"Loved him, hated Hur," quipped comic Mort Sahl when MGM first unveiled Ben-Hur in 1959. Audiences thought differently, however, saving the studio from bankruptcy and setting William Wyler's film up for its record tally of 11 Academy Awards. Nearly five decades on, it's regarded as one of the crowning achievements of the Hollywood studio system, the high watermark of the epic genre and a seminal influence on everything from Gladiator to The Phantom Menace. And all it took was seven years, $15 million and its producer's life.
Despite costing $4 million to make and taking six years to turn a profit, the 1925 Ben-Hur - with Ramon Novarro in the title role and a then 23-year-old William Wyler as assistant director - had gone on to be MGM's most successful movie of the silent era. Small wonder that, with Tinseltown under fire from the pernicious threat of TV and trembling under the watchful gaze of Senator Joe McCarthy, a new version of General Lew Wallace's 1880 novel Ben-Hur: A Tale Of The Christ seemed just the thing to make Leo the Lion roar again. Quo Vadis, The Robe and Cecil B DeMille's The Ten Commandments had revived interest in the Biblical saga, while production funds still locked up in post-war Europe made a repeat of the original's troubled Rome shoot financially attractive. As for scripts: well, producer Sam Zimbalist had a dozen of them, having nurtured the project since 1951.
Hired to make sense of the myriad drafts in return for an early release from his MGM contract, author Gore Vidal was less than optimistic: "It was a piece of junk. What we had on our hands was, essentially, a silent movie with miles of windy dialogue." Some of that dialogue came from original screenwriter Karl Tunberg, although Wyler subsequently brought in Maxwell Anderson, SN Behrman and Christopher Fry; by the time he and Vidal flew to Rome to begin shooting, the script was the size of a phonebook. "I remember Dad agonising over the screenplay," says the director's daughter, Catherine. "We would talk about it at dinner and the problems of the story and the characters. He was such a perfectionist."
One of the biggest problems in Vidal's mind was finding a plausible motivation for the bitter enmity between Jewish prince Judah Ben-Hur and Roman tribune Messala, his childhood friend. The writer's solution was a radical one: to suggest the pair had been boyhood lovers and that Messala's betrayal be motivated by his rage at having his attempts to renew the affair rebuffed by his now-hetero chum. "I doubt if two Hollywood magnates had ever been so confounded by what they took to be one writer's mad perversity," Vidal recalled, though Wyler thought it worth a try: "Anything's better than what we've got. But don't say a word to Chuck or he'll fall apart."
Chuck, of course, was Charlton Heston, reluctantly selected after an exhaustive search. (Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, Marlon Brando and Rock Hudson had turned the role down; so had first choice Paul Newman, who resolved never to be seen again "in a cocktail dress" after 1954's catastrophic slave drama The Silver Chalice.) Vidal was certainly no fan, believing the actor "had all the charm of a wooden Indian"; nor was Wyler, despite having directed him in his last movie, The Big Country. "After one scene, he took me aside and said, ‘You've got to be better,'" recalled Heston. "I spent a long time with a glass of Scotch in my hand after that."
Heston applied himself more, upping his game in the dramatic scenes and spending five weeks learning how to drive a chariot for the film's biggest set-piece. Even after this, though, he wasn't sure he had what it took and said as much to stunt co-ordinator Yakima Canutt. "Just stay in the chariot, Chuck," the latter replied. "I guarantee you'll win the race."
The 18-acre chariot track - one of 300 sets built for the production - took more than a year to construct and used 40,000 tons of white sand, a million tons of plaster and 250 miles of metal tubing; the 20-minute sequence itself saw Heston and Stephen Boyd whipcrack away in front of 8,000 extras. A brand new 65mm camera was wrecked by one runaway chariot; contrary to rumour, though, no stuntmen bought the farm during shooting. Indeed, the only fatality on Ben-Hur was Zimbalist himself, who died on location from a heart attack many believed was brought on by the stress of getting his gargantuan movie finished.
(Released on a wave of hyperbole ("The entertainment experience of a lifetime!" "A masterpiece of matchless acclaim!" "The screen's mightiest achievement!") and a string of glitzy premières that saw Heston and Israeli co-star Haya Harareet walk red carpets in New York, Los Angeles, Washington and Tokyo, Ben-Hur broke box-office records to earn $80 million worldwide. Its lucky streak continued at the 1960 Oscars, where it won 11 gongs from 12 nominations; only the Best Adapted Screenplay prize eluded it, largely because of a controversial Writers Guild ruling which saw Karl Tunberg - its former president - get solo credit for Fry and Vidal's words. ("A wretched business," rued the latter later.)
Accepting his Best Actor statuette, Heston remembered his late producer and the evening concluded with Gary Cooper handing the Best Picture award to Zimbalist's widow. To date only Titanic and The Return Of The King have grabbed as many Golden Baldies, though Wyler would later see the movie that won him his third Best Director Oscar as something of a double-edged sword. "I was a great favourite of Cahiers Du Cinéma until Ben-Hur," he told Vidal. "After that they never mentioned my name again..."