Intolerance (1916)

Belshazzar's feast in the great courtyard of Babylon, the set D. W. Griffith built in Hollywood for Intolerance. Rearing elephants crown the columns and hundreds of extras fill the stairs, and the scale is the point: nobody had built anything like it for a film. The courtyard became the picture of Hollywood ambition, and some eighty-five years later the Hollywood & Highland shopping center copied its archway and elephants, until the elephants came down in 2021.