Word: commodus
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Phoenix dropped out of school after ninth grade and finished his teens traveling in Latin America. When he returned to acting five years later, he earned raves as the mumbling killer in To Die For and an Oscar nod for his weaselly turn as Commodus in Gladiator. Walk the Line director James Mangold says both performances were seared into his memory. He noted that Phoenix looked like the young Johnny Cash, but he was more intrigued by another resemblance. "That incredible vulnerability and masculinity that James Dean had," says Mangold, "Joaq has the same thing. His face is complicated...
John Gotti thought of himself as the Caesar of the Mafia. But he was really its Commodus. As with the emperor in the movie Gladiator, when Gotti took over the Gambino crime family in 1985, some saw his ascension as a step backward for the family. He was muscle, a grunt, an obscure and none-too-bright soldier who wouldn't have become boss if so many of his betters weren't already in jail...
...like Commodus, Gotti, who died of cancer in a prison hospital last week at 61, made up for his shortcomings with entertainments. He threw Fourth of July parties for his neighbors in Queens, N.Y., making himself the toast of the locals. (His folk-heroism was always a peculiarly parochial, New York City phenomenon, like Ed Koch or egg creams.) He made like a mobster out of central casting, plunging into night life wearing $2,000 suits (hence his nickname "the Dapper Don") and taunting the feds by being acquitted three times (hence, "the Teflon Don") before the charges stuck...
Coleman had put in hundreds of hours helping screenwriter David H. Franzoni create a script that accurately represented the Roman Empire at the time of Emperor Commodus...
...Even Franzoni admits he was "bothered" by some of the semantics. He points out that addressing the Emperor Commodus as "sire"--a title used in the middle ages--was nonsensical...