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The first feature film (a commercially made film over one hour in length) was the 1906 Australian film "The Story of the Kelly Gang".

While earlier short films lasted only a few minutes, this Australian production set the global standard for what a feature film could be. It proved audiences would sit through a multi-reel story long before Hollywood or Europe followed suit in the 1910s.

The largest number of cameras used in a single scene to date was 48 for the sea battle in Ben-Hur.

Forty-two cameras were used to shoot the chariot race, capturing 53,000 feet of film in a single day.

The most film shot for a feature film to date was for Howard Hughes' "Hell's Angels", which consumed 2,254,750 feet of film with a continuous running time of 23 days.

The greatest number of known retakes was 342 for the blind flower girl scene in Chaplin's "City Lights". (He was in love with the young actress.) The clips below show the sequence and Chaplin directing the scene.

Marilyn Monroe needed 59 takes for a scene in "Some Like It Hot" in which her only line was "Where's the bourbon?"

Billy Wilder grew frustrated as Monroe struggled with memory and stage fright, eventually resorting to writing the line on slips of paper hidden inside the prop drawers so she could read it. When the scene finally made it into the finished film, her back was turned to the camera, which led many to speculate that Wilder eventually gave up and used a dubbed voice or a different take.

The longest film in post-production was Graeme Beck's "Love's Lessons Learned", with 23 years of part-time editing.

He is in good company: Brahms took 21 years to write his first symphony.

The Australian Academy Award-winning film "Happy Feet" would have taken one person 4,000 years to make.

The shower scene in Hitchcock's Psycho involved 70 setups over seven days for 45 seconds of edited footage.

The costliest news story to date was the Centenary Air Race in Melbourne, which was transmitted to Britain over 68 hours at a cost of US$30,000 in 1934 (US$1,873,400 in 2026). It was shown in 1,500 cinemas within 48 hours.

Each frame had to be printed as a photograph, mounted on a rotating drum, and scanned line by line.

"Jurassic Park" cost $90 million to make, and $98 million was spent on publicity.

The funeral scene in "Gandhi" featured around 300,000 extras: 94,560 contracted performers and over 200,000 volunteers.