Trivia for
The Big Parade (1925) More at IMDbPro »

• Studio electrician Carl Barlow died during production when he slipped and fell off a platform.
  
  
• Is the highest grossing silent film of all time, making $22 million during its worldwide release
  
  
• After director King Vidor complained to MGM production chief Irving Thalberg that he was tired of shooting pictures that played in theaters for just one week, he told Thalberg about a new kind of realistic war movie he had envisioned. Thalberg was enthusiastic about Vidor's vision, and tried to buy the rights to the hit Broadway play "What Price Glory?" co-written by Maxwell Anderson and World War I Marine veteran Laurence Stallings. Since the rights to the popular anti-war play had already been acquired, Thalberg hired Stallings to come to Hollywood and write a screenplay for the new, realistic war picture that Vidor had dreamed about making. Stallings came up with "The Big Parade", an anti-war story that dispensed with traditional concepts of heroism, focusing instead on a love story between a Yank soldier and a French girl. After Vidor completed principal photography (at a cost of $200,000, approximately $2.1 million in 2003 dollars), Thalberg took the rough cut and previewed it before live audiences in Colorado. The audiences responded favorably, and Thalberg decided to expand the scope of the picture, as Vidor had created a war picture without many scenes of war. He had Vidor restage the famous marching army column sequence with 3000 extras, 200 trucks and 100 airplanes. After Vidor moved on to another project, Thalberg had other battle scenes shot by director George W. Hill. The result was a major hit that proved to be MGM's most profitable silent picture.
  
  
• The U.S. War Department - the predecessor of the Department of Defense - loaned the film's producers over 200 army trucks, approximately 4,000 soldiers and over 100 airplanes for use in the film.
  
  
• The movie was a huge hit. When MGM discovered that a clause in director King Vidor's contract entitled him to 20% of the net profits, studio lawyers called a meeting with him. At the meeting, MGM accountants played up the costs of the picture while downgrading the studio forecast of its potential success. Vidor was persuaded to sell his stake in the film for a small sum. The film ran for 96 weeks at the Astor Theater and grossed $5 million (approximately $50 million in 2003 dollars) domestically by 1930, making it the most profitable release in MGM history at that point. Said Vidor, "I thus spared myself from becoming a millionaire instead of a struggling young director trying to do something interesting and better with a camera."
  
  
• Four years after making "The Big Parade," King Vidor restaged one of its most famous scenes - Jimmy going off to battle and leaving Melisande behind - in Show People (1928), a comedy starring Marion Davies as an actress trying to become a Hollywood star. In "Show People" Davies and William Haines played the parts originally played in "The Big Parade" by 'Renee Adoree' and 'John Gilbert'.
  
  

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