Oops. Stupid browser (and I don’t want to hear any, “A poor craftsman blames his tools…”)
I can’t believe I haven’t seen such a famous movie. But I have seen Good Morning, Babylon, which is a pretty good picture about two Italian brothers who come to America and wind up in Hollywood, helping create the sets for Intolerance.
I think you’re getting confused with the story that the Wall set from King Kong was recycled in other movies before being destroyed for the burning of Atlanta in Gone With The Wind.
There were actually two huge sets for Intolerance, the one of the walls of Babylon for the battle sequences and the more famous one for Belshazzar’s Feast. The first was demolished during production to make way for the second on the same area of ground - near what’s now the junction of Sunset and Hollywood. That replacement seems to have survived a few years. Griffith moved his entire operation onto the site and the sets for Hearts of the World were built in amongst what remained of the Babylon set. See, for example, the various remarks about the situation in chapter 13 of Karl Brown’s Adventures …
Griffith is amazing, truly amazing. There’s hardly anything in modern cinema that he didn’t use first.
Yes, that’s “Intolerance”.
What do you mean? 
That’s a pretty audacious statement. Film was 20 years old. Not having 1000kilowatt light banks to shoot inside doesn’t equal primitive.
Hearts Of The Wind is on the same tape as Intolerance that was made for me. I’ll watch that soon here.
Actually, Gone With the Wind does not depict the burning of Atlanta. What you see is a smaller event that occurred two and a half months earlier, the burning of the Atlanta Depot. A trainload of munitions and materiél was set afire by a Confederate rearguard to prevent it from falling into the hands of the advancing Union Army. A nearby warehouse and steel rolling mill also burned, but that pretty much was the extent of it.
The courtyard of the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood, where the Academy Awards are held, is partly an homage to the Babylonian set in Intolerance.
D’oh!!
Yet another thing I’ve known all my life turning out to be dead wrong — thanks for straightening me out on it.
However, I’m pretty sure I’m not alone on this; I know got the Walls of Babylon=Walls of Kong Island story out of some reference book or another. I’ll have to dig through my library…
Actually, I think it does.
“Primitive” is a relative term, its meaning pretty much defined by how the same thing would be done today. And I’m not saying Griffith’s techniques were in any way lacking — just the technologies available to him.
When a setup as elaborate as the ballroom “interior” I refer to could’ve been reduced to pandemonium by a cloudburst — how is that not a “primitive” condition?
I believe Kevin Brownlow’s The Parade’s Gone By (possibly the best book ever written on the silent era, and beautifully illustrated) has a photograph of the Babylonian palace set taken circa 1919, still standing but in obvious disrepair.
I read the book The Making of King Kong, and I don’t recall it claiming that the great wall on Skull Island was adapted from the walls of Babylon set in Intolerance. Kong was filmed at RKO Radio Studios in Culver City. If bonzer is correct that the Intolerance sets were built near Sunset and Hollywood, that’s miles away from Culver City.
Confirmation that the Intolerance sets were built near the intersection of Hillhurst, Hollywood Blvd., and Sunset Drive.
King Kong’s great wall was built in 1932 on the backlot of RKO in Culver City, several miles away. David Selznick later leased part of the studio as the home of Selznick-International Pictures, and hence the great wall ended up being burned in Gone With the Wind in 1938. Other movies that used the great wall set: as the Island of Lemuria in the serial The Return of Chandu (1934), starring Bela Lugosi; and as a Siberian palace in RKO’s exotic adventure film She (1935).
Nice pedantic catch about Atlanta, Walloon.
This may depend on the edition, but it’s not in the recentish University of California reprint. That does however have a photo of the set I haven’t seen elsewhere: similar to the standard still of the Feast, but with workers preparing the set for shooting. Brownlow and Kobal’s Hollywood: The Pioneers (Collins, 1979) has two good photos of the back of the Babylon set, including one taken after production finished.
As to narrowing down how long it remained standing, this extract from Homer Croy’s old book on Griffith suggests it was still there 7 years after the film wrapped.
Just ran across this review by the sainted Pauline Kael in her last book, For Keeps. What else need be said?
“…One of the two or three most influential movies ever made, and I think it is also the greatest…Intolerance is like an enormous, extravagantly printed collection of fairy tales. The book is too thick to handle, too richly imaginative to take in, yet a child who loves stories will know that this is the treasure of treasures. The movie is the greatest extravaganza and the greatest folly in movie history, an epic celebration of the potentialities of the new medium — lyrical, passionate and grandiose. No one will ever again be able to make last-minute rescues so suspenseful, so beautiful, or so absurd. In movies, a masterpiece is of course a folly. Intolerance is charged with visionary excitement about the power of movies to combine music, dance, narrative, drama, painting, and photography—to do alone what all the other arts together had done.”