A stuntman is catapulted over a chariot rail toward trampling hooves, and instead of locking the footage away, the editors splice it with a close-up of Charlton Heston hauling himself back aboard. This episode digs into the 1959 epic Ben-Hur as a dying MGM's last bet: stripped of its theaters by the 1948 consent decree, losing audiences to television, and forced to spend frozen Italian lira inside Italy, the studio pushed a $7 million budget to $15.175 million, and producer Sam Zimbalist died of a heart attack during the production.

We cover the parade of writers from Karl Tunberg to Maxwell Anderson, S.N. Behrman, Gore Vidal and Christopher Fry rewriting on set, Vidal's disputed claim of a homoerotic subtext between Judah and Messala, the stars who passed including Burt Lancaster, Paul Newman, Marlon Brando and Rock Hudson, William Wyler c ...