Great Cast - Shame about the movie - Myra Breckinridge

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Gore Vidal’s deliciously funny acidic anti-Hollywood novel Myra Breckinridge (1968) was regarded as unfilmable, but Michael Sarne bravely had a crack at it in 1970. He quickly gathered a promising big cast including Raquel Welch (in the title role), John Huston, Farrah (later the real star of Charlie’s Angels) Fawcett, singer Tony Basil, a debuting yet promising young actor called Tom Selleck and most bizarrely, Mae West. There were problems from the outset. Sarne made it clear that he deeply hated both the book and its author. His hold on the filming rights began to feel like a revenge vendetta being fulfilled. He also intentionally set his cast against one another to method out the dislike for one another their characters required. He often spent several hours pretentiously filming stock footage of tables and food, only to then use none or little of it. He thought nothing of vanishing off-set for up to seven hours at a time, leaving everyone standing around wondering why they even turned up that day. The finished result was shocking for all the wrong reasons. True, he left the book’s notorious sexual assault of a young male student by Myra scene in, but the real finishing touch was showing Myra was a transsexual from the opening scene. In the brilliant book, this is a surprise revelation presented much later in the story. Myra is being questioned by the authorities as a suspected killer as her rich and freshly married in secret reclusive husband, Myron has vanished leaving her his entire fortune. The reality is that Myra is Myron, and ultimately she is cruelly forced to turn back into him after a road accident. Mae West was supposed to be playing a younger woman though she was seventy-seven and looked like a walking cadaver. The movie also added other big name actors by default by using footage from their movies to help illustrate many scenes. Some actors got their lawyers to forcibly prevent scenes using their images to be cut. They included Shirley Temple who felt that a movie featuring transsexual rape scenes while using footage of her playing Heidi was bad for her blossoming respected political career. Sarne was pressured into giving up movie production work. Gore Vidal was embarrassed by the movie too, and sales of his books plummeted severely over it. Little was he to know that another movie he got involved with would make the Breckinridge farrago pale into insignificance - Caligula. That's another feature in the making. Arthur Chappell