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In the late 19th century, one novel became one of America’s biggest literary sensations.
Its story was so ambitious that bringing it to the stage required technological innovations, live horses, and one of the most elaborate theatrical productions ever attempted.
Decades later, filmmakers took on the same challenge, first in the silent era and then again in one of Hollywood’s greatest epics.
Learn more about the remarkable history of Ben-Hur on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
In the past, I’ve dedicated episodes to great movies like Citizen Kane, The Godfather, and Star Wars. You might think this is another episode like those, and in a way it is, but there’s a lot more to the story than a 1959 movie starring Charlton Heston.
Ben-Hur is unusual in entertainment history because essentially the same story became a landmark spectacle in not one, not two, but three different forms of media, and in one of those media forms, film, it was the biggest movie ever produced on two different occasions.
The story of Ben-Hur began with Lew Wallace, a former Union general, territorial governor, diplomat, and author. His novel Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ was published in 1880 after roughly seven years of research and writing.
It tells the story of Judah Ben-Hur, a wealthy Jewish prince in Roman-occupied Judea whose friendship with the Roman Messala turns into bitter rivalry. Judah is falsely condemned, survives slavery as a galley rower, returns to seek revenge, and ultimately encounters Jesus and the Christian message of forgiveness.
Jesus is important to the novel, but he is not really its central character. In fact, Jesus appears only briefly. Wallace instead tells the story through Judah Ben-Hur. This allowed him to combine religious fiction with an adventure story involving battles, romance, political intrigue, and a famous chariot race.
The combination was enormously successful. Ben-Hur became the best-selling American novel of the nineteenth century and remained a major cultural phenomenon well into the twentieth century. Prominent figures such as Ulysses S. Grant, James Garfield, and Queen Victoria admired it, and it helped make religious historical fiction a genre.
After the novel’s success, many theatrical producers wanted to adapt the story for the stage. Wallace initially doubted that the novel could possibly work on stage. His objections were practical. How could anyone stage the chariot race, and, perhaps more importantly for Wallace, how could an actor represent Jesus respectfully?
The solution to those problems produced one of the great theatrical spectacles of its era.
The first major stage version of Ben-Hur opened at New York’s Broadway Theatre on November 29, 1899. The screenplay was written by William W. Young and produced by Marc Klaw and Abraham Erlanger. Edward Morgan played Judah, while an actor who would later become one of the first great Western movie stars, William S. Hart, played Messala on opening night.
The production was enormous by nineteenth-century theater standards. There were elaborate representations of Jerusalem, Roman galleys, shipwrecks, palaces, and crowds. Scene changes themselves became feats of stage engineering. During the galley sequence, for example, scenery and performers could be transformed into the aftermath of the shipwreck in darkness in only a few seconds.
But everything revolved around one problem: the chariot race.
The producers created a mechanical illusion that must have startled audiences in 1899. Two teams of four live horses stood on enormous treadmills built into the stage.
Behind them, huge moving panoramas and cycloramas traveled in the opposite direction. The horses galloped at full speed while the scenery rushed past them, making the chariots appear to hurtle around the racetrack.
It was essentially a nineteenth-century theatrical version of filming actors against a moving background, except everything was happening live. Contemporary accounts suggest that the horses were genuinely running at tremendous speed only a short distance from the audience.
The production got around the issue of having an actor portray Jesus by representing him as a brilliant beam of white light.
That combination of religion and mechanical spectacle turned Ben-Hur into a sensation.
The original Broadway engagement ran for 194 performances, but that was just the beginning. Touring companies carried the production throughout the United States and eventually to Britain and Australia.
Various versions continued for roughly twenty-one years. Estimates suggest that there were more than 6,000 performances and that perhaps 20 million people saw the play.
With the arrival of motion pictures, the Ben-Hur story was a natural for putting on film. In 1907, the Kalem Company made a roughly fifteen-minute adaptation of the story. The company had not obtained permission from Wallace’s estate or the other rights holders, who promptly sued.
The resulting litigation helped establish an important principle that filmmakers could not simply take a copyrighted book and turn it into a movie without purchasing adaptation rights. The case became an important early precedent in motion-picture copyright.
The next attempt would therefore begin with something Hollywood would increasingly come to understand very well: buying the rights.
By the early 1920s, the motion picture industry had advanced enough that filmmakers could seriously contemplate doing justice to Wallace’s story.
The movie rights were eventually purchased for an extraordinary $600,000, and production began under Goldwyn Pictures. After Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was formed in 1924, the project became one of the new studio’s most important productions.
It was also nearly a catastrophe.
Production began in Italy in 1923. Directors, actors, and producers changed. Costs spiraled out of control. Much of the footage was considered unusable. Eventually, MGM executive Irving Thalberg brought the production back to California, replaced much of the creative team, and essentially started again.
One young assistant working on the production was William Wyler, who, thirty-four years later, would direct another version of Ben-Hur.
The silent film eventually cost about $4 million, an almost unheard-of amount for the period and many times MGM’s normal production budget. It was among the most expensive films ever made up to that point.
Once again, the sequence everyone cared about was the chariot race.
Filmmakers constructed a gigantic Circus Maximus set in Los Angeles. Hundreds of workers spent months building it. MGM positioned approximately 42 cameras around the course, sometimes hiding them in statues, behind shields, and close to the track so the editors would have views of almost every possible angle.
As this was long before computer effects or sophisticated stunt rigs, the race was astonishingly dangerous. Chariots really raced, horses really ran, and crashes really happened. One spectacular pileup involving horses, chariots, and stuntmen was a real accident that made it into the finished movie.
The filming of the race scene was an event in Hollywood and many of the top stars of the era were in the audience. Actors, directors, producers, and other celebrities came to the set simply to watch. Because MGM needed thousands of people to fill the grandstands, many of these visitors were persuaded to put on costumes and become extras.
As a result, the crowd reportedly included an extraordinary collection of established and future stars, including Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, Lionel Barrymore, Lillian Gish, Harold Lloyd, Joan Crawford, Marion Davies, and many, many others.
Roughly 200,000 feet of film was reportedly shot just for the race before editor Lloyd Nosler reduced it to a fraction of that length. Rapid cutting between wide shots, close views of the drivers, wheels, horses, crashes, and spectators created a pace that feels surprisingly modern.
MGM even used selected sequences in the relatively new two-color Technicolor process, giving audiences bursts of color within an otherwise black-and-white film.
Released on December 30, 1925, the movie became a sensation. More importantly, it helped establish the newly created MGM studio.
Many people consider the 1925 Ben-Hur as the high-water mark of the silent era. It grossed over $10 million at the box office and was one of the biggest-grossing silent films ever made.
By the 1950s, Hollywood faced a threat that had not existed in 1925: television. Millions of Americans who previously went regularly to movie theaters now had entertainment in their living rooms. Hollywood responded by trying to give audiences things television could not provide: enormous screens, widescreen photography, stereophonic sound, lavish color and gigantic productions.
Biblical sword-and-sandal epics suited this strategy in particular. The Robe, The Ten Commandments and Quo Vadis demonstrated the enormous audience for such films.
MGM still controlled Ben-Hur, and the studio desperately needed a hit.
The studio took a gamble, hiring William Wyler to direct and casting Charlton Heston as Judah Ben-Hur and Stephen Boyd as Messala.
Production took place largely at Cinecittà Studios in Rome, where MGM effectively constructed substantial portions of the ancient world.
The resulting film ran about three and a half hours, complete with an intermission in its original roadshow presentation.
But Wyler’s real contribution was that he didn’t simply make the 1925 movie bigger. He tried to deepen the human story.
As with all the other previous productions, the centerpiece was the chariot race. They built what was then one of the largest movie sets ever. The arena occupied roughly 18 acres, with enormous grandstands and a track covered with tens of thousands of tons of sand. The set took around a year to construct.
They trained dozens of horses for months to learn how to race chariots. Charlton Heston and Stephen Boyd learned to drive four-horse chariots themselves, allowing Wyler and the second-unit team to photograph their faces during much of the racing rather than constantly substituting stuntmen.
The scene lasts roughly nine minutes, and one of its most remarkable characteristics is the relative absence of music. During most of the race, the filmmakers let the sounds of wheels, hooves, and crashes take over.
One of the most memorable moments occurs when Judah’s chariot races toward the wreckage of another chariot. His horses clear it, but the chariot itself suddenly launches into the air.
Joe Canutt, stunt director Yakima Canutt’s son, performed the stunt. The chariot landed violently, throwing Canutt partly forward. Heston’s close-up then completed the illusion that Judah himself had nearly been thrown out. Canutt required four stitches on his chin.
An urban legend says a stuntman died during filming the chariot scene and that the studio left the scene in the film. This is not true. A stuntman did die during filming in Rome in 1925, but the studio never used that footage.
MGM’s gamble succeeded spectacularly. Ben-Hur became an enormous commercial hit, grossing more than $40 million during its initial release alone.
At the 1960 Academy Awards, it won 11 Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director for Wyler, Best Actor for Heston and Best Supporting Actor for Hugh Griffith. Eleven wins established a record that stood alone for nearly four decades and has only subsequently been matched by Titanic and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
Before I conclude, for the sake of completion, I should mention the other version of Ben-Hur.
In 2016, MGM went to the Ben-Hur well once again and this time created what they called a “reimagining” of the story.
It was, to be generous, a flop.
Made for about $100 million, it grossed only about $94 million worldwide, far below the level needed to recoup production and marketing costs, with estimates putting its losses in the tens of millions of dollars. Critically, it also fared poorly, earning a 24% Rotten Tomatoes score.
The CGI couldn’t compete with the actual live stunts from the 1959 version, or even the 1925 version.
I’m guessing that many of you didn’t even realize that they made a version of Ben-Hur in 2016.
The history of Ben-Hur is really the history of popular entertainment reinventing itself. What began as one of the most successful novels of the 19th century became a theatrical spectacle built around live horses and ingenious machinery, then a silent-film epic that pushed filmmaking to its limits, and finally one of the grandest productions of Hollywood’s golden age.
Each version used the newest tools of its era to tell the same story on a larger scale. Few works have been adapted so often and achieved success in so different entertainment mediums.