The story began its life in 1880 as Ben-Hur, a Tale of the Christ, a tremendously popular novel by General Lew Wallace that achieved immediate and long-lasting success, eventually outselling every other book except the Bible.

By 1899, the book had sold 400,000 copies, and Wallace finally gave his permission to adapt it to the stage. His biggest concern about a dramatized version of the story was how Jesus would be portrayed. The show's producers satisfied the author by coming up with the idea to portray Christ only as an intense shaft of light. They also solved the problem of staging the chariot scene by putting the vehicles and horses on a treadmill in front of a revolving panorama. Still running in 1920, the show had been seen by 20 million people and grossed $10 million.

A 1907 film version was produced by the Kalem Company, which was sued by Wallace's family for using the material without permission. This version established what would become the basic cinematic structure of all future versions and utilized 16 distinct scenes or episodes taken directly from the novel.

After several years of negotiations by a number of interested parties, the legal film rights were finally sold to the Goldwyn company. The production, which was set up on location in Italy, was plagued with many problems and astronomical cost overruns. When the company was eventually subsumed into Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the new studio heads forced the production to return to the U.S. for completion in the studio (in many cases scenes had to be completely reshot) where they would have greater control over it, with a new director (Fred Niblo) and star (Ramon Novarro). By its opening in December 1925, however, it had run up costs of $4 million and took years to recoup the money invested in it.

MGM still owned the rights to Ben-Hur when lavish costume epics became popular again in the 1950s. Since the end of World War II, the studio had been rocked by financial losses and rancorous regime changes. In mid-decade, Joseph Vogel had emerged as the company's new president and immediately proposed several big projects to stem recent losses; Ben-Hur was one of them, although the idea had been raised earlier by both former studio head Dore Schary and producer Sam Zimbalist, who had had it in mind since he produced the Roman epic Quo Vadis (1951). The studio made sure no prints of its 1925 version were still in distribution before undertaking what would be one of their most expensive and complex productions. Zimbalist was assigned as producer, with the added burden of knowing that if he failed, the studio would likely go bankrupt.

Zimbalist approached acclaimed filmmaker William Wyler in 1957 to direct. Wyler at first thought he was joking. The German-born director had been working in Hollywood since the silent era, making his name primarily with literate, character-driven dramas such as Dodsworth (1936), The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), and The Heiress (1949). When the producer came to him, he was at work on his most recent production, The Big Country (1958), a Western-set drama starring Gregory Peck and Charlton Heston. He asked Zimbalist why he didn't want Cecil B. DeMille, or someone like him with an interest in and talent for spectacle. Zimbalist said he believed the spectacle would take care of itself and that he wanted Wyler to bring depth and intimacy to the more personal angle at the heart of the story. He convinced Wyler to at least read the script.

MGM apparently had many scripts of the story, but the one chosen was written by Karl Tunberg, whose only notable credits had been some Alice Faye musicals at Fox and, for MGM, the Regency Era costume drama Beau Brummell (1954), starring Elizabeth Taylor and Stewart Granger.

Wyler thought the script was too primitive and elementary; however, after seeing elaborate storyboards of the chariot race sequence, he became intrigued, offering to direct this portion of the story as an uncredited second unit director. He tried to convince Zimbalist that his early experience as a director of Westerns would be valuable to the task, but the producer thought it was a foolish idea and asked Wyler to read the novel.

Wyler became intrigued by the characters in the book and by the theme of the Jewish people fighting for their lives and freedom. In 1956, the young Israeli state had begun a pre-emptive strike against Egypt that was curtailed by condemnation from the U.S., lending extra resonance to the theme. He was also attracted to the notion that the enmity between the hero and villain had grown out of their close childhood friendship.

Because the production would be based at Rome's famous Cinecitta studios, taking the job meant uprooting his family to Italy for a year or more. The Wylers had enjoyed their time there during the shooting of his romantic comedy Roman Holiday (1953), so they were eager to return. The deal he got from MGM made the move even more attractive: a $350,000 salary (plus expenses and share of the profits), a fully staffed villa, and a chauffeured limo constantly at their disposal.

A preproduction budget of $7 million was set, and Andrew Marton, who had co-directed MGM's big-budget adventure King Solomon's Mines (1950) and parts of the Cinerama travelogue Seven Wonders of the World (1956), was assigned the task of directing the chariot race.

At the time, writer Gore Vidal was under contract to Metro and brought in to work on Tunberg's script. He agreed, with the stipulation that they let him out of the last two years of his contract. Vidal says one of his major contributions to the script was to suggest to Wyler that they do the first scene between Messala and Judah as a lover's quarrel, having Boyd play the Roman with the emotional intensity of someone who would "blow a fuse" after being spurned. Vidal says Boyd and Wyler agreed but that the director warned they had to keep the tactic secret from Heston. In later years, Wyler denied such a conversation or approach ever occurred.

In his production diaries of Ben-Hur, Heston noted the rehearsal of Vidal's rewrite of the Judah-Messala scene, which he called "much better" than the version in the original script. However, in notes he added later to the published edition of the diaries, he insisted neither that scene nor any of Vidal's others had ever been shot, adding his opinion that extravagance and disdain were Vidal's natural qualities, particularly where claims of authorship of Ben-Hur were concerned.

Earlier versions of Tunberg's script had been tweaked by noted playwrights S.N. Behrman and Maxwell Anderson, but Wyler still felt it needed work, especially to lend a more classic tone to the dialogue. He and Zimbalist next hired British playwright Christopher Fry, who at last delivered what Wyler felt was needed, changing such lines as "Did you enjoy your dinner?" to "Was the food to your liking?" Fry did a substantial amount of work on the script, but neither his name nor Vidal's, Behrman's, or Anderson's appear on the credits. Tunberg, former president of the Writers Guild, successfully blocked them from getting any credit, a move that particularly upset Wyler––and likely led to the screenplay being the only one out of 11 Academy Award nominations that did not go home a winner.

Fry reluctantly retained the female love interest from the original script. He thought the character should be dropped and focus should be fixed on the emotional love-hate relationship between Judah and Messala, an opinion with which Heston concurred.

By the time pre-production on Ben-Hur began in earnest, Charlton Heston was announced as the lead and Irish actor Stephen Boyd was cast as Messala. According to many sources, other actors had been considered for the role of Judah, among them Marlon Brando, Kirk Douglas, Rock Hudson, and Burt Lancaster, a self-professed atheist who reportedly turned it down because he didn't like the religious aspects of the story.

Gore Vidal said Paul Newman was also in the running for the lead, but after his disastrous film debut in a costume epic, The Silver Chalice (1954), he vowed never to do another movie in a toga.

Gore Vidal said there was an open call for the main roles, and test footage of various actors, including Italian actor Cesare Danova as Judah and Leslie Nielsen as Messala, can be seen in the documentary, Ben-Hur: The Making of an Epic (1993). In his production diaries, Heston also mentions trying to help Chuck Connors get the role of Messala.

The finished script had 45 principal parts (although MGM publicity department hype was touting 360 speaking parts). A combination of British and American actors were cast, in accord with Wyler's decision to have all the Romans played by Brits and all the Jews played by Americans. There were two exceptions. Israeli actress Haya Harareet was cast as Judah's love interest, Esther and British actress Marie Ney was cast as his mother, but she was replaced after shooting some initial scenes by American performer Martha Scott.

According to his Ben-Hur production diaries, Heston's deal was $250,000 for 30 weeks work, to be prorated if production ran over, plus travel and expenses.

by Rob Nixon