Ben-Hur (1959) Facts
| Director(s) | William Wyler |
| Producer(s) | William Wyler (uncredited), Sam Zimbalist, Sol C. Siegel (uncredited), Joseph Vogel (uncredited) |
| Featured Cast | Charlton Heston, Jack Hawkins, Haya Harareet, Stephen Boyd, Hugh Griffith |
| Total Facts | 79 |
May McAvoy: Esther from the original Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ is the only member of the original MGM film to appear in Ben-Hur as well. She's an extra in a crowd scene.
Audrey Hepburn visited the set during the filming of the chariot race (she was in the midst of shooting The Nun's Story). This led to the false legend that she was an extra in the crowd scenes, as a favor to her former director, William Wyler.
Cesare Danova screentested to play Ben-Hur.
Burt Lancaster, a self-described atheist, claimed he turned down the role of Judah Ben-Hur because he "didn't like the violent morals in the story" and because he did not want to promote Christianity.
Charlton Heston himself wrote some additional scenes between Ben-Hur and Messala. They were never used as William Wyler deemed them to be "the phoniest thing" he'd ever had to deal with from an actor.
Charlton Heston was taught to drive a chariot by the stunt crew, who offered to teach the entire cast. Heston was the only one who took them up on the offer. At the beginning of the chariot race, Heston shook the reins and nothing happened; the horses remained motionless. Finally someone way up on top of the set yelled, "Giddy-up!" The horses then roared into action, and Heston was flung backward off of the chariot.
Rock Hudson was offered a record $750,000 to star in the movie, but turned it down in order to star in A Farewell to Arms.
Leslie Nielsen made a screen test for the part of Messala, part of which can be seen in the documentary Ben-Hur: The Making of an Epic.
Gore Vidal was uncredited as a screenwriter, although producer Sam Zimbalist promised he and Christopher Fry, who worked on the script independently from Vidal, a screen credit. Karl Tunberg, who wrote the original screenplay that had been very much rewritten into a shooting script by Vidal and Fry, claimed the credit. Zimbalist died before the movie ended, and thus could not testify at the guild arbitration hearing. Tunberg won the credit, but failed to win the Oscar. The film had been nominated for 12 Oscars, and won a record 11 (since tied). The movie's sole loss was for Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium, and usually is attributed to the fallout from the credit dispute, which Vidal made widely known.
Paul Newman was offered the role of Judah Ben-Hur but turned it down because he said he didn't have the legs to wear a tunic.
Sidney Franklin had initially been courted to direct the film.
Stephen Boyd wore dark contact lenses for this film.
Stephen Boyd wore lifts in his shoes to make his height more on a par with Charlton Heston's.
Stephen Boyd, Jack Hawkins and all other actors, that had the role of a Roman, they had to wear darkened contact lenses, if their eye color was not brown. William Wyler didn't want his two leading men to have the same eye color. Boyd's lenses constantly irritated and scratched his eyes, often leading to days where shooting had to be halted to allow the actor's eyes time to recover.
William Wyler missed just 2 days of the lengthy shoot due to flu.
William Wyler was a renowned stickler for detail. Charlton Heston recalled one particular scene where Judah Ben-Hur simply walks across a room upon his return from slavery. Such a simple scene required 8 takes before the actor finally asked Wyler what was missing. The director informed him that he liked the first take where Heston had kicked a piece of pottery to give the scene its only sound. Heston on the other hand had assumed that Wyler didn't like the kicking and had therefore deliberately avoided doing it again.
William Wyler was an assistant director on the original Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ and 34 years later directed its remake, Ben-Hur.
Sergio Leone has an uncredited second unit director credit. In later years, he claimed that he directed the chariot race scenes, but that is a falsehood (Leone had a reputation for not always being truthful).
Martha Scott was 45 at the time of filming, only 10 years older than her screen son. She also played Charlton Heston's mother in The Ten Commandments the same year.
Robert Ryan was considered for the role of Messala, with Burt Lancaster as Ben-Hur.
Miklós Rózsa wrote the musical score in eight weeks.
According to Gore Vidal, as recounted in The Celluloid Closet one of the script elements he was brought in to re-write was the relationship between Messala and Ben-Hur. Director William Wyler was concerned that two men who had been close friends as youths would not simply hate one another as a result of disagreeing over politics. Thus, Vidal devised a thinly veiled subtext suggesting the Messala and Ben-Hur had been lovers as teenagers, and their fighting was a result of Ben-Hur spurning Messala. Wyler was initially hesitant to implement the subtext, but agreed on the conditions that no direct reference ever be made to the characters' sexuality in the script, that Vidal personally discuss the idea with Stephen Boyd, and not mention the subtext to Charlton Heston who, Wyler feared, would panic at the idea. After Vidal admitted to adding the homosexual subtext in public, Heston denied the claim, going so far as to suggest Vidal had little input into the final script, and his lack of screen credit was a result of his being fired for trying to add gay innuendo. Vidal rebutted by citing passages from Heston's 1978 autobiography, where the actor admitted that Vidal had aut
According to his memoirs Stewart Granger was offered the role of Messala but claimed that he turned it down on the advice of his agent who recommended Granger not to play a supporting role to Charlton Heston.
Although William Wyler was Jewish, he particularly wanted to make a film that would appeal to all religious faiths.
Although there were presumably white horses in Italy, the white horses used in the film were brought in from Lipica, Slovenia, the original home of the snow-white "Lipizzaner" horse breed. Glenn H. Randall Sr. trained 78 horses for the film, starting months before photography began.
An infirmary was created especially for the filming of the dangerous chariot race scenes. However, in the end, very few injuries were actually sustained, most of them being sunburns.
Another problem concerned the color of the water in the pond holding the boat; it was too brown and murky. They hired a chemist to develop a dye to color the water Azure Mediterranean blue. The chemist dumped a huge sack of some powder into the pond, which, instead of turning the water blue, formed a hard crust on the surface of the water, which had to be chiselled off the boat at great expense. They finally found some dye that would make the water blue. During one of the battle scenes, an extra who fell into the water and spent a bit too much time there turned blue, and was kept on the MGM payroll until it wore off.
Besides Burt Lancaster, Rock Hudson was also offered the role of Ben Hur. Hudson seriously considered accepting the part until his agent explained to him that the film's gay subtext was too much of a risk to his career.
By the time filming had finished, MGM's London laboratories had processed over 1,250,000 feet of 65mm Eastman Color film, at the cost of $1 a foot.
Christ was played by opera singer Claude Heater, who went uncredited for his only film role.
Director William Wyler decided that the Romans should have British accents, and that the four Americans in the cast would play Hebrews. This was a technique later used in Masada.
Director William Wyler had previous experience with Ben-Hur. He served as an assistant director under action specialist Breezy Eason (B. Reeves Eason) who was one of the directors for the chariot race in MGM's mammoth silent version of the story, Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ.
Director William Wyler took on the project because he wanted to do a Cecil B. DeMille type picture.
During filming, director William Wyler noticed that one of the extras was missing a hand. He had the man's stump covered in blood with a false bone protruding from it for the scene where the galley was rammed by another ship. Wyler made similar use of an extra who was missing a foot.
During the 18-day auction of MGM props, costumes, and memorabilia that took place in May 1970 when new owner Kirk Kerkorian was liquidating the studio's assets, a Sacramento restaurateur paid $4,000 for a chariot used in the film. Three years later, during the energy crisis, he was arrested for driving the chariot on the highway.
For some sequences in the chariot race, some of the chariots had three horses instead of four. This enabled the camera car to move in closer.
In the original novel, Ben-Hur's mother does not have a name; she is referred to as Mother of Hur. For the film, she was called Miriam.
In the Roman galley scenes, Ben-Hur is referred to as "number 41." In the original General Lew Wallace novel, he is "number 60" (Book 3, Chapter 3, page 123, Harper Brothers 1922). In the Dell Movie Classic comic book, he is referred to as "number 40" (Dell Comics #1052-5911, 1959, pages 15 and 16). And in both Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ and the 1958 Classics Illustrated comic book there is no reference to any number, either by scene decor, dialogue, or intertitle.
Initially there were queries over whether William Wyler was the right director for the job, as he'd never tackled a film of this scale before. One of the doubters was Wyler himself.
It was the first "remake" to win the Oscar for Best Picture. The Departed became the second "remake" to do so, 47 years later.
June 2008 Ranked #2 on the American Film Institute's list of the 10 greatest films in the genre "Epic".
MGM acquired over 40 scripts for the film.
MGM wanted an authentic-looking Roman boat for the live battle scenes. To design the boats, they hired a person who had spent his whole career studying Roman naval architecture. When he presented his designs to the MGM engineers, Mauro Zambuto (set engineer) exclaimed, "But this is top heavy! It will sink!" They built the boat anyway and launched it in the ocean, and at first it seemed to float. Then, however, a little wave came along, a wake from another boat, splashed against the highly unstable boat, and tipped it over. MGM then put the boat in a large pond with a huge painted sky backdrop. To steady the boat, they ran cables from the bottom of the boat to anchors on the bottom of the pond.
MGM was unsatisfied with the script even as the film was shooting, and hired Ben Hecht to "polish" it. They flew him to Rome, set him up in a house and paid him approximately $15,000 for a week's work. It's not known if any of Hecht's dialogue made it into the final film.
One of only two films shot in the MGM Camera 65 cinematographic process (the other being Raintree County, which was only released in 35mm prints). The MGM Camera 65 process used 65mm negative stock, but the 70mm prints intended for projection contained additional space for a stereophonic track that was printed in magnetic stripes directly on the film in the sprocket-hole area. Magnetic stripes were superior to optical soundtracks in that they could provide four channels of sound (six in the Todd-AO process) compared to the single sound channel of optical prints. The MGM Camera 65 used an anamorphic lens akin to CinemaScope that squeezed the image by 10%. Exhibitors rejected the new system as they had already made huge capital outlays of money to equip their theaters with CinemaScope lenses, stereophonic sound systems and 70mm projectors.
One of the very few (and very expensive) 65mm cameras in the world was wrecked during the filming of the chariot race.
One thing William Wyler was completely unable to do was get his leading man to cry on-screen. You'll note in Ben-Hur's crying scenes that Charlton Heston covers his eyes.
Originally William Wyler had planned only to film the first unit and leave the second unit duties to producer Sam Zimbalist. These plans were scuppered by Zimbalist's premature death. MGM persuaded Wyler to see the film through to completion by offering him a sizable amount of money.
Producer Sam Zimbalist died two months before production ended, with William Wyler handling his duties afterward.
Producer Sam Zimbalist offered William Wyler $1,000,000 to direct this film. This was the highest director's fee ever paid up to that time.