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Spartacus:
the villa of Crassus: Hearst castle, San Simeon, California
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SPARTACUS
filming locations
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CREDITS
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“In
every city and province, lists of the disloyal have
been compiled. Tomorrow they will learn the cost of
their terrible folly... their treason. ”
One
of the best, if not the best, of the great epics of
the Fifties and Sixties, scripted by Dalton Trumbo,
one of the Hollywood Ten, blacklisted in the Fifties
(the machinations of the Roman senators clearly echo
the politics of the times). The insistence of producer
Kirk Douglas
on using Trumbo's name signalled the end of the blacklist.
Filming was begun by Anthony
Mann, responsible for the opening sequence, of dealer
Batiatus (a wickedly scene-stealing Peter
Ustinov) picking Spartacus (Douglas)
from the 'Sicilian' mines (actually the parched landscape
of Death Valley,
California)
for his gladiator school. After two weeks of work, Mann
was fired and the frantic search for a new director
eventually turned up trumps with Stanley
Kubrick.
Mann, though,
proved his skill with the genre by going on to direct
two other classic epics, El
Cid and The Fall
of the Roman Empire.
Most of Spartacus
was shot on the Universal
lot in Hollywood,
although the spectacular battle sequences were filmed
in Spain,
with the Spanish army brilliantly executing the complex
manoeuvres of the ancient Romans.
The sound was something else. The roar of battle was
the sound of 76,000 football fans attending a game between
Michigan State and Notre Dame.
The villa of scheming patrician Crassus (Laurence
Olivier) is the white marble swimming pool of newspaper
magnate William Randolph Hearst at Hearst
Castle, 750 Hearst Castle
Road, San Simeon, on California’s
Pacific coast halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco.
The inspiration for Charles Foster Kane’s 'Xanadu'
in Orson Welles'
Citizen Kane, the estate
is open to the public.
HARD
COPY:
For the details of the filming locations of 1,600
of your favourite movies, check out The
Worldwide Guide to Movie Locations. 464 pages
of fascinating facts, illustrated with over 1,000 original
photographs.
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FILMING
LOCATIONS FOR SPARTACUS
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TRAVEL
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California:
Visit
San Simeon
Hearst
Castle, 750 Hearst Castle Road, San Simeon,
on Hwy-1, between Los Angeles and San Francisco
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ASSOCIATED
FILMS |
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Although
supposedly built in ‘Florida’, Charles
Foster Kane's extravagant folly, Xanadu, was
clearly based – in concept if not design
– on William Randolph Hearst's San
Simeon estate. Orson
Welles' dazzling 1941 Citizen
Kane still regularly tops movie buff polls as the Greatest Film of All Time
For more Kubrick,
see A Clockwork
Orange or Eyes
Wide Shut
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