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Once free, the escaped gladiators chose Spartacus and
two Gallic slaves — Crixus and Oenomaus — as their
leaders. Though Roman authors assume that the slaves
were a homogeneous group with Spartacus as their
leader, this may be the Romans projecting their own
hierarchical view of military leadership on the
spontaneous organization of the slaves, reducing other
slave leaders to subordinate positions in their accounts.
The positions of Crixus and Oenomaus — and later,
Castus — cannot be clearly determined from the sources.

Originally, Howard Fast was hired to adapt his own
novel as a screenplay, but he experienced difficulty
working in the screenplay format and was replaced by
the blacklisted Dalton Trumbo, who worked under the
pseudonym "Sam Jackson". Eventually, Kirk Douglas
insisted that Trumbo be given screen credit for his
authorship, which helped ultimately to break the
blacklist. The filming was plagued by the conflicting
visions of Kubrick and Trumbo: Kubrick, a young
director at the time, did not have the degree of control
he would later have over his films, and the final product
is more a result of Trumbo's optimistic screenplay than
it is of Stanley Kubrick's trademark cynicism; Kubrick
complained, in fact, that the character of Spartacus had
no faults or quirks.