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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 Hurr on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. This episode is sponsored by Quince. Autumn is here, which means it's time to start bringing out all your cold weather gear. And for me, it means taking out my Quince Mongolian cashmere sweaters and my Quince blankets. I have a thick fisherman's blanket for sitting on the couch and an organic waffle bed blanket that I use as a bed cover. My Quince products not only keep me warm, but they look really good too, and they do so at a fraction of the price of other retailers. 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And her is unusual in the entertainment industry, because essentially the same story became a landmark spectacle in not one, not two, but three different forms of media. And in one of those media forms, film, it was the biggest movie ever produced on two different occasions. The story of Benher begins with Lou Wallace, a former Union general in the Civil War, editorial governor, diplomat and the author of the book. His novel Benher, A Tale of the Christ, was published in 1880 after roughly seven years of research and writing. It tells the story of Judah Benher, a wealthy Jewish prince in Roman-occupied Judea, whose friendship with the Roman masala turns into a bitter rivalry. Judah is falsely condemned, survives slavery as a galley roar, returns to seek revenge, and ultimately encounters Jesus and the Christian message of forgiveness. Jesus is important in the novel, but he is not really its central character. In fact, Jesus only appears briefly. Wallace instead tells the story through Judah Benher. This allows him to combine religious fiction with an adventure story, involving battles, romance, political intrigue, and, most famously, a chariot race. The combination of all these things was enormously successful. Benher became the best-selling American novel of the entire 19th century and remained a major cultural phenomenon well into the 20th century. Prominent figures such as Ulysses S. Grant, James Garfield, and even Queen Victoria admired the novel, and it helped make religious historical fiction into a genre. After the novel's success, many theatrical producers wanted to adapt the story for the stage. Wallace initially doubted that the novel could possibly work on stage. His objections were practical. How could anyone stage the chariot race, and perhaps more importantly for Wallace, how could an actor represent Jesus? The solution to those problems produced one of the greatest theatrical spectacles of its era. The first major stage version of Benher opened at New York's Broadway theater on November 29, 1899. The screenplay was written by William W. Young, and the show was produced by Mark Law and Abraham Erlanger. Edward Morgan played Judah, while an actor who would later become one of the first great Western movie stars William S. Hart played Missala Unopening Night. The production was enormous by 19th century theater standards. There were elaborate representations of Jerusalem, Roman galleys, shipwrecks, palaces, and crowds. Scene changes themselves became feats of stage engineering. In the galleys sequence, for example, scenery and performers could be transformed into the aftermath of the shipwreck in darkness in only a few seconds. But everything in the show revolved around one problem, the chariot race. 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 hurdle around the racetrack. It was essentially a 19th century theatrical version of filming actors against a moving background, except that everything was happening live. Contemporary accounts suggest that the horses were genuinely running at tremendous speeds only a short distance in front of the audience. The production got around the issue of having an actor play Jesus by representing him as a beam of white light. The combination of religion and mechanical spectacle turned Ben Hurr into a sensation. The original Broadway engagement ran for 194 performances, but that was just the beginning. Touring companies carried the production throughout the United States and eventually into Britain and Australia. Various versions of the show continued for roughly 21 years. Estimates suggest that there were more than 6,000 performances and that perhaps as many as 20 million people saw the play. With the arrival of motion pictures, the Ben Hurr story was a natural for putting on film. In 1907, the Calum company made a roughly 15 minute adaptation of the story. However, the company had not obtained permission from Wallace's estate or other rights holders, who promptly sued. The resulting litigation helped establish an important principle that filmmakers could not simply take a copyrighted book and turn it into a movie without purchasing adaptation rights. The case became an important early precedent in motion picture copyright. The next attempt at filming the story would therefore begin with something Hollywood would increasingly come to understand very well, buying the rights to the book. 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 Mayor was formed in 1924, the project became one of the new studios most important productions. And it was also nearly a catastrophe. Production began in Italy in 1923. Directors, actors, and producers all changed, costspiral.a control. Much of the footage was considered unusable. Eventually, MGM, executive Irving Falberg brought the production back to California, replaced much of the creative team, and essentially started from scratch. One young assistant working on the production was William Weiler, who 34 years later would direct another version of Ben Hurr. The silent film eventually cost about $4 million, an almost unheard of amount of money for the period, and many times MGM's normal production budget. It was among the most expensive films ever made up to that point. And once again, the sequence everyone cared about was the chariot race. Some acres conducted 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 way before the film was released, there was still a lot of work to do. Before computer effects or sophisticated stunt regs, the race was astonishingly dangerous. Chariots really raced, horses really ran, and crashes really happened. One spectacular pile-up involving horses, chariots, and stuntmen was a real accident that made it into the finished film. The filming of the race scene was an event in Hollywood, and many of the top stars of the era were in attendance. Actors, directors, producers, and other celebrities all came to the set simply to watch. And because MGM needed thousands of people to fill the grandstands, many of these visitors were persuaded to put on costumes and become extras. As a result, the crowd reportedly included an extraordinary collection of established and future stars, including Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, Lionel Barrymore, Lilian Gish, Gerald Lloyd, Joan Crawford, Marion Davies, and many, many, many others. Roughly 200,000 feet of film was reportedly shot just for the race before editor Lloyd Nossler reduced it to just a fraction of that length. Rapidly cutting between wide shots, close views of the drivers, wheels, horses, crashes, and spectators created a pace that feels surprisingly modern. MGM even used selected sequences in the relatively new two-color-techno-color process, giving audiences a burst 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 Hurr 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 did not exist in 1925. Television. Millions of Americans who previously went regularly to movie theaters now had entertainment in their living rooms. Hollywood responded by trying to give audiences things television couldn't provide. Enormous screens, wide-screen photography, stereoscopic sound, lavish color, and gigantic productions. Typical sword and sandal epics suited the strategy in particular. The robe, the Ten Commandments and Quovatas demonstrated the enormous audience for such films. An MGM still controlled the rights to Ben Hurr, and at the time, the studio desperately needed a hit. The studio took a gamble, hiring William Wyler to direct, and casting Charlton Heston as Judah Ben Hurr, and Stephen Boyd as Masala. One took place largely at the Chinachita 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. Wyler's real contribution was that he didn't simply try to remake the 1925 movie and make it bigger. He tried to deepen the human story. As with all other previous productions, the centerpiece of the movie was the chariot race. They built what was then one of the largest movie sets ever made. The arena occupied roughly eighteen acres with enormous grandstands and a track covered with tens of thousands of tons of sand. The set took around a year to construct. They trained dozens of horses for months to learn how to race chariots. Charlton Heston and Stephen Boyd learned how to drive four horse chariots themselves, allowing 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 just let the sound of wheels, hooves, and crashes take over. One of the most memorable moments occurs when Judas chariot races towards the wreckage of another chariot. The horse clears it, but the chariot itself suddenly launches into the air. Joe Kenneth, stunt director, Yakima Kenneth's son, performed the stunt. The chariot landed violently throwing Kenneth partly forward. Heston's close-up then completed the illusion that Judas himself had nearly been thrown out, but Kenneth actually required four stitches on his chin. An urban legend says that a stuntman died during the filming of the chariot scene and that the studio left the scene in the film. This is not true. A stuntman did die during the filming in Rome in 1925, but the studio never used that footage. M.J.M.'s gamble succeeded spectacularly. Ben Herb 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, Best Actor, and Best Supporting Actor. 11 wins established a record that stood alone for nearly four decades and has only been matched by Titanic and Lord of the Rings Return of the King. And before I conclude, just for the sake of completion I should mention the other version of Ben Herb. In 2016, M.J.M. went to the Ben Herb 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 just a 24% rotten tomato score. The CGI couldn't compete with the actual live stunts from the 1959 version, or for that matter, the 1925 version. I'm guessing that many of you didn't even realize that they made a version of Ben Herb in 2016. The history of Ben Herb is really the history of popular entertainment reinventing itself. What began as one of the most successful novels of the 19th century became a theatrical spectacle built around live horses and then a silent film epic that pushed film making to its limits and then finally one of the grandest productions of Hollywood's Golden Age. Each version used the newest tools of its era to tell the same story on a larger scale. Few works have ever been adopted so often and achieve success in so many different entertainment mediums. Executive producer of everything everywhere daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Austin Otkin and Cameron Kiefer. My big thanks go to everyone who supports a show around Patreon. Your support helps make this podcast possible. And I also want to remind everyone about the community groups on Facebook and Discord. That's where everything happens that's outside the podcast. And links to those are available in the show notes. As always, if you leave a review on any major podcast app or in the above community groups, you too can have it read in the show.