Tom Miller and 1925 Ben-Hur?

According to Grammie's stories, Tom Miller got scared because she was too serious and left Nevada for Los Angeles in about 1924/1925. Family stories have related he went to work on the 1925 Ben-Hur training horses for the movie. Excerpt from the book Hollywood Hoofbeats, Trails Blazed Across the Silver Screen by Petrine Day Mitchum talks about the early filming and the chariot race.

Goldwyn Pictures secured the motion picture rights in 1923. The resultant film cost $4 million and was Hollywood's most expensive silent epic. Photography began in Rome in early 1924, but problems plagued the film from the start and brought shooting to a temporary halt. It resumed in June 1924, after the director and many of the cast had been replace. A disastrous fire during the great sea battle claimed the lives of several Italian extras and prompted the newly formed Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios to bring the production home to California. The climactic chariot race had yet to be filmed.

The coliseum set was built on a vacant lot, and preparations for the great race were made. Unfortunately the man in charge of the sequence, second unit director B. "Breezy" Eason, had little regard for safety in staging the action. He even offered a $5,000 bonus to the winning driver, ratcheting up the competition to add realism at a deadly cost to horses. Estimates place the number of equines who paid with their lives at a few as two and as many as one hundred. It was clearly more than two.

There is no specific date for the filming of the chariot scene, but filming ran from October 1923 to August 1925. The timing is certainly right for Tom to have taken off and been involved with the horses on the movie. But I can also see him so disgusted by the waste and treatment of the horses, he decided that life wasn't for him and came back to Nevada.

For anyone who would like to read more from Hollywood Hoofbeats, the book will be in the cousins library.

Tom Miller and 1925 Ben-Hur?

According to Grammie's stories, Tom Miller got scared because she was too serious and left Nevada for Los Angeles in about 1924/1925. Family stories have related he went to work on the 1925 Ben-Hur training horses for the movie. Excerpt from the book Hollywood Hoofbeats, Trails Blazed Across the Silver Screen by Petrine Day Mitchum talks about the early filming and the chariot race.

Goldwyn Pictures secured the motion picture rights in 1923. The resultant film cost $4 million and was Hollywood's most expensive silent epic. Photography began in Rome in early 1924, but problems plagued the film from the start and brought shooting to a temporary halt. It resumed in June 1924, after the director and many of the cast had been replace. A disastrous fire during the great sea battle claimed the lives of several Italian extras and prompted the newly formed Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios to bring the production home to California. The climactic chariot race had yet to be filmed.

The coliseum set was built on a vacant lot, and preparations for the great race were made. Unfortunately the man in charge of the sequence, second unit director B. "Breezy" Eason, had little regard for safety in staging the action. He even offered a $5,000 bonus to the winning driver, ratcheting up the competition to add realism at a deadly cost to horses. Estimates place the number of equines who paid with their lives at a few as two and as many as one hundred. It was clearly more than two.

There is no specific date for the filming of the chariot scene, but filming ran from October 1923 to August 1925. The timing is certainly right for Tom to have taken off and been involved with the horses on the movie. But I can also see him so disgusted by the waste and treatment of the horses, he decided that life wasn't for him and came back to Nevada.

For anyone who would like to read more from Hollywood Hoofbeats, the book will be in the cousins library.