Mondo Knows Facts
Intolerance built a Babylon set hundreds of feet wide
The 1916 set had huge decorated walls and a working crane for the camera D.W. Griffith's Intolerance (1916) intercut four stories across different centuries. For the Babylonian section, designers built enormous sets with towering walls and gates, and the camera moved on tracks and a crane to show their scale. The film was a commercial failure and helped sink Griffith's studio. It sits in Mondo's movies & tv collection, one of 200 facts that each trace back to the reference below.
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Facts that can change over time are reviewed and updated. If something here looks wrong, Mondo would rather know than be confidently incorrect.
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More facts like this
Matte paintings extended sets without building themArtists painted scenery on glass and masked the live action around itGerman expressionist films bent their sets out of shapeCaligari's painted walls lean and curve to show a distorted mindSilent films were tinted to signal time of dayWhole scenes were dyed blue for night and amber for lamplightEarly cinema film was dangerously flammableNitrate stock could burn underwater and its fires killed peopleSafety film replaced nitrate in the 1950sAcetate stock burned slowly, though it decayed into vinegar over timeSome films are shot with three perforations a frameUsing less film per frame cuts stock costs and allows longer takes
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Tags: 1916, griffith, production-design
Intolerance built a Babylon set hundreds of feet wide: the short answers
- Where does this come from, and can I check it?
- The 1916 set had huge decorated walls and a working crane for the camera. The figure is taken from Library of Congress, which is linked in full on this page. Every fact on Mondo Knows names its source rather than repeating an unsourced claim.
- Is this really a movies & tv fact?
- Yes. It sits on the Movies & TV shelf, one of 2,600 sourced facts grouped into space, animals, the human body, history, science and more. Category pages collect every fact in the same field.
- What else can I read about it?
- The links under the fact point to a quiz, game, puzzle or calculator on the same subject, and the shelf below shows related facts. The wording here is original, and quoted phrases are marked as quotations.