Chapter 33
Jesus of Nazareth (1977)
I went back to the distant past for my next project. Not in a toga, but as a Roman centurion in Franco Zeffirelli’s 1977 epic Jesus of Nazareth. Franco is the man who gave us the classic Romeo and Juliet, among other great films.
This was my first TV miniseries. It was shot in Tunisia and we had an amazing cast. Robert Powell was Jesus, and we also had Tony Quinn, Anne Bancroft, Laurence Olivier, Claudia Cardinale, James Mason, James Earl Jones, and Christopher Plummer—in other words, “the works”! It turned out to be one of the best pictures of its kind. It was pious without being like a Sunday school class, and powerful without being over-the-top-bloody, if you catch my meaning.
Franco was a terrific director. He didn’t do much direction. He just made a little adjustment here or there, mostly toning things down. He trusted his actors. He also loved Tova’s soap. My wife had started a cosmetics line that was heavily advertised on TV and turned into a real industry. Franco liked the soap because where we were shooting the water was so hard that you couldn’t get up lather. Tova’s soap would foam up in the hardest water you could imagine.
Working in a foreign location with actors who often have thick accents is a chore. Local regulations require that local actors have to be used for smaller roles, but their English usually isn’t up to snuff and they have to be dubbed later on. For that reason, to save money, producers don’t bother recording sound on locations. They just have us come in and dub it later. Because there’s no recording, the sets tend to be very noisy with people yelling and construction workers hammering and trucks coming and going. It is incredibly difficult to concentrate.
One thing that stands out vividly on this shoot were all the animals we had, and all the animal smells. It was pretty awful. I know the beasts gave Franco a hard time, all the donkeys, giraffes, elephants, and things you wouldn’t believe. It seemed like every time you turned around, one animal wanted to attack another. (The well-endowed donkeys were ready to go at it with the giraffes.) Franco was yelling in Italian “Vada, eliminili!”—“Take them away!” and he would push them. No wonder he needed soap at the end of the day!
My first scene in this picture was when I, a great Roman warrior, went to ask Jesus to cure one of my servants, who was dying. As I started to beg, an extra ran up and said, “You should see your man, he’s well, he’s alive, he’s happy.” I looked back at this man, with his piercing blue eyes, and for a moment I was literally transported. For that second, he was Jesus Christ. It passed quickly, but it was one of the most surreal experiences I’ve had on a shoot. Not the most incredible, however. That was still to come.
I had a scene where I was looking up at Jesus after he’d been nailed to the cross. My preparation for this was pretty soul-searching. My feeling as the centurion was, “I’ve been in the army for a long time, but I don’t like what I see. This man actually saved my servant, and now look what they’re doing to him. I’m going to get out of the army.”
The shot required the cameras to be looking down on me. Jesus was not in the frame. But it was important and Franco wanted me to get it right. So he said, “I’m not going to put the actor up on the cross.”
I said, “No, just put a dot up there. I’ll be able to work from that, Don’t worry about it.” I didn’t want Powell to have to go up there.
So they put a mark where I was supposed to look and they had a camera right alongside it. They had another camera over on the other side, another camera behind me, looking down on me, and a fourth one behind the cross. Some directors like to have a lot of choices when they get in the editing room. It’s better to have too much footage than not enough.
When everything was set, I said to Franco, “Would somebody please read what Jesus said on the cross: ‘Forgive them for they know not what they do.’”
Franco said, “I will say it.”
So we started. I was looking up at this dot on the cross as Franco said the words and, so help me, I actually saw the face of the Lord. A moment later his face dropped down over his shoulder and he was dead.
Tears as big as teacups came from my eyes, I swear to God. I started bawling like a baby. I just stood there with the tears coming down. Finally I heard “Cut.”
I came back to reality, to the realization that we were actually making a picture.
Franco said, “Ernesto?”
I choked out, “Yes.”
He said, “That was wonderful. Now, Ernesto, do you think you can do it one more time with less tears?”
I wanted to kill him. He had something real on film, and now he wanted me to fake it. Well, he was the director. In the finished film viewers see pieces from both takes. Though they almost didn’t see any of them.
General Motors was sponsoring the show for Easter and when they saw the picture, they didn’t want to show me crying. I don’t know why. Maybe they thought it was a knock at the military, having a soldier cry. Or maybe they thought it was a little too reverent. I don’t know. But the Vatican came back and said, “If you don’t have the part in, we won’t sanction the picture.”
It stayed in the film.
The Greatest (1977)
I got to play another real-life sports hero in my next film, a biography of Muhammad Ali (starring Muhammad Ali) called The Greatest, which we made in 1976. I played his loyal manager, Angelo Dundee.
Ali was a strange, unpredictable guy at first. At our first meeting, I put my hand out to introduce myself, but I never got the chance. When he saw me coming, he just looked at me and asked, “Is it true that you worked with Randolph Scott?”
I said, “Yes, it’s true.”
He said, “What kind of a guy was he?”
I said, “He was a hell of a man.”
With that he smiled and walked off, never shook my hand, nothing. Too many shots to the head maybe? Who knows. I will say that he was the most natural acting talent I’ve ever seen.
Tom Gries, the director, was a brilliant young man who tragically dropped dead of a heart attack after finishing this film. Also in the cast were Robert Duvall, Ben Johnson, James Earl Jones, and John Marley, who a couple of years earlier woke up in bed with a horse’s head next to him in The Godfather. (I tested for the part of Don Cor-leone, by the way. So did Burt Lancaster. Neither of us had a shot, really. Francis Ford Coppola wanted Brando—despite the fact that he was considered box-office poison at the time—and fought the studio until he got him.)
Ali had his entourage with him, and people taking pictures, and sometimes he wouldn’t come to work until 11:00 in the morning because he didn’t feel like getting up. He was the star, so that was that.
We got to know and respect each other as time went on. I had a scene to do with him where he was lying in the hospital after his jaw had been broken in a fight. I called up Angelo Dundee and asked him, “Angelo, how did you react when you were over at the hospital? It says here that you were crying.”
He said, “Yes, I was.”
I said, “That’s all I want to know.” So as we got into the scene I cried. We finished the scene and no sooner had we heard “Cut” than Ali asked me, “How did you do that?” He wanted to know how to cry on cue.
I touched my chest and said, “Right from here, from your heart.”
He liked that. He even managed to master it. When Ali set his mind to something, he could not be beaten. I must say that we grew to love each other so much that when we parted at the end of the picture, I was crying and he was, too.
That part was real.
I’ve seen him a few times since, and he always shakes my hand. It’s terrible to see him with the affliction he has now, Parkinson’s disease. When he was first diagnosed in 1984, pundits said he didn’t have long to live. Well, nearly a quarter of a century later, he’s still here.
As I said, when Ali sets his mind to something…
Crossed Swords (1977)
I’d do pretty much anything for director Richard Fleischer, especially when it plays to his lighthearted side. He was a pretty funny guy. He came by it naturally: his father was Max Fleischer, Disney’s chief rival and the man behind the Betty Boop and Popeye cartoons, along with his brother, Dave.
Richard’s natural storytelling talents were perfect for this movie, yet another film version of Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper with an all-star cast that included Rex Harrison, Oliver Reed, Charlton Heston, George C. Scott, and my old friend Raquel Welch. I played John Canty, the gruff, SOB dad of the pauper.
There was one scene where we had a pile of horseshit on the set, which was brought in for authenticity. It was actually easier and, as you can imagine, less expensive to get than fake shit. We were rehearsing nearby when Dick said he wanted me to jump in there to hide.
I looked at him and said, “You mean I got to take a dive into that dung?”
Dick said, “I think that’ll work for the scene, don’t you?”
I said, “I guess.”
Dick said, “Well, let’s try it.”
I said, “Thanks a lot, Richard,” and I would’ve done it, too. I may be stupid, but I’m a professional.
Right before I jumped, he cracked up and told me to stop, that he’d only been kidding.
I was too relieved to laugh.
Something else that sticks with me was seeing Chuck Heston in full regalia for Henry VIII. Now Chuck’s a big guy, six-foot-four, and he made an imposing king. I wondered how accurately this reflected the real king, who was one of the most powerful leaders in history. I know Chuck did a lot of research for his parts, so I went over to ask.
Chuck admitted, “We took some liberties.”
“Ah,” I thought.
He said, “The real Henry was actually taller than I am.”