D.W. Griffith invented false eyelashes for this film in 1916 because he wanted Seena Owen (who plays Attarea, the Princess Beloved, in the film's Babylonian segment) with lashes luxurious enough to brush her cheeks when she blinked. In collaboration with a wigmaker, who did the actual fabricating, the solution Griffith is credited with involved weaving human hair through a fine strip of gauze, creating false eyelashes.
D.W. Griffith invested more than $2 million on the film, an unprecedented amount of money at the time. "Intolerance" never even came close to earning back its budget - audiences in 1916 were completely unused to seeing films which ran in excess of 3 hours. Even when it was re-cut and released as 2 separate features, "The Fall of Babylon" and "The Mother and the Law", it still failed to make money.
D.W. Griffith was forced to re-shoot the sequence of the crucifixion because certain organizations were saying that Griffith shot too many Jewish extras around the cross, and not enough Romans. Griffith then burned the footage and re-shot the scene with more Roman extras.
D.W. Griffith's penchant for revising and re-cutting his films has caused the loss of several scenes from this (and other) films. Some still frames of the scenes, although badly damaged, do at least survive.
Joseph Henabery was hired to shoot some additional scenes of semi-nude slavegirls when the front office declared that the film needed "more sex".
Anita Loos claimed that, when writing 'Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,' she had been inspired to give lead character Lorelei Lee a brief movie career after watching her friends on the set of Intolerance playing Babylonian slave girls.
Howard Gaye, an English actor who played Jesus Christ, got involved in a sex scandal involving a 14-year-old girl and was deported back to England. Because of the scandal, his name was removed from prints of the film at the time.
Ruth St. Denis is listed by some modern sources as the Solo Dancer in the Babylonian Story, but she has denied this in an interview.
2007: The American Film Institute ranked this as the #49 Greatest Movie of All Time.
A major sub-plot, dealing with a real-life assassination, was cut from the French story before the film's release.
After filming wrapped, the Los Angeles Fire Department cited the Babylonian set as a fire hazard and ordered it to be torn down. D.W. Griffith discovered that he had run out of money and was therefore unable to finance its demolition. The set stood derelict and crumbling for nearly four years until it was finally taken down in 1919. By then it had fallen apart enough for it to be dismantled at a sufficiently low cost.
Cameraman Karl Brown remembered a scene with the various members of the Babylonian harem that featured full frontal nudity. He was barred from the set that day, apparently because he was so young. While there are several shots of slaves and harem girls throughout the film, the scene that Brown describes is not in any surviving versions.
During filming of the battle sequences, many of the extras got so into their characters that they caused real injury to each other. At the end of one shooting day, a total of sixty injuries were treated at the production's hospital tent.
During the late 1910's, this film was a huge hit in the Soviet Union, however D.W. Griffith never realized any financial gain since the copies being shown were pirated, and distributed without his consent.
Including among the '1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die', edited by Steven Jay Schneider.
Jenkins and his foundation are modeled after John D. Rockefeller and his own foundation. The massacre of workers at the beginning of the movie is modeled after the Ludlow massacre of 1914, in which Rockefeller was involved.
Many sources claim that the walls of Babylon were actually life-size, at 300 feet - about 25 stories - high. However, assistant director Joseph Henabery said that the walls, which were made of lath and plaster with a lumber frame, were only 100 feet high, as 300-foot-high walls of that material would have blown over with just a light wind. In fact, even at 100 feet high the walls were guyed with steel cables because a fairly stiff breeze would have blown them down.
On 9 November 2001, the newly-built Kodak Theatre Complex at Hollywood Boulevard and Highland (in Hollywood) had its grand opening (it is the new permanent home for the Annual Academy Awards event and began with the 74th Annual Academy Awards on 24 March 2002). The tall archway standing in the Babylon Court of the complex is copied from designs from this film, as are the elephant statues, each of which weighs 33,500 pounds.
One of the intertitles is a quote from "The Ballad of Reading Gaol" by Oscar Wilde i.e. 'And wondered if each one of us/ Would end the self-same way,/ For none can tell to what red Hell/ His sightless soul may stray'.
The Babylonian orgy sequence alone cost $200,000 when it was shot. That's nearly twice the overall budget of The Birth of a Nation, another D.W. Griffith film and, at the time, the record holder for most expensive picture ever made.