Ben-Hur
The Original Blockbuster
Ben-Hur was the first literary blockbuster to generate multiple and hugely profitable adaptations, highlighted by the 1959 film that won a record-setting 11 Oscars. More than a century before The Hunger Games and Harry Potter, and decades before Gone with the Wind and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, General Lew Wallace’s Ben-Hur was spun off into dozens of popular publications and media productions, becoming a veritable commercial brand name that earned tens of millions of dollars.
Ben-Hur: The Original Blockbuster surveys the phenomenon’s unprecedented range and extraordinary endurance: various editions, spin-off publications, stage productions, movies, comic books, radio plays, and retail products were successfully marketed and sold from the 1880s and throughout the twentieth century. Today Ben-Hur Live is touring Europe and Asia, with a third film released in 2016.
Jon Solomon’s book offers an exciting and detailed study of the Ben-Hur brand, tracking its spectacular journey from Wallace’s original novel through to twenty-first century adaptations, and encompassing a wealth of previously unexplored material along the way.
1. The First Blockbuster
2. Lew Wallace Before Ben-Hur
3. “How I Came To Write Ben-Hur”
4. Publication And Early Reception Of The Novel
5. The Transformations Of The Novel
6. Reasons For Success
7. Early Staged Readings: Ben-Hur, In Tableaux And Pantomime
8. Ben-Hur In Song And Instrumental Music
9. My God! Did I Set All This Into Motion?”: The Klaw & Erlanger Ben-Hur
10. “Ben-Hur Flour Has The Go To Make The Dough”: Early Ben-Hur Commerce
11. Ben-Hur In Moving Pictures: Stereopticon Lectures And The 1907 Kalem Ben-Hur”
12. “The Greatest Motion Picture Property In The History Of The Screen”: The 1925 Mgm Ben-Hur
13. Between The Mgm Films
14. The World’s Most Honored Motion Picture”: The 1959 Mgm Ben-Hur
15. The Next Half-Century: New Formats And New Versions
16. Bibliography.
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He has collected an unimaginable amount of material and has thus created a Ben-Hur lexicon that, for a long time, will serve as a reference book for all future stories about the famous Roman and his later works.(translated from German)
Jon Solomon here sets a new standard for scholarship on the reception of antiquity in the media age. His book is an epic in its own right: a thorough treatment of an astonishing literary phenomenon that still pervades our popular arts and commercial culture, even legal history.
