A Time to Fire
"Ben Hur" was started by director Charles Brabin, who was married to one of Hollywood’s first screen sirens, Theda Bara.
After the Goldwyn Company became MGM, Louis B. Mayer, the new head of the studio, looked at the rushes and made two major decisions. He fired Brabin and the star of the film, George Walsh, who was replaced by Ramon Navarro. Fred Nilbo replaced Brabin.
As costs continued to soar, Mayer and Irving Thalberg, the production head, decided to bring "Ben Hur" back to Culver City.
Originally, the famous chariot race was to be filmed in now long-gone bean fields off of Jefferson Boulevard, behind the studio.
While the set was under construction, the city of Los Angeles decided to build a storm drain near the location. MGM crews
arrived one morning to find that steam shovels were demolishing Circus Maximus.
An alternative sight was found at Venice and La Cienega boulevards. Eight hundred men needed four months, working around the clock, to construct the arena for the sequence that would put MGM on the map as a master of screen spectacles.
The entire motion picture community showed up for the big race on a Saturday morning in the fall of 1925. Among the spectators were Harold Lloyd, Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks Sr. and Mary Pickford.
A Prize for the Winner
B. Reeves (Breezy) Eason was the director of the chariot race. He would later stage action sequences in "Robin Hood," "Charge of The Light Brigade" and "Cimmarron."
To generate real excitement, Eason offered a cash prize to the winner of the race that day.
In the finished film, Ben Hur wins the race. But as director Joseph Newman — who handed out box lunches to the extras on that Saturday — recalled, the race was a free-for-all in front of a frenzied crowd. Closeups, reaction shots and more complicated details of the race were filmed in about two weeks in an empty arena.
