TCM’s Ben Mankiewicz on Elizabeth Taylor’s ‘Cleopatra’ and the Scar It Left On His Family (EXCLUSIVE)

When Ben Mankiewicz began work on the sixth season of The Plot Thickens, TCM’s long-form podcast, he knew this one would be unlike the seasons preceding it in that the story was personal. The season is devoted to the 1963 epic Cleopatra—a movie that consumed years of his great-uncle Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s life and left scars that never fully healed.

“It forced me to reconcile some things about my own family,” Ben says. “I was struck by how long it took me to not have a little bit of a chip on my shoulder. Thankfully, the term ‘nepo baby’ wasn’t around. If it had been, people would’ve used it on me, I’m sure. My grandfather had been dead 14 years when I was born. Joe had been dead for more than 30 years. They were writers. My dad, on the other hand, was a big deal in Democratic politics—the smartest person everybody knew. That was the person I was most afraid of riding coattails on.”

Ben admits he spent years underselling his famous lineage. The Mankiewicz family name carries weight in Hollywood history: Herman J. Mankiewicz co-wrote Citizen Kane; Joseph L. Mankiewicz directed and wrote All About Eve and Letter to Three Wives; other family members, from Don to Chris, John and Tom to Nick Davis, have left their mark in writing, directing and producing.

“I don’t know that I fully embraced it until I was at TCM,” he says. “I’ve said for years that I’m very proud of being from this family, very proud of all that Joe and Herman accomplished. And I don’t have to undersell it anymore. I’m not making films, I’m not winning Oscars—but I’m talking about them. TCM has a really important role in maintaining this cultural legacy of classic films and I’m proud to be a Mankiewicz carrying on that legacy.”

Even the act of telling Joe’s story brought small moments of self-discovery, though Ben initially agonized over how to refer to Joe on the podcast.

“I started calling him my uncle, because you can’t say ‘great uncle’ in storytelling. It sounds silly,” he recalls. “It’s a peculiar phrase. I realized, he’s my uncle. Great uncles are uncles—they count.”

The process of making the Cleopatra season wasn’t just about chronicling a notorious Hollywood production, but coming to grips with family, legacy and how personal history intertwines with public myth as well.

“I think I’ve finally reached the point where I embrace it,” Ben says. “I am who I am. This is the family I was born with. My dad put zero pressure on me except to try. I thought I’d have a career as a baseball broadcaster or in politics, helping someone I believed in. Instead, I ended up with this gig. TCM has defined my professional life. And doing this season helped me finally get comfortable with all of it.”

The film that broke Joe Mankiewicz 

The emotional core of the Cleopatra season is the story of Joe Mankiewicz himself—a brilliant writer-director whose career was derailed by the very film that should have been his crowning achievement.

“I came out of it with a much greater understanding of what a tragic figure Joe is in this,” Ben reflects. “Everybody else who endured terrible things on that movie—Elizabeth Taylor was genuinely sick, Richard Burton faced scrutiny—emerged from it as stars. Joe was broken in some really discernible ways.”

The production’s difficulties are legendary. Joe inherited a project already in chaos: the original shoot in London collapsed after Taylor nearly died from pneumonia, and the film was relocated to Rome. The cost ballooned as sets were rebuilt, schedules stretched and headlines screamed about delays.

His perfectionism and sense of duty drove him to the edge. He directed during the day and rewrote at night, relying on stimulants to stay awake and sedatives to sleep. He served as a mediator for his cast, which included not just Taylor and Burton, but Rex Harrison and, briefly, Eddie Fisher.

“He desperately needed another writer,” Ben explains. “You can’t direct a movie like that by day, write at night, serve as a therapist to Elizabeth and Richard and maintain any kind of stability. He didn’t have the right producer either. A strong producer might have shielded him from the chaos, the studio pressure, and the little expenses that spiraled out of control. But he didn’t have that. Walter Wanger was there, but he didn’t have the firm producing hand that this kind of project needed.”

The lack of insulation left Joe to absorb every stress. He poured himself into the movie and emerged shattered.

“He made 20 pictures, and in his house in Bedford, all the posters for those movies lined the staircase—except one,” Ben says. “Cleopatra was the unspoken absence. Nobody said, ‘We can’t talk about that movie,’ but it made him sad. His daughter Alex didn’t want to make him sad. His wife Rosemary didn’t want to make him sad. And eventually, he became afraid of failure in a way he hadn’t been before. For the last 20 years of what could’ve been a vibrant time for him, he couldn’t write.”

The writer’s block was profound. He made two more films in the 1960s—The Honey Pot and There Was a Crooked Man—but he didn’t write them. “After Cleopatra, the criticism just stung more,” Ben says. “Not every movie’s going to be All About Eve, but after that experience, tepid reviews paralyzed him.”

Myth and the reality of ‘Cleopatra’

In Hollywood lore, Cleopatra is synonymous with financial disaster—a movie so out of control it nearly destroyed 20th Century Fox. Ben Mankiewicz has spent years untangling the reality from the myth.

“It’s not a disaster,” he says plainly. “It didn’t kill the studio. It made money. Flat out, under any form of Hollywood accounting, it made money. It was just nerve-wracking. For a good stretch, it was the only film in production at Fox, and they did have to sell part of the backlot—which became Century City—to stay afloat. But by 1966, after a network TV sale, the movie was in the black. And when Fox made The Sound of Music soon after, they were as rich as could be.”

The perception of catastrophe was fueled by cost overruns and by the media’s obsession with the production. Stories about million-dollar sets, endless delays and outrageous spending captured the public imagination. And Joe Mankiewicz, who had delivered Oscar-winning scripts and sophisticated character studies, was suddenly the face of what looked like a runaway train.

Ben points to the absence of a firm producing hand as one reason the production spiraled. He often compares Cleopatra’s behind-the-scenes debacle to another notorious Hollywood misfire: Bonfire of the Vanities (1990).

“Brian De Palma was asked to do too much on Bonfire,” Ben says. “He didn’t have a producer like Irwin Winkler, who could’ve stood up to the studio, made smart decisions and kept the movie from becoming an embarrassment. If Winkler had produced Bonfire, it might not have been a classic, but it would’ve been fine. And Cleopatra suffered from the same thing. Joe wasn’t there to pinch pennies or fight with the art department about a prop that wouldn’t even show on camera. That wasn’t his job. Someone else needed to do that.”

The anecdotes from The Plot Thickens season illustrate how even small decisions had big consequences. Ben tells the story of Joe’s ill-fated screening for the Fox executives, where he attempted to sell them on his original vision: two three-hour films, one focused on Cleopatra and Julius Caesar, the other on Cleopatra and Mark Antony.

“They started at seven-thirty at night and watched the first three hours,” Ben recounts. “Then they went to dinner in Rome at ten-twenty—because you can do that in Italy—and came back at midnight for the second half. They finished at two-forty-five in the morning. Joe later wrote that it was foolish not to wait until the next day for the second screening. Those little decisions—you don’t know how big they’ll be, but that one probably doomed his pitch for two films. The execs were exhausted. Maybe they were never going to say yes anyway, but it certainly didn’t help.”

Fox, desperate for revenue after sinking around $40 million into the production, demanded a single release. Joe’s preferred version was never seen, and the studio’s edits undercut his structure. “Every studio in the world today would take that offer—two movies for the price of one,” Ben says. “But back then, they wanted one movie that made money fast.”

The truncated Cleopatra hit theaters in June 1963. Its opening was strong enough to calm the immediate panic, and through pre-sold tickets and the previously mentioned eventual television deal with NBC, the film turned a profit by 1966. Yet the perception of a flop stuck, largely because of the headlines generated during production.

Scandal, paparazzi and cultural obsession

If the financial story is more complicated than legend suggests, the cultural impact of Cleopatra is undeniable. What truly captivated the world wasn’t the movie itself, but rather the spectacle surrounding it.

“The fascination isn’t the movie,” Ben explains. “It’s the story around the movie. It’s Liz and Richard. It’s the first time the production of a film became a story in itself. The cost overruns were in the papers. Paparazzi were hiding in trees and under cars to capture them kissing. The Vatican newspaper even charged Elizabeth Taylor with ‘erotic vagrancy.’ Nobody cared about Richard Burton. She got the blame, but the world was riveted.”

In 1963, the idea that the making of a movie could dominate international headlines was novel. Until then, the public rarely knew—or cared—what a movie cost, but Cleopatra’s spending became a sensation.

“Back then, people didn’t connect budget to ticket price,” Ben notes. “Nobody said, ‘I won’t go because it cost too much.’ But this was everywhere. It became the birth of paparazzi as we know it. You had photographers literally in trees, under cars, doing whatever they could to get that shot of Liz and Richard. It was Hollywood excess, romance and scandal all rolled together.”

Taylor and Burton’s affair gave the press everything it wanted: glamour, betrayal and a moral panic tailor-made for the era. Taylor had already endured tabloid scrutiny for her relationship with Eddie Fisher, which ended his marriage to America’s sweetheart, Debbie Reynolds. Now, she was leaving Fisher for Burton, a married man himself.

“In hindsight, her relationship with Eddie Fisher was supremely human,” Ben reflects. “They were drawn together by grief after the death of Mike Todd. But the public saw her as a homewrecker, and this affair with Burton just amplified that. And the Vatican literally accusing her of erotic vagrancy—that’s a headline you can’t make up.”

The movie and the scandal became intertwined. To the public, Cleopatra wasn’t just a historical epic; it was a symbol of Hollywood out of control. And that association has endured far longer than the film’s original box office run.

“People are still talking about Cleopatra 63 years later,” Ben says. “That’s proof that people still care, even if they don’t quite know why. It’s part scandal, part Hollywood history, part cautionary tale.”

TCM generations

For Ben Mankiewicz, exploring Cleopatra through The Plot Thickens wasn’t only about untangling family history or debunking myths. It also reinforced something he’s seen firsthand at TCM: the enduring power of classic film to reach new audiences.

“We worry about the future of classic film, sure,” he says. “But you don’t need a hundred million Americans to care. You just need a couple million who care deeply. People age into it. At some point, you’re less dazzled by superheroes punching each other into buildings. You start wanting to see people talking under pressure. That’s what great movies do—and that’s what thousands of classic films still offer.”

Ben has been with TCM for over two decades, long enough to see the conversation around classic film evolve. Early on, network executives worried about an aging audience. “When I started—unbelievably, 22 years ago—the concern was obvious,” he says. “We have an older audience. At some point, that population is going to be unavailable to us. That’s how this works. And yet, here we are 22 years later and we’re still doing as well as ever.”

One of the reasons, he believes, is that some viewers discover—or rediscover—classic movies as they get older. Others come in through personal connection: films their parents or grandparents loved, movies that carry memories of people who are gone.

Ben points to the TCM Classic Film Festival as proof that the pipeline of new fans is real. “I’ve seen it firsthand,” he says. “There’s a wide range of ages in that audience. Teenagers, people in their twenties, families with kids, and longtime fans who’ve been with us since the beginning. They’re all in the same theater, watching a movie made decades before they were born.”

He sees that diversity as a sign that classic film isn’t going away—it just doesn’t need to appeal to everyone at once.

“Young filmmakers are a big part of that,” he explains. “These days, the value of movies being made under $3 million is that filmmaking is available in a way it didn’t used to be. These young people are shooting everything practically. They’re not using CGI. They’re learning to tell stories with what they have. And they’re better off learning from All About Eve than from Avengers: Endgame. You learn more about storytelling from watching actors under pressure than from watching buildings fall on superheroes.”

The filmmaking world Ben describes is polarized between microbudget projects and blockbuster behemoths. “One of the sayings you hear at lunches in L.A.,” he notes, “is that you can make a movie up to $3 million, or a movie for $300 million, and nothing in between. It’s a gross overstatement, but it gives you a sense of where the industry is at.”

Studios are risk-averse, betting hundreds of millions on “known IP” rather than original stories. To Ben, that only makes TCM’s mission more important. Classic movies are a living archive of a different kind of filmmaking that is story-driven, character-focused and often deeply personal.

“Eventually, a lot of people age into wanting that,” he says. “You get to a point where you want to see human stakes, not just visual spectacle. And TCM is there to meet that need. The fact that people are still talking about Cleopatra, more than 60 years later, is proof. Even if they don’t all watch the movie, the story still resonates.”

Joe Mankiewicz’s experience on Cleopatra remains a cautionary tale—a brilliant filmmaker brought low by a combination of ambition, circumstance and a merciless production environment. But in telling that story, Ben has also highlighted the human cost behind the headlines.

“I think I came out of it with a deeper respect for what Joe went through,” he says. “He was determined to make it work. He gave everything to it and it broke him. But he also left behind a story that’s still worth telling—not just the movie, but the experience, the lessons and the legacy.”

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