The justly celebrated land rush sequence took a week to film, using 5,000 extras, 28 cameramen, six still photographers, and 27 camera assistants. The scene is so iconic that, three decades later, when MGM remade the film, the camera angles for the land rush sequence remained almost identical to the original.
The first Western to win a Best Picture Oscar. It would be another 59 years before a Western would win the Academy Award for Best Picture again when Dances with Wolves (1990) took the main prize.
This film has the lowest IMDb rating (5.9) of all Best Picture Oscar winners as of March 2021, along with Cavalcade (1933).
One of the extras was Nino Cochise, the actual grandson of the great Chiricahua chief Cochise. He and his good friend Apache Bill Russell were in this movie as well as several others.
The movie lost $565,000 on a budget of $1.433 million. It finally turned a profit following a 1935 theatrical re-release and the selling of both the film and subsequent screen rights to MGM in the 1940s.