The film shot in Rome under its Hollywood-friendly ruler, Benito Mussolini. The film-makers paid $600,000 for the rights this time around, in addition to fees to build some 30 ships for the pitched naval battle sequences. The film was the second-highest grossing feature of the year behind King Vidor’s The Big Parade.
It played at Oscar Hammerstein’s Manhattan Opera House, which is now a Quiznos.Ī scant eight years later, MGM released a 143-minute film version starring Mexican American Ramon Novarro, who played opposite Francis X Bushman as Messala. William Young’s six-act stage adaptation of Ben-Hur finally wore out its welcome in 1917, with a sixth and final run on Broadway. Production budget: $3m, adjusted to $41.2m in 2016īox office gross: $9m, adjusted to $123.8m in 2016 Director Sidney Olcott went on to film the world’s first five-reel movie, From the Manger to the Cross, in Palestine the next year.Īppropriately, both the 1907 film and novel are now in the public domain. Kalem had to pay Harper a hefty $25,000, according to Kevin Brownlow’s history of silent film, The Parade’s Gone By. Films weren’t taken particularly seriously at the time, but the justices said that the film’s advertisement had relied on the book’s success and its makers were wrong to have hitched a ride on Wallace’s coattails. The result, a landmark 1911 ruling, created contemporary copyright standards when the justices said that film-makers needed permission to adapt works under copyright. The company sued the film-makers, who had simply shot their favorite scenes from the book.īox office records for the film weren’t available, but the film’s success made an impression: the resulting infringement suit went to the supreme court. Wallace had died two years before the film’s release, but his publisher, Harper & Brothers, still held the rights to the book.
Production budget: $500, adjusted to $12,851 in 2016Įventual court settlement: $25,000, adjusted to $642,589 in 2016Īt 15 minutes long, the film is certainly the shortest adaptation of the novel’s hundreds of pages in terms of film history, though, it might be even more significant than the 1959 classic because it created the concept of movie rights.Īn elaborate play version had been a success in 1899, possibly because the spectacle had included horses on treadmills and the producing Kalem Company worked hard to replicate it, even featuring actors from the 1890 cast of the play.
Photograph: Strobridge Lithography Company: Cincinnati and New York/Wikimedia commons Ben Hur (1907)
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