Which directors have dreamt up the greatest vanity projects?

Bangladeshi movie mogul Ahsanullah Moni's full-scale replica of the Taj Mahal has made more headlines than any of his pictures has ever done. But he's not the first film-maker to lose a sense of proportion in realising a vanity project. Unsurprisingly, DW Griffith was responsible for Hollywood's first venture into gargantuanism. Inspired by Giovanni Pastrone's superspectacle Cabiria (1914) and the Tower of Jewels at the San Francisco Exposition, Griffith had Walter Hall design a colossal Great Wall of Babylon for the Belshazzar's feast sequence in Intolerance (1916). Standing over 60 metres high, the edifice was constructed by Frank "Huck" Wortman and a largely immigrant workforce, whose endeavours were recalled in the Taviani brothers' Good Morning, Babylon (1987). Despite nearly falling victim to windstorms and being condemned as a fire hazard, the set remained on Prospect Avenue for several years. Erich von Stroheim served as a production assistant on Intolerance and he clearly inherited Griffith's penchant for the epic. In 1922, he insisted that an exact replica of the Place du Casino in Monte Carlo be built on the Universal backlot in the San Fernando Valley for his satire Foolish Wives. However, Von Stroheim then decided that he needed some waterfront footage and had designer Richard Day reproduce the sets 300 miles away at Sea Lion Point on the Monterey peninsula, since it most resembled the Mediterranean coastline. The Monte Carlo sets alone accounted for $421,000 (£275,000) of what was then a record budget of $1.1m (£700,000). Money was seemingly no object to James Cameron, either, during the filming of Titanic (1997). In order to accommodate the 269-metre replica vessel, he had a 77m litre tank erected on a 16-hectare Mexican beach site south of Rosarito in Baja California. He did cut the odd corner, though, as he dispensed with the forward well deck and agreed to a 10% reduction in the size of the funnels. René Clément refused any such concessions while making Gervaise (1957). He purchased the very lavoir that Emile Zola had specified in L'Assommoir and had it dismantled, brick by brick, and reassembled in the studio. But does such perfectionism qualify this moving adaptation for vanity status? Surely that tag has to be reserved for projects that everyone but the driving creative force (or unchecked stellar ego) knew was doomed to failure – overblown blockbusters like Michael Lehmann's Bruce Willis vehicle, Hudson Hawk (1991) and Kevin Costner's The Postman (1997), or lapses in taste like Jerry Lewis's The Day the Clown Cried (1972), about a clown in Auschwitz, or the John Travolta take on Battlefield Earth (2000) that singularly failed to win many converts to Scientology. However, the media tend to use "vanity project" to damn anything undertaken by celebrities they wants to knock off their pedestals. Wince-inducingly smug efforts like Kenneth Branagh's Peter's Friends (1992) and the Primrose Hill saga Love, Honour and Obey (2000) clearly had it coming. But pop stars, rather than luvvies and Mockneys, are perhaps most prone to vanity projectitis, with Gary Glitter (Remember Me This Way, 1974), Michael Jackson (Moonwalker, 1988), Vanilla Ice (Cool As Ice, 1991), All Saints (Honest, 2000) and Mariah Carey (Glitter, 2001) being joined in the hall of shame by married misfirers Madonna and Guy Ritchie (Swept Away, 2002) and Jennifer Lopez and Marc Antony (El Cantante, 2006). But, for all the opprobrium heaped upon them, vanity projects keep coming back to haunt moviegoers – literally in the case of Yucatan, a dialogue-free cine-poem that was left unrealised on his death by actor Steve McQueen and is currently being developed by McG. Let's hope it remains as moribund as Sylvester Stallone's long-rumoured biopic of Edgar Allan Poe and the Tom Cruise Sci-fientology venture The Thetan, for which he had reportedly invited Victoria Beckham to play the alien's bride.