Last night’s trailer before Deadwood was the first I had heard of this. Does anyone have the skinny on it? Looked like Caligula only with some extra violence and sex thrown in for good measure.
I read that it’s kind of a worm’s eye view of daily life during the time of Caesar. It’s gotten the Deadwood approach in that they can recreate the era with the sex and violence fully intact. Supposedly it’s extremely well researched. A still from Entertainment Weekly showed the actor cast as Caesar having his face painted red in preparation for a triumph – which is historically correct, though (as far as I know) Hollywood has never gotten it right.
I’m looking forward to seeing this. Damned lousy time to be without cable.
Heh. The main characters are going to be Pullo and Vorenus. It’s times like this, I wish I had HBO.
Extra violence and sex? HBO might be able to provide the extra violence, but I don’t see how they are going to top the amount (and nature of) the sex in Caligula- at least the version of it I saw…
Yeah, I read some time ago that HBO was investing a huge chunck of change in this project, but promised it would not be like those old Hollywood films of Roman times. Considering HBO has done a fine job with Deadwood showing the dirty underbelly of western life, I can imagine we are going to see a more interesting old Rome than ever seen on the screen before.
Looking forward to it a lot!
Wow. It seems like YEARS ago I read about this project. It is finally coming out?
I eagerly await the DVDs (I don’t get HBO).
Oh, hell yeah, am I looking forward to this. It should be great fun. However, from the snippets of dialogue that they included in the trailer they do seem to be falling into the old convention that the Romans (the aristocracy especially) all spoke British English. Personally I’d like to see them try to “invent” an “Italian-ish” Roman accent.
Ooh, I’m a big fan of I, Claudius and thus am quite excited! Thanks for sharing this info. Who’s in the cast (yeah, I’m too lazy to look it up in the IMDB)? Is there a preview/teaser out for it yet?
Also, when does it premiere? I still have two more Colleeen McCullough books I want to get through before I watch it.
Nothing worse than having people going around trying fake accents. It’s hard to pull off right. It’s a British show, so they’re going to have British accents.
Their series are the only reason I subscribe to HBO.
I wondered how, myself. The only way I could figure is if they split-screened Rome, however they planned it, with non-stop hardcore pornography.
Okay, so I’m guilty of a little hyperbole. But I still gotta say, the graphic nature of the trailer was rather impressive.
WOW… this sounds really great. I especially like the news that it’s going to be a co-production between HBO and BBC! The last time they got together was to make “Band of Brothers”.
Here is a BBC Press Release about it:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2003/10_october/27/bbc_hbo_rome.shtml
Interesting that the first two posts in this thread mentioned Deadwood, since according to a recent New Yorker profile of Deadwood creator David Milch, he originally pitched HBO a series based on urban police in ancient Rome, when there wasn’t yet a code of law and it sort of got made up as they went along. HBO liked the ideas, but had already greenlighted Rome and wasn’t ready to commit to two series set in ancient Rome, so they asked Milch if he could explore the same themes in a different setting. The result was Deadwood.
actually no!
Most pornography has at least a couple of minutes of setup time with foreplay or the cable guy coming over and the roomate coming out of the shower. Caligua was just random orgies with barely any setup in between
At least it’s not a series about Jim Rome. That blowhard gets enough airtime already!