Ben hur how many extras

The chariot race has a to-1 cutting ratio feet of film for every one foot used , probably the highest for any 65mm sequence ever filmed. Martha Scott was 45 at the time of filming, only ten years older than her screen son, Charlton Heston. She also played Heston's mother in The Ten Commandments three years previously. Several of the categories won by "Titanic" and "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King" didn't exist in "Ben-Hur"'s day, making its 11 wins that much more impressive.

It is also the first-ever film to win 10 Academy Awards in competitive categories, with Gone With The Wind having won 8 competitive Oscars and 2 special Oscars. William Wyler was so impressed with David Lean's work on The Bridge on the River Kwai that he asked Lean to direct the famous chariot race sequence. Lean would have received full screen credit for the job--"Chariot Race directed by David Lean. The chariot scene alone cost about four million dollars, or about a fourth of the entire budget, and took 10 weeks to shoot.

Jesus Christ was played by American opera singer Claude Heater, who went uncredited in his only feature film role, because he never spoke. He was born in Oakland, California. William Wyler selected all the camera angles for the chariot race, but left all the details of its actual shooting in the hands of his second-unit directors Andrew Marton and Yakima Canutt.

When he saw Marton and Canutt's work, Wyler remarked that it was "one of the greatest cinematic achievements" he'd ever seen. Wyler then supervised the editing of the sequence. 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 eight 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.

When film students are given a tour of the Panavision facility, they are shown the chariot race from this film in full 70mm Ultra Panavision 2. When he was cast as Messala, Stephen Boyd grew a bushy beard for the role, only to be told that fashionable Roman men of the time didn't wear beards.

Desiring as much authenticity as possible, real aristocrats were recruited to play patricians as guests at the party sequence. Shot over a period of nine months at Rome's Cinecitta studios, the outdoor set of the chariot race circus was the largest built for a film at the time.

Paul Newman was offered the role of Judah Ben-Hur but turned it down because he'd already done one Biblical-era film, The Silver Chalice , and hated the experience. He also said it taught him that he didn't have the legs to wear a tunic.

One of the very few and very expensive 65mm cameras in existence was wrecked during the filming of the chariot race. Charlton Heston had learned how to handle a two-horse chariot when he was making The Ten Commandments When he arrived in Rome, he instantly began lessons in four-horse chariot racing with the film's stunt coordinator, Yakima Canutt. The chariot race was shot MOS - without sound. This was added in post-production when the decision was also made to not have any music throughout the sequence.

After a few days of shooting, Andrew Marton discovered the most effective way to shoot in the arena would be to have the cameras right in the midst of the race, necessitating a camera car that moved with the chariots. He also noted that the best shots on the curves were done using a specially built camera chariot with rubber tires. Several times during the film, Judah touches a box on the door frame of his home. This is a Mezuzah, a case containing a passage from the Torah Deuteronomy and and , which Jews traditionally affix to the door frames of their houses as a constant reminder of God's presence.

According to Charlton Heston, William Wyler was reluctant to change his mind about an approach to a scene or character, resulting in frequently conflicting direction. He also noted in his diary: "I doubt [Wyler] likes actors very much. He doesn't empathize with them--they irritate him on the set. He gets very impatient, but invariably they come off well. The only answer I have is that his taste is impeccable and every actor knows it.

Although William Wyler was Jewish, he was particularly keen to make a film that would appeal to all religious faiths. In any case, he viewed the novel's subtitle, "A Tale of the Christ", as almost incidental to the story. He never lost sight of the obvious fact that the story was about a man called Judah Ben-Hur. His insistence that it be that personal story is largely responsible for the film's enduring success.

During filming, director William Wyler noticed that one of the extras was missing a hand. He had the make-up department construct a prosthetic that included a protruding false bone to cover the man's stump for the scene where the galley was rammed by a pirate ship.

Wyler made similar use of an extra who was missing a foot. While this film was occupying most of the stages and back lot at Cinecitta, Federico Fellini was shooting The Sweet Life on a small corner there. By the time filming had finished, MGM's London laboratories had processed over 1,, feet of 65mm Eastman Color film, at the cost of one dollar per foot. Director William Wyler decided that the Romans should have British accents, and that the four Americans in the cast would play the Judaeans.

There are, however, exceptions, such as Israeli actress Haya Harareet as Esther, and a British actor dubbing one of the Judaeans winching provisions down to the Valley of the Lepers. Charlton Heston made a big blunder early on by composing a lengthy memo outlining his ideas about his character in the first scene with Messala. He later noted that it took him considerable time to get back in William Wyler's good graces after doing that and may have had something to do with the rough time the director gave him during production.

He also wrote that Wyler once told him he wished he Wyler could be a nice guy on the set but that "you can't make a good picture that way. Stephen Boyd wore lifts in his shoes to make his height more on a par with Charlton Heston's. 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. Stephen Boyd's contact lenses caused him terrible pain, forcing a rescheduling of scenes so he could rest his eyes.

Stephen Boyd, and several other actors playing Romans, wore dark contact lenses, so their eyes appeared brown. Sergio Leone was an uncredited second-unit director. In later years he claimed that he directed the chariot race scenes, but that is an apparently self-serving exaggeration Leone had a reputation for stretching the truth. As Quintus is driving his chariot in his victory procession, he is accompanied by the slave, Ben-Hur. In Roman tradition, a slave would stand in the chariot behind the victor, often holding a laurel above his head, while whispering to the victor that all glory is fleeting.

In June this film was ranked 2 on the American Film Institute's list of the 10 greatest films in the genre "Epic". William Wyler kept up a hours-a-day, six-days-a-week schedule for the nine months it took to shoot. At 2 hours, 1 minute, and 23 seconds, Charlton Heston's performance in this movie is the longest to ever win an Academy Award for Best Actor, and the second longest to win in any category. This was the highest director's fee ever paid up to that time. Producer Sam Zimbalist, 54, collapsed and died of a heart attack 40 minutes after leaving the set complaining of chest pains.

It was outside and exposed to the elements for many years. 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. Although only about 36 horses would ever be seen on screen during the race, 82 animals to cover for accidents and rest periods were brought in from Croatia. The heat of Rome proved to be a serious drawback for the action scenes.

Horses could only make about eight runs a day at most. Because of this, most of the shots in the race were done on the first take.

One of only four MGM films in which the studio's trademark Leo the Lion did not roar at the beginning of the opening credits, apparently because of the religious theme in the film. 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.

In any event, Lancaster, who was 45 when the film eventually went before the cameras, was too old for the part. Sheik Ilderim's white horses were brought in from Lipica, Slovenia, the original home of the snow-white "Lipizzaner" horse breed. Glenn H. Randall Sr. In this movie, however, he is depicted as white and played by Scottish actor Finlay Currie, while Melchior, traditionally white, is dark-skinned in the film, and played by an uncredited Reginald Lal Singh.

During a shot of chariots swinging around the large curve, two of the vehicles smashed into the cameras, which were fortunately protected by a wooden barricade. Nevertheless, production was held up for small repairs and testing on the cameras. No cast, crew or horses were badly injured in the mishap.

The process of amassing the more than one million props that were needed began in Rome two years before cameras started rolling. Famed stuntman Yakima Canutt was brought in to coordinate all the chariot race stunt work and train the drivers. Charlton Heston was among the first to begin training, arriving on location a few months ahead of scheduled shooting. He was also there to do costume fittings. 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. It is the first movie remake to win the Oscar for Best Picture. The Departed became the second remake, 47 years later. It can be argued that a talking picture made from the same story as an earlier silent film is not a true remake, since the storytelling techniques each employ are so radically different.

The city of Jerusalem set took up 10 square blocks. Altogether, the production used about 40, cubic feet of lumber, more than a million pounds of plaster, and miles of metal tubing. Stephen Boyd had difficulty driving the chariots. His hands and wrists blistered, and rest time had to be scheduled. Such was the expense of the film that nervous MGM executives flew out to Rome on a weekly basis to check on the production's progress.

The chariot arena was built by more than 1, workers beginning in January , according to some reports. It was 2, feet long by 65 feet wide and covered 18 acres, the largest single set in motion picture history to that time.

Reputedly, 40, tons of white sand were imported from Mexico for the track. Charlton Heston's Oscar winning performance in this film is his only Academy Award nomination, though he also won the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. Upon reading Karl Tunberg's original script, William Wyler had written in the margins "awful. Consequently, he brought in Gore Vidal--who was under contract to MGM at the time and hated it--to rewrite the screenplay. Vidal also thought that Tunberg's script was dreadful and initially didn't even want to take on the project.

He changed his mind when Wyler promised to get him out of the remaining two years of his contract. Wyler then brought in playwright Maxwell Anderson to do a draft. Playwright Christopher Fry was then engaged by Wyler to polish a screenplay that, by that time, was largely Anderson's work, built on the skeleton of Tunberg's earlier drafts.

It was a sweeping, sentimental bestseller, that conflated the story of a Jewish prince who's sold into slavery with the rise of Jesus Christ.

While unsophisticated, it was a cracking good yarn, and within a decade had inspired a hugely successful play. With its slave ships and chariot races, Ben-Hur's cinematic potential was obvious, and in , Kalem Studios used Wallace's story as the basis for a lively minute short which concentrated on that epic chariot race. Only trouble is, they didn't ask Lew Wallace's estate for permission first, a common practice among unscrupulous early filmmakers.

In a landmark copyright case, the studio was successfully sued, putting manners on film producers thereafter. MGM's adaptation did have film rights: a splendidly lavish, big-budget spectacular, it ran for almost two-and-a-half hours and was the most elaborate motion picture of its time. Horses died and stuntmen risked serious injury in the film's famous chariot-racing scenes, but they helped make the finished film a massive global success.

And director Fred Niblo's handling of the chariot races marked a huge leap forward in terms of editing and montage. William Wyler worked as an assistant director on Niblo's film, and so seemed the natural choice when MGM decided to remake their silent classic in widescreen Technicolor. The project had been knocking around MGM for a couple of years before Wyler got his hands on it: he hated the original script so much that he called in Gore Vidal to rewrite it.

He did, but didn't receive a credit, much to Wyler's annoyance, and disputes over the final screenplay's authorship would continue for decades. Years later, Vidal stirred things up by pointing out the homosexual subtext in Ben-Hur and Messala's relationship, a claim that horrified the ultra-conservative Charlton Heston, who rushed to refute the claims. Burt Lancaster, an atheist, turned the role down because he didn't want to promote Christianity.

Paul Newman was also approached, but reckoned he didn't have the legs to wear a toga. Bit spindly, apparently. Meaty mid-westerner Charlton Heston certainly did have the pins, but was initially offered the role of Messala, Ben-Hur's arrogant Roman rival, before screen tests convinced Wyler and producer Sam Zimbalist that he ought to be playing the lead.

Sadly, Zimbalist would not live to see the finished film: he died of a heart attack during production. Advance parties from Ben-Hur's vast crew arrived in Cinecitta Studios in October of to begin preparing for a truly epic shoot. There was no CGI, and no in-camera trickery apart from a sea battle that was done using model ships in a huge tank in Culver City.

Everything else you saw on the screen was real. Two hundred camels and 2, horses were purchased for the shoot: a workshop of artists and craftsmen worked night and day turning more than a million pounds of plaster into fake Roman friezes and statues; and on the outskirts of Rome, huge sets sprung up that attracted thousands of tourists. In the grim economic climate of post-war Italy, the multimillion dollar production presented much-needed opportunities for hard-pressed locals.

According to the National Endowment for the Humanities , inspiration for Wallace's book came from a train ride he shared with an agnostic colonel. Wallace, who was a Christian, said the conversation over the course of the journey made him realize just how little he knew about his religion — something he immediately resolved to fix.

The first film version, a short, was produced without consent, prompting a watershed legal battle that went all the way to the Supreme Court and helped establish modern copyright laws regarding film adaptations, according to tandfonline.

The authorized film was MGM's first major release and nearly bankrupted the studio, according to a post on patheos. Also popping up as extras were future movie stars such as Gary Cooper and Clark Gable. As for Zimbalist, he had a connection to the movie: He worked on it as a film cutter, according to Turner Classic Movies' website. Producers hoped the epic scale would give audiences a reason to come out to the theaters. TCM says the version was filmed using a new format to add to its epic scope: widescreen 65mm film stock shot with the MGM Camera 65, later known as Panavision.

The website also indicates that for the nine-month production, Wyler maintained a hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week work schedule. When production ended, he suffered intense migraines for months afterward.

Not surprisingly, everyone wants to take credit for the brilliant chariot race sequence. Several of the second-unit directors, including Yakima Canutt, Andrew Marton and the godfather of spaghetti westerns Sergio Leone all later claimed to have directed the sequence.

One longstanding rumor about the films is that a stuntman was killed during the chariot race. That only almost happened, according to IMDB. In one famous shot, Judah jumps another chariot broken down in the middle of the track, causing him to be thrown over the front of his chariot.

Miraculously, he catches himself on the center hitching rail and manages to climb back in.