ellauri150.html on line 482: Over the 57 years that have followed, a few things have contributed to granting the film untouchable status, the foremost being the fact that it won 11 Academy Awards, still the most Oscars any film has ever won. (That total was later matched by Titanic and Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.) But while the Oscars, the prestige, and the fact that the plot of the film deals directly (if obliquely) with the life and death of Jesus Christ, all contribute to a certain image of Ben-Hur, there have always been alternate views of the film. One of the most famous came from the mouth of one of its own screenwriters.
ellauri150.html on line 488: What the f---!? Based on a 1880 novel after all!? Whose novel? Fuck you screenwriters! Taking all the glory! “I said,’ Well, I’ll never use the "g" word,'” Vidal says. “‘There’ll be nothing overt. But it will be perfectly clear that Messiah is in love with Ben-Hur.”
ellauri156.html on line 461: King David and Diana Garland argue that, "Taking remarkable license with the story, the screenwriters changed Bathsheba from the one who is ogled by David into David's stalker." They go on to suggest that "the movie David and Bathsheba, written, directed and produced by males, makes the cinematic Bathsheba conform to male fantasies about women."
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