Wholly Moses

Laraine Newman said considerable credit must go to Dudley Moore for keeping the morale up on the set. "There was one night when everything went wrong. A break-away wall refused to break away, and we all had to cancel our supper plans to shoot past midnight", she recalls. "I figured, 'Here it comes. We've had fun 'til now. But this is when tempers snap!' I'm sure Dudley sensed the tension, because suddenly, during a break, he became a new character, a broken-down Shakespearean actor, reminiscing about his past glories. "It was absurd, hilarious, and totally ad-lib. He just babbled on. But no one minded working late."

According to an article titled ORTHODOX JEWS PROTEST "MOSES" published in the July 9, 1980 edition of The Los Angeles Times reported that "five orthodox Jewish groups protested the film for mocking their religion." They represented almost one million Jews, and more than two thousand rabbis, who were living in the U.S. and Canada. They criticized the film for mocking the beliefs and principles and historical events from their Jewish faith. Columbia Pictures studio head Frank Price denied that the picture intended to offend any religious group or their beliefs and principles.

According to Wikipedia, "On the final day of shooting, Richard Pryor, who was signed to do a one-day cameo as the Pharaoh, didn't show up. With production at a complete standstill, frantic calls were made. There was even some talk of replacing him with Cleavon Little. Several hours later that afternoon, Pryor finally appeared, but then refused to play the scene as written with a trained lion by his throne."

During breaks in shooting at Columbia Pictures' Burbank Studios, Dudley Moore would entertain the production by playing the piano.

Dudley Moore once said of the movie's main filming location: "We stayed at this beautiful, modern hotel, in the middle of nowhere, which we called the Sheraton-Negev, or sometimes the Dead Sea Holiday Inn. When we arrived at 6:00 a.m. on the 'set', if you can legitimately call a sand dune a 'set', it was twenty-eight degrees. Four hours later, it was eighty-eight degrees. I began to realize what made Lawrence of Arabia (1962) so scatty."