For almost two decades, visitors to Hollywood & Highland have been greeted by a replica of the set of the 1916 film Intolerance. | Photo by Valeria Macon/AFP via Getty Images

Hollywood & Highland?s whitest white elephants are an homage to L.A.?s most openly racist filmmaker. For the 26 million tourists who find their way each year to the place in Los Angeles where the Oscars are broadcast, the view from Hollywood Boulevard and Highland Avenue is likely not what they expected. Ascending a staircase into a nondescript beige stucco mall, visitors eager to spot a celebrity are greeted by an imposing four-story Babylonian gate rising in the distance, and, to its right, perched atop similarly styled pedestals, two gargantuan white elephants. Most of those visitors don?t know why their Hollywood?sign photos are framed by ersatz Mesopotamian architecture, and it?s difficult to locate the plaque that explains what this thing is doing here. It is, as it turns out, a full-scale replica of a portion of the set from D.W. Griffith?s 1916 film Intolerance. And that?s a problem, because Griffith directed one of the most notoriously racist films ever made. This well-intentioned architectural folly is literally the elephant in the room, and it won?t be there much longer.
In 1915, Griffith ? born in Kentucky to a Confederate general ? made the sweeping epic The Birth of a Nation. It?s inarguably one of the major milestones in the development of ambitious cinema, and it?s als...