Trivia / Sodom and Gomorrah

• Creator Backlash: Few, if any, of the film's major creators regarded it as a high point in their careers. Robert Aldrich described shooting as a "marvelous experience" but called the end result a "terrible film" and said it might have worked if they had a more believable actor as Lot, Sergio Leone had scarcely a kind word to say about either the film or his experience working with Aldrich, and Miklos Rozsa, whose score is one of the most highly praised aspects of the film, described Sodom and Gomorrah as "tacky and inferior".
• Hostility on the Set: Stewart Granger (Lot) and Pier Angeli (Ildith) had previously worked together on the 1951 caper film The Light Touch, and the enmity they developed during that shoot spilled over into their work on Sodom and Gomorrah, adversely affecting their on-screen chemistry. Angeli recalled in her autobiography that she told Granger to his face that she was sleeping with all of her male co-stars except him.
• Troubled Production: True to form for epics, the process of getting Sodom and Gomorrah to the screen was fraught at best.
  • Co-producer Joseph Levine described the initial script as "bad", and when the filmmakers asked for a $1 million budget, he suggested getting a better script and a $2 million budget, 60% of which he put up himself. In the end, the budget ballooned to over $5 million (although Levine's contribution remained 60% of $2 million) and shooting took eleven months; the opening post-orgy scene was scheduled to be shot in one day, only to take three days.
  • Location shooting was done near Marrakech in Morocco, but the second unit under director Sergio Leone ran into problems with delayed shipments of costumes and weapons, while the Moroccan Army extras playing the Elamite cavalry were often unavailable due to political unrest. Robert Aldrich claimed that when he visited the second unit and an entire day went by without any film being shot, he fired Leone; Leone claimed he quit despite Aldrich asking him to stay.
  • There was bad blood between Stewart Granger and Pier Angeli from their work together on The Light Touch ten years earlier, making their scenes together a struggle for all involved; Angeli said in her autobiography that at one point, she told Granger she was sleeping with all of her male co-stars except him.
  • The original composer, Dimitri Tiomkin, told Aldrich to his face that he didn't believe in the film, particularly the final scene of Lot's wife turning into a pillar of salt; his subsequent hospitalisation for a detached retina forced him to bow out anyway, leading to his replacement by Miklos Rozsa.
• What Could Have Been: When the film was first announced, Henry Koster was attached to direct, while Stephen Boyd, fresh from his star turn as Messala in Ben-Hur, was slated to play Lot.

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