co-write the screenplay. Yordan remarked he had found Frank's treatment to be a "terrible script" and rewrote it. By their mid-November start date, the script had been rewritten, with Heston describing it to be an improvement over the first draft. Two days prior to filming, Sophia Loren had read the latest draft and was displeased with her dialogue. She then recommended hiring blacklisted screenwriter Ben Barzman to revise it. Mann subsequently got Barzman onto a plane to Rome, after which he gave him the current screenplay draft. Barzman read the draft and found it to be unusable. With filming set to begin, Barzman received a copy of the tragicomedy play Le Cid by Pierre Corneille from the library of the French embassy in Madrid and used it as the basis for a new screenplay. Years later, in 1967, Mann told Bertrand Tavernier that "not one line" in the shooting script was written by Yordan. However, Barzman's screen credit would not be added to the film until 1999. However, Barzman's script lacked powerful romantic scenes, which again displeased Loren. Screenwriter Bernard Gordon, who was also blacklisted, was hired to rewrite these scenes. He stated, "So [Philip] Yordan yanked me from what I was doing in Paris and said, 'Write me three or four love scenes for Loren and Heston.' Well, what the hell – he was paying me $1500 a week, which was a lot more than I made any other way, and I just took orders and I sat down and I wrote four scenes, about three or four pages each. Whatever love scenes there are in the picture I wrote. And they sent them to Loren and said, OK, she'll do the picture, so I was a little bit of a hero at that point". Loren had also hired screenwriter Basilio Franchina to translate the dialogue into Italian and then back into simpler English, with which she felt comfortable. For script advice and historical truth, Spanish historian Ramón Menéndez Pidal served as the historical consultant to the screenwriters and the director of the film. The naturalist Felix Rodriguez de la Fuente also helped to use raptors and other birds. Casting Charlton Heston and Sophia Loren were Bronston's first choices for the two leads. Writing in his autobiography, in the summer of 1960, Heston had received Frank's draft which he described as not "good, ranging from minimally OK to crappy",