Trivia for
Intolerance: Love's Struggle Throughout the Ages (1916)

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• The inspiration for this film came from D.W. Griffith's surprise at the loud protests against his previous film, The Birth of a Nation (1915). In response to those attacks, he wanted to illustrate the problem with intolerance to other people's views.
  
  
• The massive life-size set of the Great Wall of Babylon, seen in the fourth story, was placed at the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Hollywood Boulevard (in Hollywood, California) when the movie was completed. It became a notable landmark for many years during Hollywood's golden era. It actually stood on the lot of the studio on Prospect Avenue near the Sunset & Hollywood Boulevard junctions in the eastern end of the city. It was the first such exterior set ever built in Hollywood. Falling into disrepair, it was eventually torn down. Years later, this same Babylon set was replicated as the central courtyard design for the new Hollywood & Highland complex in Hollywood, which opened in 2001.
  
  
• After filming wrapped, the Los Angeles Fire Department cited the Babylonian set as a fire hazard and ordered it to be torn down. D.W. Griffith discovered that he had run out of money and was therefore unable to finance its demolition. The set stood derelict and crumbling for nearly four years until it was finally taken down in 1919. By then it had fallen apart enough for it to be dismantled at a sufficiently low cost.
  
  

• The marriage scenes in the life-of-Christ part of the film were staged and shot according to Jewish tradition, under the supervision of Rabbi Myers. He was the father of Carmel Myers, who played a slave girl in the Babylonian scenes.
  
  
• During filming of the battle sequences, many of the extras got so into their characters that they caused real injury to each other. At the end of one shooting day, a total of sixty injuries were treated at the production's hospital tent.
  
  
• A major sub-plot, dealing with a real-life assassination, was cut from the French story before the film's release.
  
  
• The role of the second Pharisee is credited to Erich von Stroheim. However, von Stroheim did not play this role. D.W. Griffith decided to use von Stroheim's name as a pseudonym for actor William Courtright, who actually plays the role. This has caused much confusion over the years. Von Stroheim's only work on this film was as a production assistant for the Babylon sequences.
  
  
• Ruth St. Denis is listed by some modern sources as the Solo Dancer in the Babylonian Story, but she has denied this in an interview.
  
  
• D.W. Griffith was forced to re-shoot the sequence of the crucifixion because certain organizations were saying that Griffith shot too many Jewish extras around the cross, and not enough Romans. Griffith then burned the footage and re-shot the scene with more Roman extras.
  
  
• Jenkins and his foundation are modeled after John D. Rockefeller and his own foundation. The massacre of workers at the beginning of the movie is modeled after the Ludlow massacre of 1914, in which Rockefeller was involved.
  
  
• Joseph Henabery was hired to shoot some additional scenes of semi-nude slavegirls when the front office declared that the film needed "more sex".
  
  
• The title and some lines from the poem "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking" by Walt Whitman are used as intertitles in the movie.
  
  
• The intertitle during the strike which states that the National Guard has retreated and the workers "now fear only the company guards" was added to the re-release of the modern story, The Mother and the Law (1919), but it is utilized by present versions of the original film.
  
  
• The Babylonian orgy sequence alone cost $200,000 when it was shot. That's nearly twice the overall budget of The Birth of a Nation (1915), another D.W. Griffith film and, at the time, the record holder for most expensive picture ever made.
  
  
• Cameraman Karl Brown remembered a scene with the various members of the Babylonian harem that featured full frontal nudity. He was barred from the set that day, apparently because he was so young. While there are several shots of slaves and harem girls throughout the film, the scene that Brown describes is not in any surviving versions.
  
  
• D.W. Griffith's penchant for revising and re-cutting his films has caused the loss of several scenes from this (and other) films. Some still frames of the scenes, although badly damaged, do at least survive.
  
  
• On 9 November 2001, the newly-built Kodak Theatre Complex at Hollywood Boulevard and Highland (in Hollywood) had its grand opening (it is the new permanent home for the Annual Academy Awards event and began with the 74th Annual Academy Awards on 24 March 2002). The tall archway standing in the Babylon Court of the complex is copied from designs from this film, as are the elephant statues, each of which weighs 33,500 pounds.
  
  
• The prison chaplain in the modern scenes is played by a real priest.
  
  
• D.W. Griffith invested more than $2 million on the film, an unprecedented amount of money at the time. "Intolerance" never even came close to earning back its budget - audiences in 1916 were completely unused to seeing films which ran in excess of 3 hours. Even when it was re-cut and released as 2 separate features, "The Fall of Babylon" and "The Mother and the Law", it still failed to make money.
  
  
• The extras in the Babylonian scenes were supposedly paid $2.00 a day, per head, an astronomically generous sum at the time.
  
  
• 2007: The American Film Institute ranked this as the #49 Greatest Movie of All Time.
  
  
• During the late 1910's, this film was a huge hit in the Soviet Union, however D.W. Griffith never realized any financial gain since the copies being shown were pirated, and distributed without his consent.
  
  
• The construction of the prison gallows seen in the final portion of the Modern Story were overseen by Martin Aguerre, a former warden of San Quentin.
  
  
• Many sources claim that the walls of Babylon were actually life-size, at 300 feet -- about 25 stories -- high. However, assistant director Joseph Henabery said that the walls, which were made of lath and plaster with a lumber frame, were only 100 feet high, as 300-foot-high walls of that material would have blown over with just a light wind. In fact, even at 100 feet high the walls were guyed with steel cables because a fairly stiff breeze would have blown them down.
  
  

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