Joan Collins in Land of the Pharaohs
Credit: Getty
In April 1954, a scorching day of slave labour was afoot, in a stone quarry near the unfinished Egyptian pyramid of Zawyet El Aryan, outside Giza. Many thousands of extras were needed to achieve one of the grandest location shots in Howard Hawks’s Land of the Pharaohs, which had just started production in an extreme state of unreadiness.
An uncharacteristically nervous Hawks hoped to put his best foot forward by getting at least one huge money shot in the can. To court favour, he sent the rushes post-haste to Jack Warner at Burbank, to show where the $1.75m budget – which would balloon to an ultimately ruinous $3.15m – was going.