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of people during its twenty-year run, the stage play set an impressive
standard for all subsequent visual adaptations of Ben-Hur, and soon the
novel was adapted for the new medium of cinema. In 1907, Canadian
director Sidney Olcott was the first to produce a silent-film version of
Ben-Hur. The fifteen-minute one-reel, a standard length of a movie in the
early era, consisted of a handful of interior scenes, a sea battle filmed at a
nearby beach, and some fire fighters pulling chariots at a local racetrack.
Wallace’s literary agents, Harper Publishing, along with Klaw and Erlanger,
who owned the dramatic copyright, decided to sue the film’s producers,
the Kalem Company of New York, for unauthorized use of the novel, and
in 1912 the federal court ordered Kalem to pay $25,000 for copyright
violation, a decision that is still used today to uphold intellectual property
rights (Solomon, 2001a, 203).
Following a protracted negotiation, the newly formed MGM Company
acquired the rights to the story, and released their film Ben-Hur in December
1925. Directed by Fred Niblo, and starring silent screen idols Ramon
Novarro as Judah and Francis X. Bushman as Messala, the $4 million
production, the costliest silent movie ever made, was plagued by problems
from the start. After a disastrous stint in Italy, where some footage was
shot, the production returned to Los Angeles to finish the film, including
the extraordinary seven-minute chariot race sequence shot on Venice and
La Cienega Boulevards with thousands of extras. Like the 1907 one-reeler,
this first MGM version followed the episodic structure of the stage play,
by focusing mainly on theatrical set pieces like the naval battle, the chariot
race, and the crucifixion. But the 1925 silent film displays tremendous
development in the cinematic art, with its heightened awareness of the
emotional complexities in its characters, especially the tense relationship
between Judah and Messala, as well as the addition of several lavish sets
and sophisticated spectacular effects, with a few scenes shot in two-strip
Technicolor. Although the film was an immense box-office success, earning
over $7 million, MGM actually lost money on the venture because
of an ill-advised profit-sharing deal the studio made with the novel’s
publishers (Solomon, 2001a, 203–4). But Ben-Hur ensured MGM’s reputation
as a major player in the business of making movies.
An assistant director on the troubled shoot of the 1925 version, William
Wyler (1902–81), was chosen to direct the 1959 sound and color extravaganza
by MGM’s Sam Zimbalist, who was determined to make good on the
studio’s original financial investment in Ben-Hur thirty-five years earlier.
Wyler’s credits include some of the best-loved and most honored Hollywood
features, and he is rightly considered one of the greatest directors
70 BEN-HUR (1959)