American Spectacle

1916 · D. W. Griffith

Babylon, built about ninety feet high across from the studio on Sunset, with three thousand extras on alternate days. Four stories cut together and a cradle rocking between them. The books say $385,906.77, not the two million the ads promised. It lost money at the scale it was made.

1920 · Fred Niblo

Fairbanks turns from comedy to swords in one picture. The scale here is a body: a fop indoors, a vault over the wall outside. A fencing champion was hired to school the villains so the hero would have someone to beat.

1921 · Rex Ingram

The year's biggest grosser, and the film that made Valentino a name you could sell alone. The scale is the trenches, large for 1921, and the tango in the Buenos Aires café that everyone came back for. June Mathis insisted on him. She was right.

1922 · Robert Flaherty

The Arctic as spectacle, with a fur house paying the bills. Flaherty restaged the walrus hunt and cut an igloo in half for light, and the cold in the frame is real. The cost is the question the film keeps raising about itself: what was arranged, and who got credited.

1922 · Allan Dwan

The Nottingham castle set was advertised as the largest built in Hollywood, and the trades sold the square footage as hard as the plot. First half pageant, second half Fairbanks on the drawbridge chain. Watch him slide down the curtain. The set stood for years after.

1923 · James Cruze

The Western that taught the studios a landscape could outgross a drawing room. Hired wagons, a herd counted by the publicity office, a river crossing photographed as if it might not work. The courtship is filler. The buffalo are the picture.

1923 · Cecil B. DeMille

The Red Sea is a trough of gelatin and a camera run backward, and it still works. DeMille buries a sphinx in the Guadalupe dunes and leaves it for the archaeologists. Then a modern sermon in San Francisco. Skip to the Exodus if you must. The cost was paid in sand.

1923 · Wallace Worsley

Universal put up the cathedral façade on the back lot and Chaney put twenty pounds of plaster on his back. Three and a half hours in the chair every day. The mob is where the budget went. Watch the eyes under the makeup.

1924 · Raoul Walsh

The set is a plaster city and the body is Fairbanks. Menzies built stairs and minarets big enough to vault, and the flying carpet is wires and double exposure. Watch the first rooftop run. Everything after it is the studio trying to keep up.

1925 · John Ford

Ford in Nevada with real locomotives and a camp the trades called a town. The scale is the last spike at Promontory, with the Jupiter and the 119 standing in for themselves. The murdered father is the excuse. The landscape style Ford kept for forty years starts here.

1925 · Fred Niblo

The chariot race: a circus built in Culver City, dozens of cameras, men hurt. Begun in Italy, wrecked there, rebuilt at home, and it nearly sank MGM before it paid. The sea battle used full galleys. The 1959 remake copied the race and not much else.

1925 · King Vidor

The year's top grosser, and the cost is in the second half. The walk into Belleau Wood is staged as a slow count, men dropping on a rhythm. Stallings, who lost a leg in France, worked on the story. Gilbert without a saber, and better for it.

1925 · Harry O. Hoyt

O'Brien's dinosaurs have weight, and the actors do not. A brontosaur loose in London, an allosaurus on the plateau, and Conan Doyle himself introducing it in some prints. Cooper and Schoedsack were in the audience. King Kong is what they did with the lesson.

1926 · Albert Parker

Two-color Technicolor as the point of the production. Fairbanks wanted Howard Pyle's plates and shot toward them. The slide down the sail on a knife was the stunt the ads sold, and it was done for real. A revenge plot that looks hand-tinted.

1926 · George Fitzmaurice

Valentino playing father and son by double exposure, in the same Guadalupe sand DeMille used. It opened weeks after he died and the grief sold it. He had wanted something lighter than The Sheik. What he got was a farewell the studio could bill.

1927 · William A. Wellman

Wellman had flown in the war and bolted cameras to real aircraft. The dogfights are airframes, not paintings; the Saint-Mihiel battle used infantry and trenches dug in Texas. It took the first Outstanding Picture award. Bow in a mechanic's suit is the part they kept for the poster.

1927 · Ernest B. Schoedsack, Merian C. Cooper

Siam, a Lao family, a tiger, and an elephant drive through a village on stilts. Cooper and Schoedsack staged what they had to and shot what they could. The stampede is the sequence, and the danger in it is not acting. Six years later they built Kong out of this method.

1928 · Michael Curtiz

Real water released on real extras, and several were hurt; the literature no longer calls that a rumor. A modern war romance cut against the Flood, half a talkie already. Curtiz was new at Warners. Watch the deluge, then think about who is in it.

1930 · Howard Hughes

Three years, a fleet of period aircraft, about four million dollars, and pilots killed. Hughes began it silent, reshot it with sound, and replaced his lead with Jean Harlow. The Zeppelin raid is the sequence. The cost is in the credits nobody reads.

1921 · Fred Niblo

Fairbanks as D'Artagnan, the year after Zorro, and the scale is swords and stairs. Niblo keeps the diamond-brooch plot moving so the vaults have somewhere to land. Watch the duel with the cardinal's guards. This is the athlete before the castle got built.

1927 · F. Richard Jones

Fairbanks with a whip and a darker script: a shrine, a usurper, and a reckoning the boyish pictures had not asked for. The bolas and the horse work are the scale. The cost is that the hero has to be humbled, and Fairbanks, for once, lets him.