But the payoff was equally grand: Heston's Oscar-winning performance and a hefty box-office gross validated the costs of operating on a vast canvas.
The only surprise is how little choccy there is in this hefty purple box replete with plastic window: 220g, to be precise.
Theatre carpenters then built two hefty wooden boxes for them, and the collection toured country-wide.
As the morphine-addicted Mary Tyrone, Ms Redgrave is the wounded and wounding epicentre of a four-hour-plus familial epic that is doing hefty business, with box office grosses regularly in excess of $600,000 a week.
A hefty cabal of boxing's finest movers, shakers and fixers had broken bread in a thousand restaurants, bars and Las Vegas suites looking to make the Holyfield, Tyson and Lewis fights happen.
Given the warm weather and the lack of a big-budget, big-hype new release, the top 15 films were an unsurprising 36% down on the previous weekend, when Terminator Salvation contributed a hefty £6.9m to box-office takings.
It has received more nominations than any other film (12) and packed a hefty punch at the box office ($164m+).
I certainly don't see this week's offerings being unwrapped on Christmas morning with quite as much enthusiasm as, say, Warner's hefty new Blu-ray box set Kubrick: The Masterpiece Collection.
The movie, based on the classic television series, cost about $64 million, relatively low for this kind of high-tech adventure, because Mr. Cruise deferred his customary $20 million fee for a hefty percentage of the box office (and thus stands to earn a fortune).
In its first weekend, "A Few Good Men" scored a hefty $16 million at the box office, which industry sources said was the biggest opening ever for a non-sequel film in December.
