If you've been to the Hollywood & Highland Center and have a working knowledge of silent film history, you may have noticed that the hulking mall's design has been lifted with mixed success from the Babylon set in DW Griffith's 1916 epic Intolerance. (An influential and ruinously expensive feat of filmmaking in which Griffith calls out critics of his previous film, The Birth of a Nation, as the real racists; it interweaves tales of intolerance from ancient Babylon, the life of Christ, Renaissance France, and then-modern America). That's pretty weird, right? What kind of mind came up with that? In a posthumous essay just published at the Paris Review, late science fiction author Ray Bradbury says it was his idea.
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