page_title: Intolerance (film)
section_title: Production
hierarchical_section_title: Intolerance (film) / Production
caption_attribution_description: English: D. W. Griffith, wearing a straw hat, directs Miriam Cooper in Intolerance (1916). Cameraman Billy Bitzer is obscured by the Pathé camera he is cranking. Behind him actress Dorothy Gish watches the scene. On the right, Bitzer's assistant Karl Brown is keeping script.
context_page_description: Intolerance is a 1916 epic silent film directed by D. W. Griffith. Subtitles include Love's Struggle Throughout the Ages and A Sun-Play of the Ages.
  Regarded as one of the most influential films of the silent era, the three-and-a-half-hour epic intercuts four parallel storylines, each separated by several centuries: a contemporary melodrama of crime and redemption, a Judean story: Christ's mission and death, a French story: the events surrounding the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre of 1572, and a Babylonian story: the fall of the Babylonian Empire to Persia in 539 BC. Each story had its own distinctive color tint in the original print, but not in the currently available versions. The scenes are linked by shots of a figure representing Eternal Motherhood, rocking a cradle.
  In Intolerance, Griffith chose to explore the eponymous theme partly in response to criticism of his previous film, The Birth of a Nation, which was criticized by the NAACP and other groups as perpetuating racial stereotypes and glorifying the Ku Klux Klan.
context_section_description: Intolerance was a colossal undertaking featuring monumental sets, lavish period costumes, and more than 3,000 extras. The lot on Sunset Boulevard featured a Babylon set with 300-foot (91 m) walls as well as streets of Judea and medieval France. The extras were reported to have been paid a total of $12,000 a day (equivalent to $282,000 in 2019). Griffith began shooting the film with the Modern Story (originally titled "The Mother and the Law"), whose planning predated the great commercial success of The Birth of a Nation. He then greatly expanded it to include the other three parallel stories under the theme of intolerance. Three hundred thousand feet of film were shot.
  The total cost of producing Intolerance was reported to be close to $2 million including $250,000 for the Belshazzar feast scene alone, an astronomical sum in 1916, but accounts for the film show the exact cost to be $385,906.77 (equivalent to $9,067,000 in 2019). A third of the budget went into making the Babylonian segments of the film.
  Griffith financed most of the film, which contributed to his financial ruin for the rest of his life.
caption: Left to right: Griffith, cameraman G. W. "Billy" Bitzer (behind the Pathé camera), Dorothy Gish watching from behind him, Karl Brown keeping script, and Miriam Cooper in profile, in a production still for Intolerance (1916)
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