Ben-Hur (1959)

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Hello, what went wrong, listeners?

Before we dive into today's coverage of Ben Hur, we have two quick announcements.

First, what went wrong is coming to you live.

That's right, we are hosting our first live show live from the Cheerful Earful Podcast Festival in New York this October.

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So please join us in New York at the caveat Manhattan on Wednesday, October 8th, 9 p.m.

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We'll do a QA on top of coverage of a big time flopper.

All right, second announcement.

In today's episode, we will briefly be discussing, unfortunately, some animal cruelty that occurred on set.

I reiterate it is brief, but of course, if you don't want to listen to that, I'd advise you skip this week's episode and we'll catch you next time.

All right, without further ado, what went wrong?

Hello, and welcome to What What Went Wrong, your favorite podcast full stop that just so happens to be about movies and how it is nearly impossible to make them, let alone a good one, let alone one that is really old and really holds up and is just stunning.

And I imagine was an absolute terror to make.

I am your host, Lizzie Bassett, back in the chariot, as it were, here with my co-host, Chris Winterbauer.

And Chris, what are we talking about today?

Well, for the last 40 days, we've both been watching Ben-Hur,

and we are discussing the 1959 iteration.

There are many adaptations of this novel, as we will discuss.

I agree, Lizzy.

I think this movie holds up very well overall with a couple of key caveats.

Notable exceptions, yes.

That we'll discuss.

Had you seen it before?

And what were your thoughts upon re-watching it for the podcast?

I believe I had seen this before.

I don't know that I had seen it in its entirety.

As you mentioned, it is four hours long, which is a lot of hours.

Three hours and 40, but yeah.

Okay, sure.

It's a lot of time for a petulant child to sit down and watch a movie.

So I can't imagine I finished it, but I know I'd seen the chariot race before.

I don't think it really sunk in how deeply, deeply insane it is until this viewing, but this was my first time seeing it, I think, all the way through.

And I really enjoyed it.

When you said it was four hours long, I was like, hmm.

But for Bible fan fiction, it's really pretty good.

And that's exactly what it is, which David pointed out while we were watching it.

This is 50 Shades of Gray for the Bible, essentially.

I agree, Lizzie.

I think it's undeniably a remarkably impressive movie.

The chariot race, of course, stands out, but the whole thing.

The naval battle.

Yeah.

Just the sheer scope and scale.

Some of the performances are really, really incredible.

There's one in particular I'm excited to talk about.

And the chariot sequence is breathtaking 65 years later.

Yeah.

It really, even not discounting for time is a terrifying piece of cinema to watch.

And it also, the movie has some really wonderfully humanist sentiments to it.

So you mentioned it is a historical fiction biblical story.

And the book is more Christian, as we'll discuss, but the movie has some really great lines and it kind of puts the Christianity in the background, I think, in a really interesting way.

And one of my favorites is that early on when they're talking about Jesus, this man is different.

He teaches that God is near in every man and how that contrasts with the Romans who, I believe it's Aries, Quintus Arius says to him, you know, you would assume that your life would have a purpose.

And that's such like an unusual notion to the Roman soldier.

You know, the gods matter, our lives do not.

I think that this, you know, when we started it, when you told me that Jesus was an actual character in this movie, I was definitely concerned that we were maybe headed into Passion of the Christ territory.

And I will say we're very much not, which I thought was impressive for the time.

And like you said, I actually think that this was a very sort of humanist portrayal of, you know, obviously this is not really Jesus's story.

It's been hers, but he is sort of tangential to Jesus'.

A better comp than 50 Shades of Grey would be Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead, which is that, you know, we're following sort of a side character while the main character comes in and out of the narrative.

But yeah, I was pleasantly surprised by this.

Yeah, I really think it's an amazing movie.

I'm really excited to talk about it.

It's definitely one of those movies we mentioned, Goldeneye, Was It Greater Were You Eight?

This is definitely one that it was great, but I was eight.

And I watched it when I was little, did not appreciate it.

And I definitely didn't appreciate it until film school when I kind of first started to learn about the production and the scale of the production.

And this time through, it blew my mind even further, knowing the history behind the studio, et cetera.

Let's talk first about the details.

So Ben-Hur.

is a 1959 religious epic film is how it's described, Lizzie.

So not biblical fanfic, but close.

Directed by William Wyler, produced by Sam Zimbalist, and starring Charlton Heston as Judah Ben-Hur, Stephen Boyd as Masala, Jack Hawkins as Quintus Arius, Haya Hararit as Esther, Hugh Griffith as Sheikh Ildarem, Martha Scott as Miriam, Kathy O'Donnell as Tirza, Sam Yaffe as Simonides, and Finlay Curry as Balthazar, along with many, many, many, many, many, many more.

Lots of speaking roles in this movie, if you haven't seen it.

It is based on Lou Wallace's 1880 novel, Ben-Hur, A Tale of the Christ, adapted for the screen by Carl Tunberg, and a few others that we'll get to.

Another, just a trend, Lizzie of screenplay arbitration disputes.

Three movies in a row for me.

It was produced by MGM, distributed by Lowe's Inc., and we'll get to that distinction as well.

And the IMDb logline reads: A A Jewish prince is betrayed and sent into slavery by a Roman friend in first century Jerusalem, but it's not long before he regains his freedom and comes back for revenge.

It's a pretty good synopsis, I would say.

They could just update it to say it's Gladiator, but Gladiator plus Jesus.

I feel like Gladiator would be it's Ben-Hur minus Jesus, but

you know, or it's pod racing before there was pod racing, as it were.

Yeah.

Also, Charlton Heston really made a career out of playing Jews.

Yes.

Are you referring to the Ten Commandments?

Yeah.

Which was shortly before this.

His involvement is really interesting, and he's a very interesting person.

And he will be through line, obviously, in this story.

Great.

Sources for today's episode include, but are not limited to, the story of the making of Ben-Hur, The Actor's Life by Charlton Heston, Ben-Hur, The Original Blockbuster by John Solomon, Ben Hur, The Making of an Epic, the behind-the-scenes documentary, filming the chariot race for Ben-Hur by Andrew Martin, written for American Cinematographer Magazine, and of course, various articles from the Trades and the New York Times contemporaneous to the production of the film.

So, Lizzie, the question is: how did a studio on the brink,

a Jewish director, and a second-rate star turn a pulpy, near-blasphemous mass-market Christian book into one of the biggest hits of the 20th century?

To learn everything that went wrong and right on Ben-Hur, we're going to need to travel back to a tinsel town in painful transition.

Now, Lizzie, from 1930 to 1950, Metro Goldwyn-Mayer, or MGM, was called the Tiffany of the Hollywood system.

It was the crown jewel.

It was the studio with what, Lizzie, what did MGM have more of than any of the other studios?

Stars?

Stars!

Exactly!

That's exactly right.

It was the home of the stars.

And the studio system was built on star vehicles.

A pictures resting on the broad or thin shoulders of recognizable faces.

Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, Judy Garland, Mickey Rooney, Catherine Hepburn.

This studio was cranking out hits.

And that was thanks to Louis B.

Mayer, studio head, and Irving Thalberg, boy wonder head of production in Los Angeles.

MGM was actually the only studio to post a profit in the early 1930s following the Great Depression.

So five of the eight studios collapsed, four ended up being owned by Wall Street, and MGM just kept putting out those star vehicles on the forced labor of all the actors that they had in their roster.

1939, Lizzie, we've discussed this year, banner year, The Wizard of Oz,

which you covered.

And they distributed David O'Selzenick's Gone with the Wind.

Yes, which weirdly, I think, has some similarities to Ben-Hur.

It has more than you'd think.

So they made basically 10 million in profit that year, more than the rest of the major studios combined.

Entering the 40s, they just pushed into higher and higher end productions, lavish costume dramas, literary adaptations, historical epics, musicals.

But these films were very, very expensive.

And so was MGM's middle management.

So the number of producers and execs at the studio had bloated under Mayer, especially after Thalberg died.

He died in 36.

He had a congenital heart condition.

And I believe he was only 35 when he passed away.

It was really sad.

And he knew he was going to die likely by his 30s.

He was a very, very interesting, tragic figure.

So compared to the cost-conscious, like Warner Brothers, for example, MGM was very indulgent.

And in 1947, they posted their first ever financial loss at the end of the year.

And shortly after came,

we've discussed this before, Lizzie, the Paramount decision.

And this was, of course, the United States versus Paramount Pictures Inc., a landmark antitrust case that severed the vertical integration of the big five studios.

They had to divest their theater chains.

And so, if anybody is unfamiliar, the studios owned the means of production and the means of distribution, and therefore they had effectively vertically integrated as monopolies.

So, Lowe's MGM, now you have Lowe's theaters, and obviously MGM pictures, would fight this decision, but change was inevitable.

The landscape was a lot more competitive.

And then an unexpected foe arrived in the interim.

Lizzie, any guesses about a nascent technology that might threaten the movies around 1950?

Would it be the small picture box, Christopher?

The television?

The teletubes, as no one called it.

That's exactly right.

In 1949, a million American households owned a television set.

By 1959, any guesses?

Is that what the number was?

40 million.

Very good guess.

50 million households.

So a 50x increase in 10 years.

Box office receipts declined steadily from their post-war high of 1946.

In 1955, theater attendance hit its lowest point since 1923.

It really feels like COVID-era Hollywood that we're discussing, killed by streaming.

And studios needed spectacle.

They needed Mission Impossible movies, but they didn't have Tom Cruise yet.

They needed to offer what television couldn't.

And Lizzie, that was color, widescreen formats, stereophonic sound, and novelties like scent or 3D.

Wow.

So a lot of fun things that you can't get at home.

And whose bodies are they going to fill these giant widescreen images with, Lizzie?

Any guesses?

The stars.

But what kind of star?

Is there, when you think of the 50s?

The big one?

The large, physically large ones?

The big, brawny men.

There you go.

Okay, great.

The 1950s became kind of the era of the Hollywood masculine physique leading into the fitness craze that would follow.

So basically, a lot of academics have theorized that post-World War II, American culture equated physical toughness with national strength.

And the studios leaned into these more muscled, glisteny heroes to attract audiences in this early Cold War climate.

So you've got former military men as stars: Burt Lancaster, former paratrooper, Kirk Douglas, Navy man, Charlton Heston, Air Force.

In 1958, critic Richard Armour suggested in Playboy that the era might be remembered as the age of the chest.

And he didn't mean the women.

Groucho Marx actually had a very funny quote where he said, I don't like a picture where the man's tits are bigger than the ladies

in reference to this era.

So, bigger screens, bigger bodies.

The studio starts consolidating into fewer, bigger movies.

I mean, it just feels like today.

So much like today.

Just all the buff Chris' filling out all the big buff movies.

It was very risky, though.

Basically, one flop could spell financial doom.

Instead of churning out films that could eke modest profits, and then you reap the rewards across all of them, your entire year hinged on maybe one or two movies.

The Tentpole movie.

So, what does Hollywood do to hedge against risk, Lizzie?

We've talked about it before.

Tax breaks?

What types of stories are they drawn to?

Oh, existing IP.

You took the words out of my document.

So, remakes and book adaptations were the name of the game, and one particular genre was having quite the revival.

Not biblical fan fiction, but biblical epics, as they were called.

I argue it's still biblical fan fiction.

You know, I think if they had the word for it, they would have said 100%.

Yeah, it's expanding the biblical cinematic universe.

That's right.

Jesus is at the center.

Satan is Thanos, and we'll go from there.

As Variety put it in 1953, studios are playing it safe by relying on the past to ensure the future.

A trend throughout its history.

The sword and sandal epic sat in a sweet spot of allowing the leading man to strip down a bit under the guise of virtuous heroism.

Nothing overtly sexual here, just what's necessary to do the Lord's work.

Just me in my diaper on a raft in the ocean.

I mean, Kirk Douglas and Spartacus is the most...

A full-blown diaper the entire time.

Trouble tested and spends at least 90 minutes of this also in a diaper.

He does.

He looks great.

He's put together.

He does look great.

So, some examples of the Cecil B.

DeMille's Samson and Delilah, released by Paramount in December of 1949, was a massive success, highest-grossing film of 1950.

20th Century Fox's David and Bathsheba, prequel to The Conjuring, released the following year, was a more modest success.

1953's The Robe crushed it.

There was 1954's Ulysses with Kirk Douglas.

But most important to our story was 1951's Quo Vadis,

MGM's production adaptation of Enrique Senkovit's 1896 sword and sandals novel.

So again, this was a 19th century novel.

It had been adapted into two previous features in Italy and was now a movie with MGM.

It was extremely expensive.

It came in at over $7 million.

And at the time, it was the most expensive movie ever made.

And it paid off.

It was MGM's highest grossing film of the year, second highest grossing film ever behind Gone with the Wind.

So it was their highest-grossing film that they had produced.

Profits exceeded 5 million for the studio on the film just in the first year.

And some credit the movie with saving MGM from bankruptcy.

I've never even heard of it.

It was nominated for eight Oscars.

And it was time, I have to do this, to turn Quo Vadis into the status quo.

Sorry.

Sorry.

Sorry, everyone.

I will retire from this podcast.

If I knew what it was, that would land better.

It means where are you going in Latin, and it's more of a love story.

It's about a Roman military commander who falls in love with a devout Christian woman during Nero's Rome.

So a few decades after Ben-Hur.

And again, it's, you know, there are themes of conversion.

The military commander does ultimately reject Roman ideals and embraces Christianity, and Rome burns as Nero goes insane.

But again, more of a love story, story, less an epic of revenge and then ultimately spiritual revival.

Oh, okay.

Sounds good.

So one year after Quo Vadis was released in December of 52, the New York Times reports, MGM plans to remake another 19th century biblical fan fiction novel,

Ben Hur.

So, Lizzie, do you know anything about the author of Ben-Hur?

I know that he was a Civil War general, and I looked it up.

He was on the Union side.

So he was.

Got that going for us.

So we're allowed to root for him.

Yeah.

More than Margaret Mitchell for going with the wind.

Yeah.

Well, he was definitely a war veteran and general, but he was a lot more than that.

And it's worth spending a moment on him.

Born in April 10th, 1827, General Lewis Wallace was a lot of things.

He was the son of an Indiana governor.

He was a copyist, newspaper editor, lawyer.

He was a soldier under Ulysses S.

Grant.

And at 34, during the Civil War, he was one of the youngest Union officers promoted to major general.

After the war, he was the governor of the New Mexico Territory and even the U.S.

Minister to Turkey.

Wow.

He was a Renaissance man through and through, but he is best known for his second historical novel, Ben-Hur, A Tale of the Christ.

There is a subtitle there.

Published in 1880, the tale of vengeance and spiritual reform has a fascinating history of its own that we don't have time to get into, but the novel was inspired by a conversation Wallace had with famed agnostic Colonel Robert G.

Ingersoll, and perhaps influenced by Wallace's complicated career in the military.

So I think he was very much writing a bit of what he knew, and he wanted to write a book that got at the heart of Christianity, but he didn't feel like he had the authority to retell a biblical story, so he wrote a story in parallel to the story of Christ.

Hence, Lizzie, as you described, Jesus is a little orthogonal to Judah ben-Hur.

So there were even rumors that he had been involved in a horse race with Ulysses S.

Grant, and that inspired the chariot race in the film.

Wow.

Rumored.

How drunk was Ulysses S.

Grant during the horse race?

Well, we lost the war.

Sales were slow at first, but by 1885, it was selling 1,200 copies per month, then 50,000 copies per year.

And by 1900, it was the best-selling American novel of the 19th century, surpassing Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Wow.

It was described as second only to the Bible as the best-selling book in America.

Apropos.

And it would hold that title, Lizzie, until Gone with the Wind.

Gone with the Wind.

Exactly.

So suitors came calling to adapt it, not for the screen, of course, but for the stage.

But he didn't want to license license it because he was nervous about how the religious material would be handled.

He was very sensitive to making sure that he wasn't offending devout Christians when he wrote the book.

But two very clever producers of the firm Claw and Erlinger approached him with a novel idea.

We'll represent Jesus on the stage with a beam of light instead of an actor.

Oh, it's cool.

Very cool.

So Ben-Hurr went to Broadway, complete with real horses and treadmills for the chariot race.

What?

And I have read that it was a phenomenally impressive production.

Oh my God.

Truly incredible.

It grossed $10 million during its 20-year run on Broadway.

And the first film adaptation was made in 1907, and it was very, very unauthorized, and it was only one reel, and nobody liked it.

They were promptly sued by Wallace's son.

Wallace had died in 1905.

The first official adaptation came in 1925.

And this was by a very new MGM.

We'll get into some of the details, but basically, the story goes, Goldwyn Pictures, founded in 1916 by Samuel Goldfish, who would later change his name to Samuel Goldwyn, wanted to make an epic film along the lines of D.W.

Griffith's Birth of a Nation, for example.

So, Goldwyn Pictures mounted an adaptation of Broadway's hottest untapped property, Ben-Hur, A Tale of the Christ.

The 1925 version kept that subtitle intact, knowing it was going to be expensive, very expensive, impossibly expensive.

But an unexpected savior lurked in the shadows.

1919, Marcus Lowe, the New York-based head of Lowe's, the theater chain, bought Metro Pictures to secure a pipeline of films for his theater chain.

Vertical integration.

This is when it started to form.

Shooting on Goldwyn's Ben-Hur, meanwhile, dragged on in Italy, and it was a nightmare.

It is one of the craziest productions I've ever read about.

We will discuss it at another date.

It will get its own episode.

And Marcus Lowe saw an opportunity.

He said, I'm not satisfied with Metro's output, but I want this Ben-Hur movie as a prestige picture for my new studio, and I want Goldwyn's Culver City Studios lot.

Oh.

Lizzie, you're very familiar with that location.

I am indeed.

That's where I go to work.

Exactly.

So he thought, if I buy Goldwyn and I own Metro, I get Ben-Hur, I have a studio.

He just needed somebody to run it, enter Louis B.

Mayer, the combative head of Mayer Studios at that point, and his head of production, Irving Thalberg.

Lowe bought out Mayer's company too, and thus MGM Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was born.

Now, the costs for the 1925 Ben-Hur, A Tale of the Christ, were extremely high.

Both financially, Thalberg and Mayer actually threw away almost all, if not all, of of the footage that had been shot up until that point and redid it and morally.

The film reportedly resulted in the death of 100 horses and one stunt man

under the direction of second unit director Reeves Eason.

They would run trip wires under the horses to make them fall.

And if they injured themselves or broke a leg, they basically would shoot them immediately.

Oh, my God.

This was a practice that was unfortunately very common at the time.

There were also rumors that at least three of the Italian day laborers drowned during the filming of the sea battle, although that was never technically confirmed.

Now again, just to clarify, this is the 1925 predecessor to the 1959 version of Ben-Hur that we're discussing today.

This version was the most expensive silent film ever made.

An MGM executive remarked, nothing like it has been, nothing like it ever will be, and nothing like it ever should have been.

End quote.

Obviously, many lives were lost that should not have been lost, and the studio lost over a million dollars on the picture.

But the net effect was that MGM had arrived and been established as a prestige player in Hollywood that the other studios were going to have to contend with.

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Now, Lizzie, this movie required 200,000 feet of film just to shoot the chariot race.

And for reference, D.W.

Griffith's Birth of a Nation required 150,000 feet of film to shoot the entire film.

Oh, my God.

And one of the cutters responsible for assembling this footage was a young Russian immigrant by the name of Sam Zimbalist, producer of Arben Hurr.

Okay.

So, born in Kiev in 1901 to a Russian Jewish family, Sam Zimbalist came to the U.S.

in 1914, and soon he was working as an office boy at Metro Studios in Jacksonville, Florida.

He ended up in Hollywood in 1924, moved up the ranks, and eventually became a full-fledged producer at MGM.

And in 1951, he produced the studio's biggest success, Lizzie.

This movie's going to come up a lot.

You haven't seen it.

Quo Vadis.

In November of 1953, the New York Times reports, Sam Zimbalist is attached to produce MGM's Ben-Hur, and the stakes couldn't be higher.

As famed writer Gore Vidal later said, Sam was assigned this with the understanding that if you don't pull this thing off, we'll give you all the money you need.

But if this doesn't come off, there is no studio.

No pressure.

Just the kind of thing you want to hear from your boss as you embark on a new project.

So, Carl Tunberg was announced as the project's screenwriter, Oscar nominated for 1941's Tall, Dark, and Handsome, mostly known as a comedy writer, but he'd just written Bo Bremmel, a British historical film, and Valley of the Kings, an adventure film.

And in 1954, Variety reports that director-producer Sidney Franklin had been hired to direct.

Now, Franklin was Oscar nominated, but he hadn't been credited on a film for eight years.

So I don't think he was a necessarily high-demand director that they were roping in.

And that may have been because I think this was viewed as a very risky project.

I don't think the material was looked at as either a sure thing or easy to adapt.

This was a 600-page novel that tries to weave the story of Jesus into a fictional Jewish man on a quest for revenge through Rome.

It is a lot.

It's a tight needle to thread.

It doesn't exactly sell itself, yes.

No, it's challenging.

So, according to Variety, MGM planned on pulling out all the new technology for this movie.

So, they would use Cinemascope and regular widescreen.

They would use a new all-purpose camera developed after months of secret experiment by Metro technicians.

This would, I believe, be called Metro Camera 65, a 65 millimeter film camera that is enormous that we will talk about in just a bit.

Now, Franklin worked with Zimblist and Tunberg for a year or so, and they got as far as a 200-page outline.

Oh my God.

Yeah, it's a very long outlines tend to be shorter than scripts.

So you can imagine what script that would yield.

Now, let's talk about the differences between the film and the book briefly, since Tunberg was responsible for a lot of the structural changes, although some had already been made in the 1925 film.

So biggest difference between the book is the role of Jesus and Christianity.

So Lizzy, how would you describe the role of Jesus and the role of Christianity in the film?

Very present or more of a background element?

Definitely more of a background element.

I think it's done very tastefully, but it's certainly not, he is not driving the narrative in any way.

He's there and it ends up sort of tying up nicely in a neat bow at the end in terms of what Ben-Hur comes to realize and, you know, how the character grows, which I think works really well.

But yeah, definitely more of a background element.

Exactly.

So the movie focuses much more on the human drama with Judah and his family.

And beyond that, you know, there are just sequences in the book dedicated to biblical stories.

An entire 50-page prologue on the three wise men, for example, that's been reduced to a couple of minutes of screen time.

You don't really need it.

Beyond that, many of the choices seem very practical as well as a little creative.

Aging up the characters.

So they're much younger.

They're like early 20s in the book, and it's more of a coming-of-age story.

Aging it up for more established stars.

Killing Masala was a big one for emotional impact in the film.

Limiting Judah to one female love interest in the film.

There are two in the book, etc.

So, despite announcements that Ben-Hur was going to be MGM's next epic, sometime in 1955, the project was shut down.

Okay.

Why?

Because a battle of biblical proportions was taking place for the control of Lowe's MGM in the boardroom.

So, Lizzie, we discussed some of these characters.

Marcus Lowe, who founded Lowe's, was dead.

He had been succeeded by his partner, Nicholas Schenck, who did not share Lowe's fondness for Mayer.

The two men hated each other.

Thalberg was also two decades deceased, as we discussed.

Mayer had been fired in 1951.

He was replaced by Dor Sherry.

Sherry started on a hot streak, had a string of losses in 56.

He got canned.

He actually says he was dismissed for political reasons, but his movies did start to lose a lot of money.

Meanwhile, things were even bloodier in New York.

In 55, Nicholas Schenk got shanked in the boardroom, ended up losing his position to Arthur M.

Lowe, Marcus's son, in a little Nepo move.

And Arthur lasted about a year, and then he was gone, citing health reasons, and got got replaced by Joseph R.

Vogel, who's going to be our studio man as we tell this story.

So a lot of turmoil through the 50s.

And throughout all of this, I think everybody's just sitting there like, are we making Ben Hur?

Are we not making Ben Hur?

Are we spending on an absurd amount of money on this movie?

Are we not?

And MGM was in financial straits through all of this.

So it really was a big question of do we want to bet the farm on this movie or do we not want to bet the farm on this movie?

Vogel was considering doing a lot of things to try to save the studio.

And the board had even pitched selling the entire film library to television as one option.

Yikes.

So just to give you a sense of how desperate things were.

Yeah.

So in 56 and 57, they had 20 in-house productions.

19 took losses for a total loss within the film division of $16 million

in 56, 57.

That's a lot.

That's a lot of 1950s bucks.

It is.

MGM Lowe's as a company only had about a $500,000 loss because it was offset by a bunch of other divisions, like, you know, Jack Donaghy's Northeast Microwave division or whatever it was, but films were not doing well.

MGM was in the red for the first time in 30 years.

And amidst this turmoil, Vogel green lights Ben-Hur in August of 1956.

He's like, we're doing it.

For better or worse, we got to make this movie.

They needed a hit.

And unfortunately, Lizzie, Sam Zimbalus, found himself in need of a director because in the meantime, Sidney Franklin said, I'm going to get off of this thing while I have the chance.

So it seems like while it was shut down, he said, you know what, guys, this just isn't for me.

He had health issues.

He didn't want to travel abroad to film this movie for a year.

He'd actually taken like an 18-month, you know, health sabbatical and he ended up leaving MGM shortly after.

So in 1957, February, the New York Times reports that Academy Award-winning director William Wyler was considering an offer to helm Ben Hur.

And what had he won before previously?

He won Best Director in 1942 for Mrs.

Miniver and 1946 for the Best Years of Our Lives.

He'd been nominated eight other times, but I believe the one that you've seen is 1939's Wuthering Heights.

Oh, yes, of course, with Merle Oberon and Lawrence Olivier.

Got it.

That's right, which was nominated for Best Picture, I believe.

Wyler was known as a very serious, very established, very methodical, very slow director.

As we will get to.

Now, Wyler had been born in Mulhausen, Germany, which is now Mühlhaus, France.

I just blew both those accents so poorly.

He was in his mid-50s, and Hollywood was in his blood.

Literally, his cousin Carl Lemley was the president of Universal, and that's how he got his start.

He came to the U.S.

through this connection, started working at Universal at 18.

He did odd jobs, prop boy, gopher, script clerk.

Suddenly, he found himself directing a section of the crowd for Ben Hur's chariot sequence back in 1925.

So he too was involved in the original production of Ben-Hur for MGM.

He then directed Western two reelers, 20-minute films, then five reelers, partial talkies, full talkies.

As we mentioned, he ended up being nominated for best director, I believe, 10 times in total

across his career.

As Wyler later said, the producer of Ben Hur came to me and said, how about doing Ben-Hur?

I thought it would be intriguing to see if I could make a Cecil B.

DeMille picture.

It was in line with my desire to make every type of picture.

In fact, Weiler had apparently suggested to Zimbalist that he should just hire Cecil B.

DeMille to direct Ben-Hur.

And Lizzie, if you're not familiar, DeMille had directed a lot of the historical epics of the 1920s, and then he had even remade a couple of them 30 years later.

So the example that comes to mind is 1956 is The Ten Commandments.

Right.

That was basically a remake of the 50-minute prologue of his 1920s, The Ten Commandments.

Now, Zimbalist wasn't concerned about the epic moments of the film.

I think he felt very confident that they could pull off the bigger sequences.

He was concerned about the smaller moments.

What we want, what we're interested in, is good, intimate stuff.

Intimacy is the meat of the story, as you mentioned, Lizzie.

And proportionally, the spectacle is perhaps one-tenth of the whole film.

I think that was a very smart observation.

And he really wanted a director who was going to get good performances in a somewhat melodramatic story that was going to keep the audience invested in between the big action sequence.

Although, I think we end up making up for the lack of action with absolutely enormous set pieces throughout this.

Well, there's always scale.

And we'll get to one of the reasons why is the decision to shoot widescreen, which, as we'll discuss,

you got to fill that frame.

Now, Zimblis wanted to make sure that he wasn't going to lose Wyler.

So he apparently offered him a million dollars, which was more than any other director had made at that time.

Others claim, and these numbers are more shocking, it was 8% of gross revenues or 3% of the net profits, whichever was greater, which of course would be the gross revenue number.

So, I don't fully understand that quote, in addition to his salary of $350,000.

Regardless, Wyler was getting a king's ransom to direct this movie.

Do we know what that would be in today's money?

Like $1 million?

$11 million.

That's a lot.

Yeah.

Now, Wyler was in, and according to the New York Times, the word is that Mr.

Wyler has expressed satisfaction with the script, which was not true.

In fact, one source stated that Wyler actually turned down the script, not a fan of the story at all, and it was only when Zimbalist revealed that they were willing to spend $10 million making the movie, more than had been spent on any movie before, and showed him some storyboards of the chariot race that Wyler began to change his mind.

So later that year, two more writers get brought in, Maxwell Anderson, S.N.

Berman, and their changes included making the dialogue more archaic, less modern.

So one of the things that really bothered Wyler was that the movie sounded as if it was contemporary, even though it was set in ancient Rome.

But the movie needed a modern leading man.

Prior to Wireless Attachment, actors considered for the role of Judah Ben-Hur included Lizzie, Marlon Brando.

Oh, yeah, that makes sense.

Montgomery Clift, Rock Hudson.

Yeah, it makes a lot of sense.

Van Johnson, Edmund Purden.

Quick note on Hudson, because I want to put this to bed.

It has been rumored online, and I don't know who came up with this, that his agent steered him clear of Ben-Hur because of its, quote, homosexual subtext.

That is totally incorrect, as we will discuss.

Any homosexual subtext was added much later than the period of time that we're discussing.

So, Hudson was in the mix, you know, 55, 56, 57.

As we'll get to, Gore Vidal's additions to the script did not come to fruition until they were on set with all of these actors.

So, that is not possible.

Now, Richard Burton had been teased in 1955.

Bit of a drunk, Ben-Hur, but sure.

And in 57, Italian actor Cesar De Nova was being groomed for the title spot.

He even did a color screen test opposite a young Leslie Nielsen as Masala.

Wow.

Interesting.

Yeah, you can see that on YouTube in the Making of Ben-Hur documentary.

Now, following Wyler's involvement, Paul Newman passed on the part.

Nari a Jew in sight.

No.

Well, let's reface, yes, all behind the camera.

That's true.

Actually, isn't Paul Newman half?

He actually is.

He's half Jewish.

I believe he was raised in a Unitarian church, and I don't think he was raised at all Jewish.

And I believe he had a somewhat complicated relationship with his Jewish heritage that I'm sure we'll get to whenever we cover one of Paul Newman's many exceptional films.

Okay.

Well, there you go.

That was the closest they were going to get.

It was.

Well, Newman, his first big film was called The Silver Chalice, and it was actually like a biblical historical epic, and he hated it, and he vowed that he was never going to do another one.

And he also said that he didn't have the legs to sport a tunic.

You got to have some thick thighs.

You do.

Burt Lancaster was an option that Joseph Vogel, head of the studio, particularly liked because it solved two problems.

So really quickly, I don't want to get in the weeds about this.

The studios get broken up by the Paramount Decree, and all of the sudden, they are the suitors to the producers, directors, and stars that they previously owned, right?

So they started cutting these contracts loose of all these people they owned.

And all of these directors, producers, and stars started forming their own independent production companies.

And the studios then had to woo these, you know, packages to come and make movies with them.

So one of the reasons it was believed MGM was lagging its peers was its failure to court independent talent, right?

They had been the house of the stars.

We're not going to debase ourselves to go and get people to make these pictures with us.

We make in-house pictures.

But Vogel wanted to partner with Lancaster's company, Hechthill and Lancaster, to produce the film and have Lancaster play the title role.

But the board shut it down.

They were very conservative.

And Lancaster apparently even turned down just the title role and Vogel's $1 million offer to play the part.

Wow.

Because he hated the script.

He said it was, quote, a belittling picture of Christianity as I understand it.

And reportedly even asked William Wyler, why do you want to do this piece of crap?

Oh,

okay.

Yeah.

Now, one person who did want to work on this piece of crap,

Kirk Douglas.

Of course, Spartacus.

Yes, he'd even worked with Wyler on 1951's detective story, but Wyler only wanted him for Masala, which Douglas called a one-note villain.

The snub would spur in part Douglas's drive to make Spartacus.

Okay.

So that movie was at least partly inspired.

It would have been a good Masala.

I don't necessarily agree that that's a one-note villain.

I think he was until Gorvidal came on, and we will discuss.

Now, according to Gorvidal, the studio resorted to holding an open casting call, but that didn't lead anywhere either.

And meanwhile, Lizzy, Charlton Heston, or Chuck, as he was known, was frustrated.

Like Moses, he had been seemingly chosen by God when picked by Cecil B.

DeMille to play Moses in 1956's The Ten Commandments.

But two years later, he felt that little had changed in how he was viewed in Hollywood.

He was fourth-billed on the poster of the upcoming Buccaneers, And at that moment, he was also fourth billed on a Gregory Peck movie that was turning into a real slog.

It was called The Big Country.

Peck and the director were at each other's throats.

The director shot more takes than anybody else in Hollywood.

And there were constant rewrites.

Any guesses as to who that director was, Lizzie?

David Oselznick, William Wyler.

William Wyler!

Who might just be doing Ben-Hurt?

Turns out you can lead a Wyler to Heston, but you can't make him give him the part.

So

entries from Heston's journal reveal that he was initially approached by MGM for the role of Masala in September of 1957.

Also would have been good at that.

By mid-January 58, he seemed annoyed at having been strung along by Wyler for three months.

Quote, As for Ben-Hur, there is nothing approaching a final word on it.

Willie is proving the champion decision avoider of the industry.

Very damaging to the ego.

I would highly recommend Heston's book, The Actor's Life.

It's very fun.

It's very well written.

It's basically just his journal entries.

By January 21st, though, of 1958, Heston wrote that Wyler had finally decided that he should play Ben-Hur.

He was thrilled.

Quote, I tried to contain my exaltation, which flowed through the evening Lydia and I spent with a bottle of champagne and happy thoughts of eight months in Italy.

Oh, those eight months would not be so happy.

They don't look that happy.

Yeah.

Now, three months later, in April of 1958, the New York Times reported that a 28-year-old newcomer by the name of Stephen Boyd had been cast as Masala.

His real name was William Miller, but he'd changed it and adopted a transatlantic accent to try to make it in the industry.

He had a background in theater and, when times were tough, busking, and he had some small parts in TV and movies.

But it was his role in the British film The Man Who Never Was that landed him his first deal with 20th Century Fox and ultimately led to this role in Ben-Hur.

But this was a pretty big deal and step up for the young Stephen boyd who is fantastic in this movie he's really good he's really really good now i'm going to skip through some of the female parts a little quickly because let's be honest they're just not that important to the story about them

well esther got a little bit of attention listen esther found some sort of oversupply of blue eyeshadow in judea and boy did she use it she did Esther also just magically shows up wherever Judah is.

He just, he rolls in and Esther's like, oh, Judah, you're right.

She emerges from the shadow and she's like, Judah, look at my eyeshadow.

She's basically Lady Gaga and Joker Folia Du.

She just keeps showing up randomly.

So 30 plus actresses screen tested and more were considered before Wyler's involvement, but it was an unexpected foreign actress who Wyler had briefly met at Cannes that would bag the role.

And this was Haya Hararit.

The problem was he couldn't remember her name.

So he remembered her spirit and spunk, sent out a cable in May of 1958, quote, find out the name of Israeli actress at Cannes last year and test her for Esther, end quote.

The MGM office in Tel Aviv identified her as Haya Hararit.

She was in Paris at the time.

She did a 30-second silent screen test, and within 10 hours, she was on her way to Rome.

Wow.

So much smaller world at that time.

Find this random woman on the street for me.

Find that one Israeli woman I saw at Cannes.

Exactly.

And just some poor assistant is sweating as they go through this.

Now, Martha Scott replaced Mary or Marie Ney after two days as Miriam, who plays his mother in the film.

And this was at Heston's suggestion.

I did read that Ney couldn't cry on command, and that's why she was let go two days after starting the film.

So Martha Scott was actually only 10 years older than Heston, but she had played his mother in the Ten Commandments.

And so they said, you know what?

Why not just run it back?

Yeah, she does not look that old.

No, not at all.

Even the leprosy doesn't look that bad.

I was like, no, they look fine.

I mean, stop touching those lepers, but they do look fine.

That's comparable to my acne in high school.

Let's be honest right now.

Welsh actor Lizzie Hugh Griffith was cast as Chic Ilderim.

Oh, dear.

And of course, this is one of the areas in which the film does not age flawlessly.

Yeah, pretty rough.

Brown face was very common in Hollywood, even in 1959.

Black face actually had become kind of an anachronism by that point.

Minstrel shows were more or less a thing of the past.

It was not as common.

But brown, red face, yellow face were all very common.

Natalie Wood in Westside Story, Marlon Brando and Viva Zapada, even, I believe, Charlton Hesson in Touch of Evil plays a Mexican police officer.

Really everyone, everyone in Westside Story.

Yeah, I mean, there were so many examples of

these instances of racial stereotyping and just outright racism, ostensibly to put white audiences at ease.

Ridiculous examples, including putting more brown makeup on Rita Moreno, a Puerto Rican, to make her look more Puerto Rican.

Yes.

And obviously, this would go on for a long time, especially with Middle Eastern characters.

But I do want to point out just one interesting,

I guess, counterexample.

You might say from the 1925 instance of Ben-Hur, the lead, Judah Ben-Hur, was actually played by Mexican-American actor Ramon Navarro, who was one of the silent era's notable Hispanic leads and was promoted by MGM as a sex symbol and a Latin lover and considered one of the first Latin American actors to succeed in Hollywood.

Now, apparently, to avoid a clash of accents, director William Wyler hired British people primarily to portray the Romans and Americans to portray the Hebrews, for the most part.

Haya Hararit was obviously an exception.

She is Israeli and playing a Hebrew, so makes a lot more sense than Charlton Heston, for example.

Now, usually we stop at the casting of the principles, and we will on the names, but I just want to give you some numbers because the casting was so expansive in this movie.

Mid-1957, MGM opened a casting office in Rome to begin the process of casting the more than 50,000 people who would appear in the movie.

Got to fill them stands, got to fill that screen.

Can't CGI,

no, no CGI.

You can put some popsicle sticks back there.

Just scribble on

the lens.

Can't fill it in.

I mean, there are some popsicle sticks happening for sure, but there's an awful lot of people.

And by the way, I was being facetious.

The matte paintings, which are paintings on glass between the camera and the scene in this movie, are fantastic.

I don't mean to diminish those.

They're amazing.

Now, there were 367 speaking roles.

If you worked in Hollywood and you didn't work on Ben-Hur, you were a failure because they needed everybody they could get.

Now, Wyler wanted real royalty at the Quintus Arius royal party scene.

That included princes and counts, as well as a princess, duchess, baroness from Italy, Spain, Hungary, Russia, and Austria.

So that was a pretty high-falutin affair that they really put together.

Now, when it came to transform the city of Archinazzo or Arsenazzo is probably better into Nazareth, basically an entire village of 300 people became extras in the film.

More than 5,000 people responded to newspaper ads for bearded men.

One had a beard that was almost three feet long.

Cast him.

Really hope he made it.

Now, depending on the source, Lizzie, construction on sets began as early as one to two years before shooting began.

I believe that.

So either spring of 56 or 57, which would have been before Wyler was confirmed as the director.

And I believe after Franklin exited.

So this would have been Zimbalist saying, start building the sets.

I will find a director.

I mean, you'd have to.

Like the scale of them are crazy.

It's amazing.

Those statues of the Roman soldiers that sit at the center of the chariot race.

Those are 60 feet tall.

Those are real.

They're amazing.

The set design in this is truly, truly remarkable.

Unbelievable.

Now, MGM knew this was going to be expensive, but they were going to find every savings they could.

One of the reasons they'd green lit the film to shoot on location in Italy in order to, quote, take advantage of the old Roman atmosphere required by the story and, not so incidentally, to give Metro an opportunity to draw on some of its frozen lira earnings.

So, Lizzie, following World War II, the Italian government had seized U.S.

studio funds earned in Italy to stabilize the economy.

You want that money back?

You got to come spend it here.

Very, very good negotiating by the Italians following World War II.

Okay.

Further, they could reuse sets and production elements from what movie, Lizzie?

The Ten Commandments.

Quo Vadis.

Okay, I'll get it.

Come on, I gave you the answers.

It's the answer to every question.

Quovatis.

Quo Vadis.

That 1951 smash hit.

And while we're at it, let's bring back a couple of people from Quovatis.

Production manager, Henry Hennigson, art director Edward Carfano, Oscar nominated for their work on Covadis, and cinematographer Robert Sertes, another Covadis veteran, an accomplished cinematographer of historical epics.

Now, Lizzie, we talked about widescreen.

Zimblist and the MGM execs insisted on widescreen.

This movie had to be huge.

And William Wyler was not happy.

Nothing is out of the picture, and you can't fill it.

You either have a lot of empty space, or you have two people talking and a flock of others surrounding them who have nothing to do with the scene.

Your eye just wanders out of curiosity.

How did you feel about the scale of the film or the use of widescreen?

I mean, I do think it looks great.

I know there's a lot to fill, but like it is so impressive.

It's just huge.

It's huge.

One of the reasons it looks so good, and it's too technical to get into here, is the lengths that cinematographer Robert Sertiz, who by the way, was already a two-time Oscar winner when making this film, went to ensure that literally every 65 millimeter frame of this film was not only as creatively rich, but as technically pristine as possible.

So, if you guys are interested, check out the American Cinematographer Magazine's coverage of the shooting of Ben-Hur, their use of 65mm, the ways that they had to control for changes in color temperature throughout the day, complicated lighting.

It's really, really, really remarkable.

I think it's just not conducive to a audio format to discuss all the details about how it was shot.

Now, the main site they shot at was Cenesita Studios, which offered 148 acres of space and nine sound stages.

I believe at the time it was the biggest studio in Europe.

I'm not sure if it still is.

Now, it has its own fascinating history, Lizzie, but just know it was founded.

What authoritarian despot might have founded this studio in the 1930s?

Mussolini.

Benito Mussolini and his really fun son son and head of film back in 1937.

And they had a really like charming, very laid-back slogan that was, Cinema is the most powerful weapon.

Okay.

Now, what the crew of Ben-Hur undoubtedly already knew or was about to learn is that it may be true that film is the most powerful weapon, but it's as likely to kill its creators as anybody else.

Oh, no.

And Sam Zimbalist and his team were embarking on what would be the largest film production in history.

It is difficult to convey the scale of Ben-Hur,

so I'd like to list out some numbers to give you a sense of the monumental size of this undertaking.

It had more than a million props, 300 sets based on 15,000 sketches built from 40,000 cubic feet of lumber.

A million pounds of plaster, 250 miles of metal tubing, 40,000 tons of white sand brought in from Mediterranean beaches.

I'm sure the locals were thrilled.

40 miniature ships, two 175-foot-long Roman galleys based on plans found in Italian museums, 18 chariots built by the Danesi brothers of Rome.

The arena for the chariot race was more than 18 acres with stands five stories high to hold thousands of people.

It was the largest single movie set ever built at the time.

They dug a lake at Cinecita Studios big enough to hold two galleys for the sea battle with equipment capable of generating sea-sized waves.

Behind it stood a 200-foot by 50-foot backdrop that was painted to hide the city and hills in the background.

More than 400 pounds of hair for wigs taken from women in the northwest region of Italy was flown in.

One year was spent embroidering wool and tooling leather in England before more than 100 seamstresses, armorers, and leather makers then set up shop in Rome to perfect the thousands of costumes used in the film based on more than 18,000 drawings and sketches.

I mean, I just don't even, like, we wouldn't do this now.

This is

such an undertaking.

Now, this was, of course, rivaled by the amount of paper that had been used to write the script.

By this time, MGM had reportedly accumulated over 40 versions of the screenplay.

So you have Tunberg writing dozens of drafts, Sidney Franklin was involved, then you had revisions by S.N.

Berman, then Robert Wyler, William Wyler's brother had been brought in for rewrites, then back to Tunberg until Willie Weiler found himself on a plane to Italy reading the newest draft and he didn't love it.

Editor Ralph Winters later said, Tunberg had a script, a completed script, which everybody agreed on.

Then they got over to Rome and Willie started looking at the script and decided there were a lot of things in it that he didn't like.

And he had even seen the script, and apparently Wyler had just written like terrible, awful rewrite throughout the margins across the whole thing.

So producer Sam Zimbalus had a production that was millions in the hole, an unhappy director, and literally weeks until shooting began.

Principal photography, second unit had already started.

He needed help.

He needed it fast.

He needed Gorvadal.

The acerbically witty novelist and public intellectual was not interested in this movie.

As he later said, so Sam turned to me and he said, Will you have a go at it?

I said, I would rather die, Sam.

And I said, this is a piece of junk.

But Zimbalist had something that Vidal wanted, an early exit from his MGM contract.

So Zimbalist would lop off two years of Vidal's sentence at MGM if Vidal headed to Rome in April of 1958 to rewrite the script.

And can you tell us what Vidal had done?

before this?

Like, what was he most known for at this point?

Yes.

So this will be directionally correct.

And if there are any Gore Vidal fans out there or gorehounds who want to write in a correction or give me some other insights I'm missing, Vidal was already known as a public figure.

He was an established writer and political commentator, and he'd even appeared on late-night talk shows.

He'd published a dozen books at this point, including maybe most famously the controversial The City and the Pillar, which many critics condemned because of its unflinching, unvarnished, and I think really normalizing portrayal of homosexuality.

The New York Times actually refused to review his books for almost a decade, and some publications even refused to print his name.

He wrote 20 TV dramas in the mid-50s, and he even published mystery novels under a pseudonym.

And he had adapted a couple of his own teleplays into movies, and then he entered into this long-term contract at MGM.

And he did write some movies for MGM before Ben-Hur, The Catered Affair, 1956, I Accuse, 1958, and Suddenly Last Summer, 1959.

But he hated the movie, he hated the script, and he hated Charlton Heston.

So So the question is, why would Zimbalist hire Vidal?

And the answer is, one, convenience.

As I mentioned, he was already at MGM.

He was on the payroll.

It was easy.

Two,

he had the balls to suggest things that were a little unconventional.

Lizzie, you

sent me a text as you were watching this film.

I don't know if you're allowed to read the text.

I'm going to read the text and we can change it if we need to.

And the text says, is Ben-Hur gay?

Is Ben-Hur a little gay?

a little gay right yes well ben-hur maybe stephen boyd's masala definitely as we'll learn i meant the movie as a whole by the way not the character of ben-her and also not in a derogatory way i know

literally it seems like ben-hur judah ben-hur and masala are potentially in a little bit more than a friendship.

It seems heavily implied to me throughout the movie.

All right.

So let's talk about it.

And Masala more more than Ben-Hur, yes.

Well, that happened very specifically.

So I'm going to paraphrase, because it's a very long quote, and Vidal has told this story numerous times.

You can watch clips on YouTube.

Basically,

the big thing that they couldn't figure out from a plot structure perspective was

why does Masala freak out so much at Ben-Hur in the first act when Ben-Hur rejects Masala's offer to basically be his informant.

It feels like it comes out of nowhere.

It doesn't feel like it would justify him sending him into slavery.

No, your lifelong friend.

It doesn't totally make sense.

Exactly.

What's the emotional impetus here?

Basically, Vidal says he's done a number of revisions on the script and he goes to Wyler and he says,

lovers quarrel?

And apparently, Wyler had one bad ear.

And when he heard something he was interested in, he would like swing his good ear to you.

And so right when he heard lovers quarrel, he swings his good ear over.

He's like, what do you mean?

Well, it could be that the two boys had some sort of emotional relationship the first time around.

And now the Roman wants to start it up again.

And Ben-Hur doesn't and doesn't get the point.

And Wyler was like, this is Ben-Hur.

We can't do that.

And he's like, well, if you don't do that, the movie's not going to work.

And Wyler's like, well, we can't make it overt.

And he's like, no, it'll be subtle.

We'll make it subtle.

And Wyler says, all right, do it.

But

you cannot tell.

Chuck.

No, you can't.

You certainly don't tell Charlton Heston.

You cannot tell Charlton Heston.

So the Heston that I remember from my childhood and adolescence was fiercely conservative.

So this lined up with that idea, the Heston of the 90s and the early 2000s, until I believe he passed away in 2008.

He was the president of the National Rifle Association for five terms.

He gave a number of controversial culture war speeches.

He founded a conservative political action committee supporting Ronald Reagan, etc.

But Heston was actually a liberal Democrat at the time of Ben-Hur.

He was a firm supporter of the civil rights movement.

He openly denounced racism.

He campaigned for Adelaide Stevenson.

He picketed segregated restaurants in Oklahoma City.

And he marched on Washington in 1963, along with a number of other Hollywood actors who really put themselves out there for the civil rights movement, despite studio concern that they were going to alienate portions of their audience.

I could not find any specific evidence that Heston would have protested Vidal's insistence on putting a homosexual subtext in this part of the movie.

There is one entry from his journal in 1962.

He was very interested in Otto Preminger's advise and consent, but he was offered the role of Brig Anderson, who, it's revealed in the film, had a past homosexual relationship with another Army veteran.

Heston wrote, I'm not put off by the homosexual angle, but the part isn't very interesting.

Now, it's entirely possible that Vidal and Weiler were aware of some aspect of Heston's beliefs or personality that we are not.

It's also entirely possible that Heston would have objected to Vidal's idea because this was a story about Christianity and about Jesus Christ, and he would have felt that that was inappropriate.

But I raise all this just because I think it's a slightly more complicated situation than it would seem to be at face value.

Regardless, according to Vidal, the plan was not to tell Charlton Heston about this new subtext.

So, The plan was Heston would play the role as originally written as old friends, and Stephen Boyd would be assigned the backstory of a spurned lover.

As Vidal said, he agreed to play the frustrated lover.

Study his face in the reaction shots in that scene, and you will see that he plays it like a man starving.

So Boyd was in on it.

Wyler was allegedly in on it, although I want to be clear.

Vidal has said that Wyler later denied that any such conversation took place, and therefore any subtext that Vidal put into the script was of his own doing and would have been surreptitious.

But assuming Vidal's story is correct and that Boyd was in on it and Wyler is in on it, we can also assume that producer Sam Zimblis was in on this as well because he approved all pages that Vidal wrote before they went to Wyler.

So again, according to Vidal, basically everybody above the line was in on this subtext except for Charlton Heston when they were filming these scenes.

It works really well because it comes off as though Ben-Hur is sort of unaware of the importance of their relationship, or rather the depth of it.

And then obviously, like that hurts Masala even more.

I mean, come on, they're spending late nights throwing spears

at the beam together.

Yeah,

I think it works really well.

I think

Ben-Hur seems aloof.

Yeah.

But in a way that I think Masala then reads as offensive.

Like, how you meant so much to me.

You know, why are you acting like this towards me?

You know, why are you treating me like somebody that you used to know in modern parlance?

I think it works really well.

I think Stephen Boyd acts his ass off in these things.

He's really good.

So.

One key reason why Heston likely didn't suspect anything is that Vidal's name was never printed on the script.

And he left production shortly after filming began.

He was replaced, and he he may have overlapped with, English poet and playwright Christopher Fry.

Christopher Fry would stay on for the entirety of principal photography, rewriting dialogue to Weiler's liking and working directly with Heston and the other actors.

So Fry became representative of the screenplay.

Vidal was in the wind, but he would obviously leave a lasting and controversial imprint.

as we'll get to.

By this point, the film had actually been filming for quite some time.

Back at the end of 1957, second-unit photography of the sea battle was captured using miniatures on the MGM Culver City studio backlot.

William Wyler was still on the big country at this time.

He actually left the big country early.

That movie was finished by his editor so that he could start Ben-Hur.

It's really, really crazy how they would segment these movies away from, you know, the main director.

The main director was really just doing the principal photography, the dramatic action of the lead characters.

Well, that makes a lot more sense, though, when you think about how much more creative control the studios and the producers had.

And how specialized some of the technology was.

I don't think William Wyler would know the first thing about shooting miniatures on water, but they had a team who had probably done that dozens and dozens of times.

Now,

principal photography began in May of 1958, May 20th, according to Heston's journals.

I want to read some quotes from Heston's journals because even though I do think the result is fantastic, I think that one of the results of the fact that Heston was not in on that crucial subtext is that he was really struggling to give Wyler what he wanted throughout this production, especially the Masala scenes.

So I'm just going to read some of the quotes because they're fun.

So May 19th, this is from a rehearsal before production.

After lunch, we went over still another version of the Ben-Hur Masala quarrel.

I spoke too freely and annoyed Willie, but not seriously, I think.

So anyway, tomorrow we begin.

And it should be clear.

Heston was 34, 35.

Willie Wyler was 20 years older than him, 10 times Oscar nominated for best director.

Heston was hoping this would be his breakout to become a leading man.

So Wyler has the power here.

Right.

June 2nd.

The final quarrel with Masala in the garden, which is the first time Judah really admits they're at odds, shaped up.

I sense Willie doesn't entirely agree with me on all this.

So tonight I worked on a long, Selznick-type memo outlining my ideas about this section.

After which he adds, This was a terrible idea.

One of the worst mistakes I've ever made.

Oh, no.

Some directors love to have their actors write long themes about the character's backstory and motivations.

Willie doesn't.

End quote.

Probably because Willie was like, he's just gay.

Dirk's like, I feel like we were really, really great friends.

And we were such good

friends, buddies, the best of, and we would talk about the things friends would do.

And we would hold our spears together and throw them at the wall.

Why are we talking about this?

June 6th.

I worked my ass off this morning getting my close-ups in the castle scene with Masala.

16 takes for me to say, I'm a Jew.

Maybe because I'm not.

I damn near decided I would never say it right.

And it's just,

I think that's not what's happening.

No, but I will say this, and I, in defense of Tralton Hessen, something I never thought that I would say, I actually think he has the hardest role here, and not just because he's the one with the most lines or anything.

He's effectively a straight man, which can often be the hardest thing to play.

And I do think he does it really well.

Oh, he's great in this movie.

I actually read these to illustrate how difficult I think this was for him emotionally.

June 10th, I had very few lines in the scene, but that's when Willie's tough.

He's harder to please when you're listening rather than you're talking.

Again, he's listening.

He can't play the subtext that Wyler maybe wants him to go for.

Because he doesn't know.

Yeah.

Because he doesn't know it.

June 12th, my close-up went like butter today.

Either I've actually improved, which is a happy thought, or Willie's given up.

He's very funny.

I really like his journals.

I would like to note, again, Heston had deep respect and admiration for Wyler as a director, and he clearly wanted his approval.

He writes at length about his impeccable talents, and he even wrote at one point, Willie's the toughest director I've ever worked for, but I still think he's the best.

And Heston had a really, I think, challenging time with this movie.

And as we'll get to, I think he was much more self-aware about where he stood in the industry and how he was perceived than other people credited him for.

I think people thought he was a little stiff.

I think they thought he was more a pretty face and a pretty body than he was a good actor.

And I think Heston was much more aware of that than especially someone like Gorvidal gave him credit for.

As we'll get to, I'll tell you what, he was:

a hefty pair of eyebrows.

He was a heavy brow.

That's one of the reasons he actually secured the Moses part, was for that part of his countenance.

The weight of the world upon those brows.

So Heston also had a really tough time working with a different co-star, Camels.

Quick aside, June 18th.

This was about as profitless a creative day as I can imagine.

I spent all of it acting with camels, confirming my strong view that they are the most ill-endowed creatures God ever made.

I love these.

Meanwhile, Stephen Boyd may have been given a clearer picture of Masala and Ben-Hurst's relationship, but he couldn't see anything when he was on set because he had blue eyes, as did Heston and most of the main cast, and Wyler wanted to differentiate between Boyd and Heston, so he had to wear brown contact lenses.

Brown contact lenses in the 50s were basically cardboard paper shoved on top of your eyeball.

Yeah, cut this circle of cardboard out, stick it in your eye.

Exactly.

Very uncomfortable, irritated his eyes endlessly.

Very difficult to see.

He needed a lot of breaks.

They had to delay filming at least twice as a result.

The conditions on set were really difficult.

The hours were very long.

The weather was extremely hot.

There were water buoys that circulated to keep the extras hydrated.

There were tons of extras, and managing them was a logistical nightmare.

One of the big challenges, Lizzie, they didn't know how to contact the extras because there were several who didn't leave a phone number or address and instead indicated who they could be reached through.

Like, talk to my friend who lives down the road.

Call my nana.

So, in June of 1958, about two or three weeks into filming, the New York Times reported that a riot had broken out when roughly 3,000 extras showed up to set for the chariot race scene when only 1,500 were needed.

Apparently, three extras and five policemen were injured when the rest swarmed the employee entrance, throwing stones and hurling insults.

When the riot police arrived, fist fights started and it took the police an hour to restore order.

And a quick note: this was in Reconstruction post-World War II Italy, and there were still a lot of people out of work, and so the opportunity to get a job in this movie was substantial.

That's a big deal.

Now, extras weren't the only unwanted bodies flooding to set.

Studio executives just

kept showing up.

Yeah.

If you guys are not watching the studio, there's a very funny episode where the main character of Seth Rogans, Matt Remick, visits a film set that's filming a one-ner, and it's good.

It's very funny and ruins everything.

It does absolutely in every episode.

Yes.

Throughout production, executives, celebrities travel to Rome, drawn in part by the rising budget.

So, what started as a $5 million production in 53 had doubled.

It stood at 10 million by the time shooting actually began, and it was growing by the day.

The lot was also a hotspot for celebrity and tourists.

In fact, they started sending sightseeing buses to Cineceda Studios just so people could see the Ben-Hurr production.

Oh, no.

25,000 tourists stopped by to see this movie as it was being made.

Go ahead and shuttle it into the chariot sequence.

Well, let's talk about the chariot sequence.

So you definitely don't want a thousand members of the media from America and Europe stopping by as you're about to recreate one of the deadliest sequences in film history, which is Ben-Hurr's chariot sequence.

Now,

Zimbalist, Weiler, and their team are trying to improve upon a sequence that, as we mentioned, was literally lethal to at least one performer and 100 horses.

Don't kill anyone.

So the question is, can you do this safely?

And that was up to second unit directors Andrew Martin and stunt rider Yakima Knut.

So Washington-born Knut was a massive talent.

He was a former rodeo cowboy.

He had doubled for John Wayne and Clark Gable in a bunch of Westerns.

He's fantastic.

And all of the horse choreography and chariot choreography in this film is largely thanks to him.

And we'll get to some of the stunts and stuff as well.

Wow.

He'd also contributed to the script.

There are multiple records of revisions to the chariot sequence listing him as the author.

So he actually wrote the screenplay for that sequence too, technically.

And Andrew Martin was an extremely accomplished second unit director.

And he was really tired of not receiving credit for his work.

So he had actually directed the mountain battle sequences in David Oselznick's A Farewell to Arms, which I believe that's what Rock Hudson actually turned down Ben-Hur for.

And he got his screen credit was many thanks to Andrew Martin for his valuable contribution.

What contribution, audiences would never know.

But he gets the call for the chariot race in Ben-Hur, and it's William Wyler, who he respects, and it's Sam Zimbalist, who he respects, and even worked with Wyler before.

So he says, okay, let's do it.

And they basically say, it's yours.

You can do the whole sequence.

It's yours to shoot.

And there's just one rule.

It has to be a race to the death that carries the hatred to its logical conclusion between these characters.

The problem was not who wins the race, but who stays alive, which I think he accomplishes, right?

It seems like it's just who's going to survive.

Totally.

But if anything happens to Heston or Boyd, there is no picture.

So, like, you can do anything, but if you hurt one of these two leads, we're dead in the water.

But those 1500 extras, you go right ahead.

Just keep running them over.

Now, Martin tracked down 82 horses in Yugoslavia for the race.

They rehearsed on an identical track built outside the arena so they wouldn't impact the construction of the arena.

Famed horse trainer Glenn Randall was brought in to teach the horses how to work in unison, respond to commands, and behave like race horses.

This is an enormous, they're not using racehorses.

They are training these horses how to do this.

Why?

Because that's what they had access to.

It would have been too expensive to bring in American, like thoroughbreds, to come and shoot this movie.

Okay.

Is that why some of those horses look a little spray-painted?

Is that why?

I think because they needed like two or three of every set to replace them in, I believe they probably had to paint some horses.

Yeah.

Now, the riders were mostly U.S.-based stunt and rodeo riders, all elite riders.

They started work in February of 58, and Heston.

and Boyd trained with them as well.

So I mean, there's a lot of shots where it is them doing this.

That's exactly right.

Now, Heston was a very experienced writer.

He had done Westerns.

And according to Martin, he was a natural fit going into these sequences.

But Stephen Boyd was brand new to it.

And his hands paid the price.

They were so blistered and bloodied that he had to take days off between rehearsals in order to let them heal.

Now, Lizzie, I want to show you the camera that they were using to film these scenes.

Yeah, I'm very curious.

There are a lot of shots where they're moving.

I mean, they're not like the camera is on the chariot with them.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

So let's take a look at.

How are they doing that back then?

That's the size of the camera.

Oh my God.

Yeah.

It's the size of a refrigerator.

What?

Yeah.

So that is the MGM 65 camera.

It is enormous.

The camera costs $100,000 and each of the lenses costs $100,000.

It is enormous.

It is cumbersome.

It is expensive.

And as you mentioned, Lizzie, they are putting it on a car to drive around the track as they are filming these horses.

How are they getting power to it?

Was there a way they were able to hook it up to something in the car?

Yeah, I believe the camera car actually had a generator on it that would power itself in the camera, or it could actually be powered off of the car's engine, I think, depending on what the demands of the camera were.

Okay.

And I do want to mention, just as an aside, the process of developing the MGM Camera 65 or the Ultra Pana vision, as it was originally called, could be its own episode.

But very, very briefly, MGM wanted the most sophisticated technology possible.

And they wanted something that could show off both the scope of the film that they were making, but also draw the audience in emotionally.

And so even though you had something like CinemaScope, which could do widescreen, amazing widescreen images, there were distortions with the anamorphic lenses that made them difficult to use in close-ups.

And so MGM approached Panavision to develop a camera system that could create incredibly high-definition images on 65 millimeter negatives, which would then make these high quality 70 millimeter prints that could be projected widescreen with anamorphic lenses and a six-track stereophonic sound for the release print.

along with every other form of print that they could think of downstream of that, 35 millimeter anamorphic, 35 millimeter flat, 16 millimeter, etc etc all of which was amazing and led to the creation of this mgm camera 65

but would create quite the logistical headache in post-production which we'll get to

so the first day they get no usable footage even though they have 6 000 extras in the crowd because they'd added too much of a layer of yellow rock to the track and it slowed the horses down too much now according to martin heston and boy did all the chariot driving they seem to be doing except for two stunts lizzy Other sources suggest it may have been more than two, but Martin, who directed the scene, says it was only two.

Joe Canut, who was Yakima's son, doubled for Charlton Heston.

So Yakima was directing his own son in several of these dangerous stunts.

And there was one nearly catastrophic accident.

Is there one moment that you remember, Lizzie, that looks pretty dicey?

Yes, that would be when Ben-Hur's chariot jumps over horses that are laying on the ground in another chariot.

He gets thrown basically onto the front of the chariot, like up and over it, and then crawls back in.

That was unplanned.

That was an accident.

What?

So,

yeah, basically, Joe had failed to take his dad's instruction to settle his horses before attempting the jump.

So, he does it at way too high a speed.

Yeah, it's really fast.

Launched over the front of the chariot, manages to somehow contort his body to grab the chariot and save himself from going under it, which would have potentially been

dead.

Yeah.

Fatal or suffered a serious injury.

And then pulls himself back up in the shot.

He got cut on his chin and he got stitches, but according to his dad, he was back in the chariot within half an hour.

Nope.

It's an amazing stunt.

Martin later wrote, his is the most spectacular stunt I have ever seen.

It will do for him what the stagecoat stunt, jumping between the horses, did for his father.

And it really, it's an amazing, you watch it like insane.

Could they have done that more than once?

You know, and obviously they didn't.

In fact, they didn't do most of this more than once.

They actually filmed most of these shots only one time because it was so time-intensive.

So.

Despite the direction from Zimbalus that nothing was to happen to Boyd or Heston, they had to throw one of them under the bus or horse, as it were.

As Morton later wrote, we tried out one scene with a dummy being dragged by a chariot.

It didn't work.

Boyd looked at the ripped and torn dummy and asked, me?

I nodded.

He shrugged and did it.

We protected him with some steel coverings here and there on his body, but he was still bruised and abrased.

However, we got a real and untricked close-up of Boyd being dragged under his own chariot.

Oh my God.

I wondered about that because I did not understand how they could possibly have done that.

Yep.

So that shot where...

I can't believe he did that.

Where he rolls out at the end.

That is real.

That is him.

I saw secondary sources that he suffered permanent starring, but I could not verify these.

And I actually don't think they're true.

I think

he was bruised, but I don't think there was permanent damage.

Now,

two cameras were smashed by a careening chariot along the curve.

Remember, these are multi-hundred thousand dollar cameras.

They were able to be repaired, but they're out of commission for several days.

And the horses saved Boyd and Heston when the camera car, which was leading Heston and Boyd, so they were approaching the camera car

with seven other chariots behind them, the camera car died in the middle of the take.

So the horses all swerved and spared the camera car and its operators.

So all those horses swerved in conjunction around the camera car and prevented Heston and Boyd from just smashing into this vehicle at a high speed.

Wow.

Yeah.

A lot of really interesting stuff about this, guys.

They filmed at 20 frames per second and then sped the footage up very slightly to get to 24 frames per second, which gave it a more intense feel as they were shooting.

And the most difficult shot was when they pan from the wheels up to Masala whipping Ben-Hur.

So to get this shot, they had to chain the picture car and both of the chariots together.

Which, if one horse fell down, the entire thing would have careened into the wall and everybody would have been horribly wounded.

I'm scared to ask this, but were the horses okay?

It's incredible.

So they spent, according to Martin, 10 weeks on this sequence for nine minutes of finished film.

So basically, one minute per week, and not one horse was killed or injured in the process.

I thought for sure this episode was going to be all horses being hurt based on that sequence.

Nope.

That's amazing.

They managed to do it with really only the minor injuries to Boyd and Joe.

And there may have been another stunner camera person, but all the horses were okay.

This is just, I mean, watching it, my jaw was on the floor.

Like it, it really,

because you know that they are not able to augment anything with any kind of VFX,

it is so crazy to watch this because they're just doing it.

They're just doing an actual chariot race.

It's amazing.

It is amazing.

And, you know, they talk a lot about how, you know, the horses horses could really only do, I believe, like seven or eight laps, you know, a day because it was so hot and it was so challenging.

So they would plan meticulously.

They would shoot one take.

And unless the take was really off, that was the take for that angle.

And what was also really unique about this sequence is that it featured more edits per minute.

than almost any action sequence that had come before it, which is one of the reasons I think it still feels so modern.

Yes.

Is that it more closely matches the editing pace of a modern film?

Yeah.

I believe that this sequence for a long time had the highest film to finished film shooting ratio, meaning the amount of film captured versus what was seen on screen of any sequence in film for a number of years.

That could be wrong, but I did read that.

And it's also worth noting, one stuntman, Nosher Powell, claimed in his book that there was a stuntman killed during the sequence.

And then he spread that rumor online, but everybody else involved in the production denied it.

And I don't believe a name has been provided or a record of that happening.

So it seems like this actually went off very safely with very few hitches.

That's amazing.

I think it's a big testament to the production team.

A couple of really quick fun facts.

So I want to mention Richard Thorpe was another second unit director.

He oversaw the galleon battle scenes in that large artificial pool in Italy.

So that was under Richard Thorpe's direction.

Those scenes are fantastic as well.

Italian cinematographer Piero Portoluppi coordinated the filming of the chariot race.

And apparently Sergio Leone was one of the various assistant directors during the chariot sequence.

Oh, wow.

I've also heard he tells tall tales.

So take that with a grain of salt.

Now, Joseph R.

Vogel, president of MGM, visited Set in the summer of 1958.

There is a funny story that my sister pulled, which was that when he showed up, he asked how Wyler was doing.

He said, good.

He said, you know, do you need anything?

Can Can we do anything to make this go faster?

And Wyler said, no.

And then he left on a five-week vacation, came back, and Wyler was shooting the same scene, but with new dialogue from Christopher Frye, probably reshooting it after having done other things.

But Vogel was nervous that they were still shooting the same scene five weeks later.

Despite that, he told Variety, Ben and Hur was the greatest undertaking in the history of the industry.

But the trades, Lizzie, were going to turn on Ben Hur, much as they have on Titanic and other films that we've covered.

By October, Variety reported that some question has been raised as to whether the Lowe's board would have approved the project at the outset if it were known that such a mammoth investment would be involved.

And that's because the budget Lizzy had grown to a reported $15 million by the fall of 1958, which would make it the most expensive film.

of all time.

I mean, we're talking like well over $200 million at this point in our product.

I think it was like $160 well with marketing yes i believe the production cost was roughly 164 million dollars in today's money that's a lot and we will talk about marketing they spent as much on marketing as they did on the film oh dear yeah so as the budget ballooned and the pressure mounted on the production the team lost production manager henry hennixon when he left set after suffering a serious but non-fatal heart attack.

But two weeks later, in early November, almost five years to the day after it had been announced that he'd be producing Ben-Hur,

Sam Zimbalist died of a heart attack.

Oh, no.

Under his watch, the film hadn't suffered a single casualty until his.

As Heston wrote in his journal on November 4th, after struggling all day on the last scene with the chic, I was shocked to find not an hour after I'd spoken with him on the set that Sam Zimbalist had dropped dead in in his driveway.

Dear God.

The next day, he wrote, Before shooting began this morning, Willie said some simple things about Sam that were true and brief.

I'd settle for that myself.

I think to have men I'd worked with stop the cameras for a moment and think about me while the work waited.

And Gore Vidal would later write, Wyler's slowness, MGM's corporate hysteria, the whole thing was far too much for easily the nicest person I've ever dealt with in the movies.

As for the film itself, not one silly frame of it was worth Sam's life.

Now, Sam's passing put even more pressure on William Wyler.

He did have some new help, new production manager, J.J.

Cohen, another person who had worked on the 1925, Ben-Hur,

stepped up.

But one thing in particular that kept Wyler up at night was how to handle the religious aspects of the film.

I spent sleepless nights trying to find a way to deal with the figure of Christ.

It is a very challenging thing to do that and not get any complaints from anybody.

And I think Wyler was particularly sensitive to this because he was Jewish.

Better not show his face.

And they don't.

Exactly.

So let's talk about the decisions he made that would pay off.

So the writing team was told, let the theology sit behind the action.

We discussed that.

He then casts an uncredited, unseen Jesus.

This was actually opera singer Claude Heater.

He was a Bay Area native and never showed his face.

Yeah.

The Sermon on the Mount is heard only by the crowd, not the audience.

There's even almost,

they do a shadow across his face during that, even though it's far away.

That clearly is added to obstruct his face.

And also, cinematographer Robert Sertes shot Jesus with a high-key backlight, so it always looked like he had a halo-like glow behind his head.

The crucifixion, I think, is handled extremely well.

It was played without music or dialogue in almost complete silence.

It is muddy, ragged weather.

It is not, you know, beautiful tableau lighting.

And Christ is presented as this silent healer who acts, not somebody who gives grand speeches or transforms Judah through ideology, but rather by leading by example.

Yeah, it's also, it is interesting to see a story told in this way where it's like Judah isn't even really,

like you said, not experiencing the Sermon on the Mount or the sort of preaching of Jesus.

He's hearing things secondhand from a lot of people, which is how people would have heard.

So that's sort of interesting to see that here.

And then, of course, he is experiencing firsthand the, you know, the generosity when he gives them water in the desert.

But it's very effective.

I agree.

As production rounded the corner to completion, the speculation of the spectacle of Ben-Hur grew.

But MGM actually wanted this.

So they had kicked off some promotional campaign elements as early as the summer of 1958, well over a year ahead of the film's release.

Oh my god.

In July of 1958, Variety reported, Metro is issuing special bulletins with news and pictures related to the filming of the picture in Rome.

A new edition of the bulletin of poster size will be issued each month during the shooting to keep the public up to date on what Metro terms the biggest production ever filmed.

Arrangements have been made for placing of the posters on display boards and store windows throughout the world, according to Metro.

This would be the equivalent of, you know, four weeks into filming on your next movie, saying, Hey guys, just touching bass, here's another poster of the next month of this movie.

The newspaper ad budget on this film was $1.75 million.

The entire marketing budget was reportedly almost exactly the same as the film:

$15 million or $160 million in today's currency.

It was a

marketing blitz.

By September of 1958, Variety reported that Lowe's stock rose on the New York Stock Exchange in part because of the Ben-Hur production.

MGM conducted market research, including a survey that confirmed that 534 out of every 1,000 people knew about Ben-Hur,

but over 50% preferred the use of the subtitle, A Tale of the Christ.

And I believe Wyler avoided that because he was intentionally trying to background the Christian elements to appeal to as broad an audience as possible.

MGM was apparently even answering the phone, MGM, good afternoon.

Ben-Hur is coming.

Oh,

is an immediate answer.

And then it was just the sound of hooves and Charlton Heston loading his rifle.

Meanwhile, they targeted schools by marketing the movie as an education project.

Now, William Wyler and his editorial team had captured more footage on 65mm than had ever been filmed on that format before, between 1.1 and 1.25 million feet of film.

Editors John Dunning, Ralph Winters, and Margaret Booth spent January through April of 1959 assembling a four and a half hour rough cut.

So, pretty long.

The technological wonders being used to draw audiences to the theaters made editorial even harder.

So the 65mm negatives, which are very large, had to be optically reduced down to 35 millimeter work prints.

Then they would edit the 35mm film.

Then they had to conform it back up to 65 millimeter to screen in the proper 70 millimeter wide screen that they were going to do in the finished film.

So every edit was done twice at minimum, basically.

Further, the Chariot sequence, as we mentioned, had more edits per minute than nearly any action sequence before it.

And this movie, Lizzie, has a lot of music.

Actually, I'm curious, what did you think of the music?

I, you know, now that you mention it, it did not stand out to me at all, which, by the way, is not a bad thing.

No, I think it's fantastic.

There's a beautiful main theme.

I think it's really amazing.

And there is a lot of it.

There is a lot of music in this movie.

So, composer Miklos Rosa, who had also worked on Quovatis,

bringing it back, wrote the score for Ben-Hur.

He did two years of research before even beginning to compose.

He then wrote three hours of music.

In the end, it took 12 recording sessions, totaling 72 hours, to nail the final score.

His music was actually so influential that they recut certain sequences to better match picture to the music.

Wow.

Instead of the other way around, the movie actually has two and a half hours of music.

He held the record for the longest score until a movie from 2021, Lizzie, the near-4-hour-long score of Zack Snyder's Justice League.

Oh, God.

We'll get to it, guys.

The Sinesita stages had a lot of reverb.

They also had a lot of Italian laborers in the background.

So, Heston, Boyd, and dozens of other actors had to do a lot of ADR in Culver City.

You can hear it in the film if you're paying attention.

The music was complete according to the timelines we put together around August of 59, September and October.

they are just sound mixing.

They have a six-track stereophonic mix for the 70-millimeter roadshow presentations.

Then they have to fold that down to a four-track 35-millimeter version, a 16-millimeter mono version.

The director's cut was three hours and 50 minutes, but MGM trimmed it down to a much more manageable three hours and 33 minutes long, which made it.

It's still so many minutes.

It's the third longest film of all time.

Behind Gone with the Wind.

Gone with the Wind.

Yeah.

And the the ten commandments another charlton heston film i believe that heston when he wins spoiler best actor for this film his performance was the longest best actor award winning performance in film history i heared it he's on screen i believe for over two hours yeah including like cutaways to other you know like dialogue within his scene he is physically on screen for over two hours So the final print wasn't delivered until a week before the New York premiere, and there was one other holdup.

And Lizzie, Lizzie, that is, of course,

it was held up because of credit for the screenplay.

So before Zimbalus passed away in November of 58, he had been trying to get Christopher Fry co-credit on the screenplay.

After his death in February of 59, Lowe's MGM submitted an official request to the WGA on Fry's behalf.

But the scripts they submitted apparently didn't include a lot of the

on-set contributions that he had made late in the production.

I'm guessing likely because a lot of them weren't official, right?

They may have been printed on set.

They were not sent back to MGM necessarily.

They may have been written by hand.

Who knows?

And meanwhile, Gore Vidal also wanted credit on this.

He submitted his own request to the WGA and to MGM.

And there's a really interesting letter that was dug up.

from him to, I believe, an MGM secretary.

And he basically says he rewrote the script from the first page through the chariot race on page 180.

And Christopher Fry wrote the rest.

And so he says that in the finished film, a third of the picture was his, and so therefore he should be one of the names credited.

He then says there would, of course, have been no problem if Sam Zimbalist had not died.

In mid-June 1959, the WGA awarded sole credit to Carl Tunberg, who had written the most versions of the script, certainly.

William Wyler was pissed.

He then attacked the WGA and said at least 90% of the added dialogue and rewritten scenes was done during or just prior to the time of photography of each scene involved, the writing of many visual and silent scenes of considerable imagination, and all of those were done by Christopher Fry.

And so his point was: this movie was 90% Christopher Fry.

Why is Christopher Fry not getting credit?

But it was no use.

Tunberg was given sole credit, and some people believe it's because I believe he had formerly been the head of the WGA.

Oh, wow.

It was disappointing.

and it wasn't the only credit that may have been lost due to the death of Sam Zimbalist.

As second unit director Andrew Martin later wrote, I cannot help thinking that if Sam Zimbalist had lived, I would have received the simple credit I wanted, Chariot Race directed by Andrew Martin, a credit that he did not get.

Now, they may have been disappointed, but the public was champing at the bit.

Exhibitors sold reserved set tickets months ahead of the release.

At the end of November of 1959, Time magazine reported, Ben-Hur has run up the biggest advanced sale, $500,000, in film history.

Wow.

And the studio expects it to run at least two years at high-priced, 10-a-week showings in selected theaters and to make more money than the Ten Commandments, which has already grossed more than $50 million.

The hype was so overwhelming that one source says Spartacus pushed its release date to 1960 to get out of Ben-Hur's way.

I mean, yeah, I would.

So Ben-Hur premiered in New York on November 18th, 1959, and a lot of people worried, was it too long?

Would audiences sit for four hours?

There was even a joke around town.

I couldn't sit for four hours, even if they made The Last Supper with the original cast.

Now, it didn't matter.

The movie was a massive success.

It made nearly $150 million worldwide on its original run, roughly half in North America, half international.

It was the highest grossing film of the year, the second highest-grossing film of all time behind Gone with the Wind.

Reviews were also overwhelmingly positive.

The New York Times said it was by far the most stirring and respectable of the Bible fiction pictures or fan fiction pictures ever made.

Variety was entirely positive.

They said the big difference between Ben-Hur and other spectacles, biblical or otherwise, is its sincere concern for human beings, which I think is a

fantastic point.

Even the Roman Catholic Legion of Decency gave Ben-Hur the A1 classification that it didn't always hand out, which is morally unobjectionable for general patronage.

Are you sure?

Did they see how high that diabetes went?

It's a high-cut diabete.

And it appealed to both Christian and Jewish audiences because it had a very universalist message.

Weiler apparently would joke that it took a Jew to make a good film about Jesus.

for many years after the film was made.

Now, the film did momentarily revitalize MGM, although profitability would vary year to year as the studio chased the boom and bust method of making a big epic every year.

And Ben Hurr set an Oscar record.

It took home 11 Academy Awards in 1960.

It held that record for nearly four decades before it was outdone by Titanic in 1998 and then, I believe, Return of the King in 2001.

So, best picture, Sam Zimbalist, presented posthumously.

Best director, William Wyler.

Best actor in a leading role, Charlton Heston.

Best actor in a supporting role, Hugh Griffith.

This should have been Stephen Boyd.

I just don't understand why it's not Stephen Boyd.

Best cinematographer, Robert Sertes.

Best art direction, costume design, sound recording, film editing, special effects, dramatic or comedy score.

And in 1967, Charlton Heston presented Chariot Stunt Mastermind Yakima Knut with an honorary Oscar.

So there was just one Oscar it was nominated for that it did not win.

Any guesses, Lizzie?

Oh, screenplay.

Yep, best writing.

It's believed in part because Wyler had openly campaigned against Tunberg getting credit or sole credit.

It pushed voters away from the film.

And in his acceptance speech for Best Actor in a Leading Role, Heston said, I would like especially to thank not only all of you and all of them, but Willie and writer writer Christopher Fry and Sam Zimbalist, who gave more than any of us.

Notably, I did not thank Carl Tunberg and definitely did not thank Gore Vidal.

It's only fitting that there was one last battle to be fought.

Now, Vidal had long told the story of Ben-Hur's gay subtext, including to author Vito Russo for his 1981 book on depictions of homosexuality in film, The Celluloid Closet.

But it seems that things didn't come to a head until a documentary film of the same name was released in 1996, in which Vidal again asserts that Masala and Judah Ben-Hur had been romantically entangled, and basically everybody knew except for Charlton Heston.

In March of 96, Charlton Heston wrote a letter to the LA Times, which was the equivalent of tweeting in those days, in which he asserted, Vidal over the years has made more and more extravagant claims of authorship.

He was in fact imported for a trial run on a script that needed work.

Over three days, recorded in my work journal, he produced a scene of several pages which Wyler rejected after a read-through with Stephen Boyd and me.

Vidal left the next day.

Vidal's claim that he slipped in a scene implying a homosexual relationship between the two men insults Willie Wiler and I, and I have to say, irritates the hell out of me.

To which Vidal responded in the LA Times, using Heston's 1978 The Actor's Life against him.

He also has a pretty funny line in which he states Heston never tells us who the eponymous actor is.

Oh no.

It's a good burn.

Basically, Vidal pulls quotes from Heston's production journals proving that he was on the movie longer and that Heston had liked his writing.

May 15th.

Today we rehearsed Vidal's rewrite of this crucial scene with Masala.

Indeed, the crucial scene of the whole first half of the story.

This version is much better than the script scene.

Vidal then threw salt in the wound, asserting that Heston had been no one's first choice, and that, quote, Newman and Hudson were not available, and so Willie brought in Chuck from a western where Chuck had made a convincing villain.

Guns have always brought roses to his cheeks, end quote.

It was a pretty ugly epitaph to the film's legacy, and based on reader responses to the LA Times, it seems that Vidal got the last word.

I don't think Heston had the facts or the moral ground or the skill with the written word to take Vidal on in this arena.

And, you know, as we wrap up, it just kind of strikes me that despite being such a success, Ben-Hur is littered with disappointment.

Andrew Martin, uncredited for his spectacular and ultimately safe direction of the chariot sequence.

Christopher Fry for his relentless rewriting on set for months and months and months.

Sam Zimbalist passing away before he could see the fruits of his tireless labor bringing this movie to life.

Gore Vidal unsupported by his director and his assertion that a homosexual subtext was not only nothing to be ashamed of, it was necessary to the story.

And Charlton Heston, who achieved Oscar glory, but allegedly as a director's last resort and without having a full understanding of his own character.

And so I'd like to end with a quote from Heston's journal.

And politically, I don't think Charlton Heston and I could be more different from our views on homosexuality to religion and guns, but I don't think Heston was unaware of his limitations as an actor.

So this is from December 31st, just before production on Ben-Hur concluded.

I suppose this is a pivotal year.

Half my three score and ten.

In it, I make the picture that may or may not be the best I'll ever make.

But it'll certainly either finally press me into the thin, airless reaches where the supernovas drift or demonstrate conclusively that my orbit is a different one.

Eaten though I am by the drive to that further space, I'm not sure I'd be unhappy with either end.

That's probably because so much more happiness stems for me now from my family.

My son grows finer and my wife more serene each month, this year more than before.

Whether the film I made turns out to be memorable or not, I know the year we spent making it will be.

And Rome will mark us all forever.

And that, Lizzie, is most of the making of Ben-Hur and what went wrong.

It is a massive production.

That was amazing.

Yeah.

So I have to ask you: after sitting through another 40 days of Ben-Hur,

what went right?

Uh, sorry, Chuck.

I am going to give it to,

well, I'll give it to the writers, all of them.

There were many, and there were even more that we didn't discuss.

There were so many writers involved in this.

I think the writing of this movie is pretty remarkable.

I think it would have been so, so easy to

villainize.

certain groups of people.

It would have been so easy to make this preachy, to use, you know, opportunities to have this be essentially some sort of religious propaganda.

And it's really not in any direction.

And that makes, I think, the message that they are trying to give at the end of the movie all the more effective.

So I'll give it to the writers with a particular tip of my hat to Gore Vidal, because I do think that that dynamic, coupled with Stephen Boyd's performance, is really, really good.

And it really just raises the stakes so much on the relationship between Judah and Masala.

And I just think that's interesting.

I thought it was something I was surprised to to see on screen from the 1950s.

Yep.

Chris, what went right?

Okay.

I think there are some obvious ones.

Sam Zimbalist, who basically gave his life to make the movie.

William Wyler, who just relentlessly, meticulously directed the hell out of it.

Robert Surtes, the cinematographer.

But I

want to give mine to Charlton Heston.

And

I don't think Charlton Heston's a great actor.

I think he's a great screen presence, but I don't think he's a great actor.

I think he knew he was not a great actor.

And he really relied on directors to help him get there.

There was a story I read that basically said he was watching dailies with William Wyler, who did not seem happy.

And he said,

I can take criticism.

Just tell me, like, what do I need to do?

And Wyler just said, better.

Ouch.

Which is tough.

And I think there's a reason that Heston, I've loved a lot of movies he's been in.

You know, Silly Ones, Soilent Green, The Omega Man, Planet of the Apes.

He tends to do, I think, better in more B-movie fare.

Yeah, well, because he can play an elevated version of himself.

Exactly.

And I guess I'll end it with one thing I love about film and making movies is that it allows or forces people to come together and transcend their own limitations.

The whole can be greater than the sum of its parts.

And so I find it kind of endlessly fascinating that for Heston, the high of his film career, whether he likes it or not, came in part thanks to the efforts of someone he completely disagreed with.

And the same could be said to a degree about Vidal.

Yeah.

It's an instance where an actor made out of balsa wood, as Vidal described Heston, and a confabulating writer, as Heston, I'm sure, would say of Vidal, came together to make one of the greatest movies of all time.

That's interesting for sure.

I do think he gives a really good, good performance

in the film.

And again, even though I think he's a limited performer in some ways.

All right, guys.

Well, thank you, Chris.

That was great.

Thank you for sticking with me and for sitting down and just getting through this.

I know you had to watch it with your in-laws and explain all the characters like nine times as they were getting introduced.

Who's this guy?

We've never met him, but I'll tell you when I find out.

No, you know, it was less that and it was more that my poor mother-in-law was deeply, deeply upset by this movie.

She was very upset anytime anyone was being hurt, anytime they were whipping the people in the galleys.

She had a hard time, had a hard time with Ben-Hur.

They were just getting Ben-Hur ready for the horse race.

He was getting so yoked in that

erg machine.

Yeah.

I love how he's getting so cut and like half the people behind him are starving to death.

I know.

I was like, those little string beans are not ramming.

He's lead ahead.

He stands up and you're like, oh my God, he's Ben Afflicin Batman versus Superman, just throwing tires and swinging chains.

And then there's a guy next to him just withering away.

Exactly.

And you're like, is he eating all his food?

What's happening on this ship?

How does he look like that?

Yeah.

Guys, thanks so much for sticking around for another episode of What Went Wrong.

As always, if you have a correction or you worked on Ben Hur, you're probably dead because they're all dead by this point.

But you can always send that in to whatwentwrongpod at gmail.com.

Lizzie, if the folks want to support the podcast, how can they do that?

Well, you can tell a friend about us, you can force a friend or family member to listen to an episode.

The car is great for that.

They can't get out, especially if you're moving at high speeds.

Yep.

Childlocks are your friend.

That's right.

Keep them in.

Keep them in the car just to listen to our show.

You can follow us on Apple or Spotify or whatever podcatcher you are listening on.

And of course, you can leave us a rating and review, and you can join our Patreon.

Chris, you want to tell them what they can get?

Of course.

You can join for free and get additional information, articles, essays penned by me.

Or for a dollar, you can vote on films we cover in the future.

Ben Hur was the result of a poll, believe it or not.

For $5, you can get an ad-free RSS feed, and for $50, you can get a shout-out

just like one of these in what will be, I'm sure, the worst Charlton Heston impression you're apt to hear.

Cameron Smith, Ben Scheindelman, Casey Boogie-Simmons,

Scary Carey, the Provost family, where the O's sound like O's.

Zach Everton, Galen,

David Friscolanti, Adam Moffat, Moffat,

Film It Yourself, Chris Zaka, Kate Elrington, M.

Exodia, C.

Gray Speed,

Jen Mastromarino, Christopher Elner, Blaise Ambrose, Jerome Wilkinson, Lauren F.

Lance Stater,

Nate Denny,

Lana,

Ramon Villanueva Jr.,

Half Grey Hound,

Willa Dunn Brittany Morris Darren and Dale Conkling Richard Sanchez Jake Killen

Andrew McFagelbagel Matthew Jacobson Grace Potter Ellen Singleton J.J.

Rapido Jewish Reesamant

Scott Gerwin Sadie Just Sadie Brian Donahue, Adrian Pang Correa, Chris Leal, Kathleen Olson, Brooke, Leah Bowman, Steve Winterbauer, Don Scheibel,

George Kay,

Rosemary Southward, Tom Christen, Jason Frankel, Soman Chainani, Michael McGrath, Lonrilod,

and Lydia Howes.

Thank you, Charlton, and apologies to everybody

for that accent, but thank you so much.

All right, guys, we will be back in a week.

Lizzie, what are we covering?

Oh boy, the Ben-Hur of the early aughts, Chris.

And that is, of course,

Mariah Carey's glitter.

We're so excited.

This has been a stinker that you guys

are itching for us to cover for a long time.

It is

as important as,

let's see,

nothing.

We are so excited to cover it.

It's going to be so much fun.

And I, Lizzie, here's my reveal.

I've never seen it.

Oh.

Buckle up, Chris.

It's a real treat.

I'm excited.

I do like Mariah Carey.

I do.

I'm excited.

She's a lot of fun.

All right, guys.

Until next time.

Bye.

Go to patreon.com slash what went wrong podcast to support what went wrong and check out our website at whatwentwrongpod.com.

What Went Wrong is a sad boom podcast presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer.

Editing and music by David Bowman.

Research for this episode provided by Jesse Winterbauer with additional editing from Karen Krupsoff.

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