Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The History of Ben-Hur

Starting point is 00:00:00 In the late 19th century, one novel became one of America's biggest literary sensations. Its story was so ambitious that bringing it to the stage required technological innovations, live horses, and one of the most elaborate theatrical productions ever attempted. Decades later, filmmakers took on the same challenge, first in the silent era and then again in one of Hollywood's greatest epics. Learn more about the remarkable history of Ben Hur on this episode, of Everything Everywhere, daily. Do you ever climb into bed ready to sleep only to have your mind start racing the moment your head hits the pillow? Thoughts bouncing around, replaying the day or jumping ahead to tomorrow? That is exactly

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Starting point is 00:01:55 Thank you. At the nexus of all things, there is a diner. Look for Midnight Burger on your favorite podcasting app, or just go to we open at 6.com. In the past, I've dedicated episodes to great movies like Citizen Kane, the godfather, and Star Wars. you might think that this is another episode like those. And in a way, it is. But there is a lot more to the story than a 1959 movie starring Charlton Heston. Ben Hur is unusual in the entertainment industry because essentially the same story became a landmark spectacle in not one, not two, but three different forms of media. And in one of those media forms, film, it was the biggest

Starting point is 00:02:41 movie ever produced on two different occasions. The story of Ben-Hur begins with Lou Wallace, a former Union General in the Civil War, Territorial Governor, diplomat, and the author of the book. His novel, Ben-Hur, A Tale of the Christ, was published in 1880 after roughly seven years of research and writing. It tells the story of Judah Ben-Hur, a wealthy Jewish prince in Roman-occupied Judea, whose friendship with the Roman Massala turns into a bitter rivalry. Judah is falsely condemned, survives slavery as a galley roar, returns to seek revenge, and ultimately encounters Jesus and the Christian message of forgiveness. Jesus is important in the novel, but he is not really its central character.

Starting point is 00:03:28 In fact, Jesus only appears briefly. Wallace instead tells the story through Judah Ben-Hur. This allows him to combine religious fiction with an adventure story, involving battles, romance, political intrigue, and, most famously, a chariot race. The combination of all these things was enormously successful. Ben Hur became the best-selling American novel of the entire 19th century, and remained a major cultural phenomenon well into the 20th century. Prominent figures such as Ulysses S. Grant, James Garfield, and even Queen Victoria

Starting point is 00:04:03 admired the novel, and it helped make religious historical fiction into a genre. After the novel's success, many theatrical producers wanted to adapt the story for the stage. Wallace initially doubted that the novel could possibly work on stage. His objections were practical. How could anyone stage the chariot race, and perhaps more importantly for Wallace, how could an actor represent Jesus? The solution to those problems produced one of the greatest theatrical spectacles of its era. The first major stage version of Ben Hur opened at New York's Broadway,

Starting point is 00:04:38 theater on November 29th, 1899. The screenplay was written by William W. Young, and the show was produced by Mark Law and Abraham Erlanger. Edward Morgan played Judah, while an actor who would later become one of the first great Western movie stars, William S. Hart, played Masala on opening night. The production was enormous by 19th century theater standards. There were elaborate representations of Jerusalem, Roman galleys, shipwrecks, palaces, and crowds. Seen changes. Seen changes. themselves became feats of stage engineering. During the galley sequence, for example, scenery and performers could be transformed into the aftermath of the shipwreck in darkness in only a few seconds. But everything in the show revolved around one problem, the chariot race.

Starting point is 00:05:27 The producers created a mechanical illusion that must have startled audiences in 1890. Two teams of four live horses stood on enormous treadmills built into the stage. Behind them, huge moving panoramas and cycloramas traveled in the opposite direction. The horses galloped at full speed while the scenery rushed past them, making the chariots appear to hurdle around the racetrack. It was essentially a 19th century theatrical version of filming actors against a moving background, except that everything was happening live. Contemporary accounts suggest that the horses were genuinely running at tremendous. and to speeds, only a short distance in front of the audience.

Starting point is 00:06:12 The production got around the issue of having an actor play Jesus by representing him as a beam of white light. The combination of religion and mechanical spectacle turned Ben Hur into a sensation. The original Broadway engagement ran for 194 performances, but that was just the beginning. Touring companies carried the production throughout the United States and eventually into Britain and Australia. Various versions of the show continued for roughly 21 years. Estimates suggest that there were more than 6,000 performances and that perhaps as many as

Starting point is 00:06:47 20 million people saw the play. With the arrival of motion pictures, the Ben-Hur story was a natural for putting on film. In 1907, the Callum Company made a roughly 15-minute adaptation of the story. However, the company had not obtained permission from Wallace's estate or other rights holders who promptly sued. The resulting litigation helped establish an important principle that filmmakers could not simply take a copyrighted book and turn it into a movie without purchasing adaptation rights. The case became an important early precedent in motion picture copyright. The next attempt at filming the story would therefore begin with something Hollywood would increasingly

Starting point is 00:07:30 come to understand very well, buying the rights to the book. By the early 1920, the motion picture industry had advanced enough that filmmakers could seriously contemplate doing justice to Wallace's story. The movie rights were eventually purchased for an extraordinary $600,000, and production began under Goldwyn Pictures. After Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was formed in 24, the project became one of the new studio's most important productions. And it was also nearly a catastrophe. Production began in Italy in 1923, directors, actors and producers all changed. Cost spiraled out of control. Much of the footage was considered unusable. Eventually, MGM, executive Irving Thalberg, brought the production back to California,

Starting point is 00:08:19 replaced much of the creative team, and essentially started from scratch. One young assistant working on the production was William Weiler, who, 34 years later, would direct another version of Ben Hur. The silent film eventually cost about $4 million, an almost unheard of amount of money for the period, and many times MGM's normal production budget. It was among the most expensive films ever made up to that point. And once again, the sequence everyone cared about was the chariot race. Filmmakers conducted a gigantic circus maximus set in Los Angeles.

Starting point is 00:08:56 Hundreds of workers spent months building it. MGM positioned approximately 42 cameras around the course, sometimes hiding them in statues, behind shields, and close to the track, so the editors would have views of almost every possible angle. As this was way before computer effects or sophisticated stunt regs, the race was astonishingly dangerous. Chariots really raced, horses really ran, and crashes really happened. One spectacular pile-up involving horses, chariots, and stuntmen,

Starting point is 00:09:28 was a real accident that made it into the finished film. The filming of the race scene was an event in Hollywood, and many of the top stars of the era were in attendance. Actors, directors, producers, and other celebrities all came to the set simply to watch. And because MGM needed thousands of people to fill the grandstands, many of these visitors were persuaded to put on costumes and become extras. As a result, the crowd reportedly included an extraordinary collection

Starting point is 00:09:56 of established and future stars, including Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, Lionel Barrymore, Lillian Gish, Harold Lloyd, Joan Crawford, Marion Davies, and many, many, many others. Roughly 200,000 feet of film was reportedly shot just for the race before editor Lloyd Nossler reduced it to just a fraction of that length. Rapidly cutting between wide shots, close views of the drivers, wheels, horses, crashes, and spectators created a pace that feels surprisingly modern. MGM even used selected sequences in the relatively new two-color tetanacolor process, giving audiences a burst of color within an otherwise black and white film. Released on December 30th, 1925, the movie became a sensation.

Starting point is 00:10:42 More importantly, it helped establish the newly created MGM studio. Many people consider the 1925 Ben-Hur as the high watermark of the silent era. It grossed over 10 million at the box office and was one of the biggest grossed silent films ever made. By the 1950s, Hollywood faced a threat that did not exist in 1925. Television. Millions of Americans who previously went regularly to movie theaters now had entertainment in their living rooms. Hollywood responded by trying to give audiences things television couldn't provide. Enormous screens, widescreen photography,

Starting point is 00:11:20 stereoscopic sound, lavish color, and gigantic productions. Biblical sword and sandal epics suited this strategy in particular. The robe, the Ten Commandments, and Quovadus demonstrated the enormous audience for such films. And MGM still controlled the rights to Ben Hur, and at the time, the studio desperately needed a hit. The studio took a gamble, hiring William Weiler to direct, and casting Charlton Heston as Judah Ben-Hur and Stephen Boyd as Masala. production took place largely at the Chinichita Studios in Rome, where MGM effectively constructed substantial portions of the ancient world. The resulting film ran about three and a half hours, complete with an intermission in its original roadshow presentation. Wiler's real contribution was that he didn't simply try to remake the 1925 movie and make it bigger.

Starting point is 00:12:12 He tried to deepen the human story. As with all other previous productions, the centerpiece of the movie, was the chariot race. They built what was then one of the largest movie sets ever made. The arena occupied roughly 18 acres with enormous grandstands and a track covered with tens of thousands of tons of sand. The set took around a year to construct. They trained dozens of horses for months to learn how to race chariots. Charlton Heston and Stephen Boyd learned how to drive four horse chariots themselves, allowing Weiler and the second unit team to photo their faces during much of the racing rather than constantly substituting stuntmen.

Starting point is 00:12:55 The scene lasts roughly nine minutes, and one of its most remarkable characteristics is the relative absence of music. During most of the race, the filmmakers just let the sound of wheels, hooves, and crashes take over. One of the most memorable moments occurs when Judah's chariot races towards the wreckage of another chariot. The horse clears it, but the chariot itself suddenly launches into the air. Joe Canett, stunt director Yakima Canett's son, performed the stunt. The chariot landed violently, throwing Canott partly forward. Heston's close-up then completed the illusion that Judah himself had nearly been thrown out,

Starting point is 00:13:32 but Canett actually required four stitches on his chin. An urban legend says that a stuntman died during the filming of the chariot scene and that the studio left the scene in the film. This is not true. A stuntman did die during the filming. in Rome in 1925, but the studio never used that footage. MGM's gamble succeeded spectacularly. Ben Hur became an enormous commercial hit, grossing more than $40 million during its initial

Starting point is 00:14:02 release alone. At the 1960 Academy Awards, it won 11 Oscars, including Best Pitcher, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actor, and Best Supporting Actor. Eleven wins established a record that stood alone for nearly four decades and has only been matched by Titanic and Lord of the Rings return of the king. And before I conclude, just for the sake of completion, I should mention the other version of Ben Hur. In 2016, MGM went to the Ben Hur well once again, and this time created what they called

Starting point is 00:14:35 a reimagining of the story. It was, to be generous, a flop. Made for about a hundred million dollars, it grossed only about $94 million worldwide, far below the level needed to recoup production and marketing costs, with estimates putting its losses in the tens of millions of dollars. Critically, it also fared poorly, earning just a 24% Rotten Tomato Score. The CGI couldn't compete with the actual live stunts from the 1959 version, or for that matter, the 1925 version.

Starting point is 00:15:09 I'm guessing that many of you didn't even realize that they made a version of Ben Hur in 2016. The history of Ben Hur is really the history of popular entertainment reinventing itself. What began as one of the most successful novels of the 19th century became a theatrical spectacle built around live horses, and then a silent film epic that pushed film making to its limits, and then finally one of the grandest productions of Hollywood's Golden Age. Each version used the newest tools of its era to tell the same story on a larger scale. few works have ever been adopted so often and achieve success in so many different entertainment mediums.

Starting point is 00:15:54 The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Austin Otkin and Cameron Kiefer. My big thanks go to everyone who supports the show over on Patreon. Your support helps make this podcast possible. And I also want to remind everyone about the community groups on Facebook and Discord. That's where everything happens that's outside the podcast. and links to those are available in the show notes. As always, if you leave a review on any major podcast app

Starting point is 00:16:19 or in the above community groups, you too can have it read in the show.

Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The History of Ben-Hur

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