![]() There was no money left to dismantle the set, and for a few years it became an actual ruin in the middle of Los Angeles. The walls were about the same height as the columns on which the elephants were erected it is safe to estimate the overall height at one hundred and forty feet… At its widest point, the tower structure was forty feet.” (He adds that “Altogether we spent little more than a couple of hours on the scene.”) Intolerance’s Babylon set was built on a still-dirt Sunset Boulevard, at Hollywood, site today of the Vista Theatre, and it was both carefully researched (though Griffith insisted on the totally inappropriate elephants) and enormous in Kevin Brownlow’s book The Parade's Gone By, second-unit director Joseph Henabery describes the scale: “The walls of Babylon were ninety feet high. ![]() That’s pretty weird, right? What kind of mind came up with that? In a posthumous essay just published at the Paris Review, late science fiction author Ray Bradbury says it was his idea. (An influential and ruinously expensive feat of filmmaking in which Griffith calls out critics of his previous film, The Birth of a Nation, as the real racists it interweaves tales of intolerance from ancient Babylon, the life of Christ, Renaissance France, and then-modern America). If you’ve been to the Hollywood & Highland Center and have a working knowledge of silent film history, you may have noticed that the hulking mall’s design has been lifted with mixed success from the Babylon set in DW Griffith’s 1916 epic Intolerance.
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