Hollywood went bankrupt making these monsters — and you're gonna watch why in 58 minutes.
A Night at the Movies: The Gigantic World of Epics looks at Hollywood’s biggest screen spectaculars from all sides, including the genre’s beginnings, literary adaptations, great epic directors and actors, the challenges of making big-budget movies, classic set-pieces and epic music scores. The special also looks at how the genre fell out of favor with audiences and filmmakers in the ‘70s and ‘80s, only to be reborn with more recent films like Gladiator, and Dances with Wolves trilogy. Throughout, the special is packed with classic scenes and behind-the-scenes images from such films as The Birth of a Nation (1915), Gone With the Wind (1939), Samson & Delilah (1949), The Ten Commandments (1956), Ben-Hur (1959), El Cid (1961), King of Kings (1961), Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and Doctor Zhivago (1965).
Production
Behind-the-scenes chaos from DeMille's actual Egyptian labor camp.
Editing
Laurent Bouzereau's rapid-fire montage of cinematic excess.
Director
Laurent Bouzereau
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Omar Sharif appears here discussing Doctor Zhivago nearly 45 years after filming it, still slightly frozen from those Russian winter shoots.
This aired on TCM in 2009 when 'prestige TV' was beginning to eat the epic's lunch — notice how nobody mentions streaming yet.
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