The Bible as Living Technicolor

"This is the world's greatest picture from the world's greatest book," says the reigning flack, as he watches 3,500 body-tanned extras toiling with baskets of plastic bricks up the staircases and setbacks of the Tower of Babel on the set south of Rome. "Here," says the associate producer, "you have the first love story, the first sin, the first murder, the first boat and the first skyscraper." "All these fantastic stories," marvels the prime mover of all, Italian Producer Dino de Laurentiis, "it would be incredible if it weren't the Bible."

It is the Bible, and all the more incredible for being so. When De Laurentiis first embarked on his epic, he envisioned a ten-hour film, costing $25 million and depicting nearly all the still waters and flaming furnaces, from Creation to Gethsemane. When he actually started shooting the picture in Rome last May, he had boiled it down to a mere three-hour, $15 million Technicolor frieze of episodes from Genesis 1-22, with Christopher Fry writing the script and a cast of a dozen stars, including Ava Gardner, as the Mother of the Jews, and John Huston, who plays Noah and also directs the film.

Floating Zoo. Last week Huston was functioning furiously in both guises. As Noah, with a full grey beard and wearing a coarse beige tunic, he was striding up and down the gangplank of the $300,000 ark made of roughhewn logs. As director, he moved inside the 200-ft.-long, 60-ft.-high ark--one of five to be used in the film--to supervise 200 animals that had been brought down over the Alps from Althoffs Circus and were undergoing their first try at bedding down.

The din below decks was strident.

Two honey bears started fighting and stampeded the camels, tethered opposite the elephants. Noah's son Japheth, played by one of Althoff's animal trainers, was using baby talk to soothe a pair of lions and Siberian tigers in their glassed-in cages. Elsewhere in the hold, zebras nipped, sheep bleated, yaks grunted and Watusi bulls bellowed. But the real test is yet to come. This week the whole zoo, accompanied by some 1,000 birds, will make its way up the gangplank, two by two. "My God," groaned Huston, "how the hell did Noah do it?"

Two Eves. Adam talks hip, and can only be photographed from one side because of his coinlike vaccination mark.

Eve was originally a languorous Italian brunette, but De Laurentiis promoted an international newspaper straw vote to find out whether the world thought of Eve as blonde or dark, and a few thousand Western Europeans in effect declared that they could not see how the mother of mankind could have come from any place east of Sweden. Eve is now a Swedish girl named Ulla Bergryd who has been accustomed to stalking about in only long tresses while paparazzi keep leaping out of the foliage to take her picture. Huston has decided that there will be no fig leaves after the Fall. He said he tried aprons of fig leaves but "they looked too much like G strings." Instead, Adam and Eve will clutch whole branches of vine leaves to hide their nakedness.

"The picture won't be like DeMille's," says one of De Laurentiis' assistants. "DeMille would take the 40 years of Moses' life not covered by the Bible and he would create a motion picture story. We have tried faithfully to reproduce and annotate the text of the Bible." Christopher Fry apparently was not told this because, although the Bible gives no hint what instrument Cain used in killing Abel, the Fry Bible does. In showing the world's first fratricide, Fry has the psychotically jealous Cain pick up an ass's jawbone--si, si, Samson, an ass's jawbone--and bash Abel. The jawbone was custom-built out of hard rub ber. Cain missed Abel's upper cranium the first time he used it, and the scene had to be interrupted for nearly a week until the black and blue patch subsided.

Efficient Cost. Special-effects men are having their finest hour. The top of the Tower of Babel was shot in Egypt, where 4,000 sun-baked Egyptians were hired to play Babylonian extras. One day only 1,500 arrived for work, so armadas of taxicabs had to be sent out through the streets of Cairo to pick up anything that moved on two feet. The bottom of Babel's tower was shot near Rome, where one genius in the makeup department ran around with cans of something called Clean Fly, which he sprayed on pale Italians to turn them brickbrown; these secret ingredients have worked--except when January winds sweep down from the north; then the extras have been registering blue.

One of the smaller arks has been moored just below a tributary of the Tiber; soon the gates will be open and the deluge will result. Sodom has been built out of charred plastic and spreads over 25 acres of Mount Etna. Katherine Dunham and her dancers were called in to provide the sin. Huston filmed Sodom dimly lit, and shied clear of the debauches of DeMille's epics. "There's no obscenity," says Huston, "but you will know unspeakable things are going on."

With only three more scenes and three more months of shooting left to go, the company is already boasting, "This is the most costly, efficiently made picture in history."

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