding rare gems makes him a sort of cultural cross-pollinator of the highest order. He’s also a musician and a filmmaker. 

I saw Tom last fall at a wedding in Los Angeles and he told me about a new project he was engaged in, a recut of Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione’s lone foray into cinema, the ill-fated and critically savaged X-rated epic Caligula and suggested maybe there was something there for Dangerous Minds.
 

 
Last week he told me over email about an amazing discovery he’d made:

I’m sure you know the general story: Bob Guccione took control of the production of Caligula, fired the director, and edited something with no sense of plot whatsoever. We have all 96 hours of original camera negative and all the location audio, and we are editing these to conform to Gore Vidal’s original script. This new version that we are titling Caligula MMXX will bear no resemblance to the 1980 version. The footage is brilliant; Helen Mirren and Malcolm McDowell actually made a good movie but no one’s ever seen it! (Malcolm has been saying this for 40 years in interviews.)

We are finding tons of odd rarities in the vaults: promotional items, interviews, and over 11,000 set photographs, nearly all of which have never been seen before. Mario Tursi took most of them, and we are compiling the best of them into a book. (One of the other photographers was Eddie Adams who took that award-winning photo of the Vietnamese guy getting shot in the head.)

There was even a proposed Caligula toy line(!!) if you can believe that. A company named Cinco Toys pitched Guccione, who never met a deal he didn’t like, on them getting a license to do a line of action figures. Star Wars action figures were making millions and apparently they pitched him pretty hard for this. Caligula‘s budget was twice that of Star Wars. They made a handful of prototypes for action figures. They even went so far as to make a spec TV commercial to woo Guccione to let them do this, which is extra insane. They made it like he (Guccione) would be (star) in the commercial himself and had someone do a VO as if they were Bob. And there it was on the shelf with the various drafts of the script. There was a 3/4” tape and a VHS of the same commercial with Cinco labels. They also wanted to do Caligula jigsaw puzzles.”

Obviously I had to see that! I asked Tom if he’d post it on YouTube for Dangerous Minds readers to see it, too. 

Here it is, folks: