The film begins in October 1921 when a huge hurricane has almost transformed the entire outdoor area of Sascha Film on the Laaer Berg and the giant buildings made for the movie 'Sodom and Gomorrha' into a field of rubble. After that, there is a cut back to 1917 when the protagonist Sascha Kolowrat as head of the k.u.k. War film propaganda in Vienna produces front reports and newsreels. Since the quality of this content was no longer sufficent for the commander of the war press quarters, Kolowrat was removed from his position. Afterwards he concentrates again on the production of feature films and merges with Arnold Pressburger and Philipp Siegmund to form Sascha Film Industrie AG, thereby combining studio, copy shop, production company and distribution under one roof.
In 1919 he travels to the United States and sees D.W. Griffith's monumental film 'Intolerance', which impresses him very much. He then commissioned the Hungarian director Mihály Kertész and the screenwriter Ladislaus Vajda to write and conceive a similar film for him - the idea of 'Sodom and Gomorrah' was born.
The filming of this gigantic project finally began in August 1921 - between 3,000 and 5,000 extras, a gigantic film crew and temple buildings of enormous size provided unprecedented images within the Austrian film landscape. Although the lead actress prematurely leaves the film and her husband at the same time and Wannemacher's wrong calculations regarding various explosive special effects take the lives of some people, the film is finally finished after it has cost five times the originally planned budget and is a great success.
The end of the film shows an already terminally ill Sascha Kolowrat - he suffered from pancreatic cancer - in 1927, who still looks past the set of 'Café Elektric' and checks whether everything is going well.