Griffith built this Babylon set to a scale nothing in film had attempted before -- walls and towering statuary reportedly visible for miles across Hollywood, populated with some 3,000 extras for its crowd scenes, standing for years afterward as a local landmark before it was finally torn down. He made the film partly as his answer to the firestorm of criticism over his previous picture, The Birth of a Nation: an epic about the destructive cost of intolerance across four different eras of history, crosscut together in a way virtually no one had tried at feature length before. It was a costly commercial failure on release and contributed to Griffith's later financial troubles, but its editing techniques went on to influence nearly every filmmaker who saw it.Griffith built this Babylon set to a scale nothing in film had attempted before -- walls and towering statuary reportedly visible for miles across Hollywood, populated with some 3,000 extras for its crowd scenes, standing for years afterward as a local landmark before it was finally torn down. He made the film partly as his answer to the firestorm of criticism over his previous picture, The Birth of a Nation: an epic about the destructive cost of intolerance across four different eras of history, crosscut together in a way virtually no one had tried at feature length before. It was a costly commercial failure on release and contributed to Griffith's later financial troubles, but its editing techniques went on to influence nearly every filmmaker who saw it.
Griffith built this Babylon set to a scale nothing in film had attempted before -- walls and towering statuary reportedly visible for miles across Hollywood, populated with some 3,000 extras for its crowd scenes, standing for years afterward as a local landmark before it was finally torn down. He made the film partly as his answer to the firestorm of criticism over his previous picture, The Birth of a Nation: an epic about the destructive cost of intolerance across four different eras of history, crosscut together in a way virtually no one had tried at feature length before. It was a costly commercial failure on release and contributed to Griffith's later financial troubles, but its editing techniques went on to influence nearly every filmmaker who saw it.