MOVIE TRIVIA … BEN HUR

MOVIE TRIVIA …

BEN HUR 1 

1.    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.

2.    The film used over 1,000,000 props with over 300 sets built for the film. The outdoor sets built for the chariot race were the largest built at the time. Featured more crew and extras than any other film ever made before it. There were 15,000 extras alone for the chariot race sequence.

3.    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. The chariot race has a 263-to-1 cutting ratio (263 feet of film for every one foot kept), probably the highest for any 65mm sequence ever filmed.

4.    The chariot race segment was directed by legendary stuntman Yakima Canutt. Joe Canutt (Yak's son) doubled for Charlton Heston. During one of the crashes, in which Judah Ben-Hur's horses jump over a crashed chariot, the younger Canutt was thrown from his chariot onto the tongue of his chariot. He managed to climb back into his chariot and bring it back under control. The sequence looked so good that it was included in the film, with a close-up of Heston climbing back into the chariot. Canutt got a slight cut on his chin, but it was the only injury in the incredibly dangerous sequence.

5.    The design of the stadium was another major bone of contention. MGM asked an archaeologist what the stadium in Jerusalem had looked like. "Roman," came the reply. A second archaeologist was asked. "It was in a Phoenician style," he said. A third archaeologist was consulted, who said: "Stadium? I was not aware that Jerusalem had one!" MGM engineers eventually sat down and carefully studied Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1925), and based their design on that.

6.    When the production was over, MGM was afraid that small-time local Italian producers would use the leftover sets as backgrounds to their own low-budget epics, so they destroyed all of the sets.

7.    Miklós Rózsa wrote the musical score in eight weeks.

8.    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.

9.    This is the only one of the three movies who have won 11 Academy Awards (the others being Titanic (1997) and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003)) to have won an Oscar for acting performances.

10.    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.

11.    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.