Cecil B. DeMille's Hollywood

Foreward

For~word In 1989 I had the honor ofintroducing the Silent Society's seventy-fifth anniversary screening of Cecil B. DeMille's The Squaw Man in the Lasky-DeMille Bam, home of the Hollywood Heritage Museum today and the very building from which DeMille's first film was produced. It was a special thrill for me because my relatives' citrus orchards once began across the street from the Barn's original location at Vine Street and Selma Avenue, extending many blocks to where the Egyptian Theater stands today. But I quickly brought Robert Birchard to the stage, knowing ofhis passion and knowledge ofDeMille. His remarks then and there made it clear that he was the man to write this definitive survey of the films and career of Cecil B. DeMille. As a veteran film editor and an experienced film historian, Birchard is uniquely qualified to judge DeMille and his accomplishments-artistically , technically, and historically.We learn how much DeMille's movies cost, how much they made (or on occasion, lost), and how long they took to make, where they were made, and under what conditions. Cecil B. DeMille's Hollywood is a detailed study of DeMille's films and their impact, not a biography of the director. Yet Birchard illuminates the director's relations with his colleagues so thoroughly that we get an idea of what DeMille was like through this documented history perhaps more strongly than we would through the inherently conjectural nature ofconventional biography. DeMille emerges as a man oftremendous drive and dedication, concerned with making a contribution through his work, and on the whole much more likable than one would have imagined. Today DeMille is best remembered for his colossal 1956 remake of his 1923 silent The Ten Commandments, for which Charlton Heston has good-naturedly endured a zillion Parting-of-the-Red-Sea jokes. It is the epitome ofthe biblical spectacles for which DeMille was so famous, those with a seeming cast of thousands and filled with pagan revels featuring scantily clad beauties, as the director was a firm believer in showing sin in action in order to effectively condemn it. DeMille is also remembered for his 1952 circus extravaganza, The Greatest Show on Earth, which won the Oscar for Best Picture, and for his 1927 silent story ofJesus, The King ix x / FONword of Kings, which has a simple beauty and deep spirituality that surprise many who only think of DeMille as the most unabashed of showmen. That DeMille showed an instinct for the cinema and its endless possibilities is startlingly evident right from the beginning with The Squaw Man, which may be an adaptation of a play, but in its unfolding makes excellent use of its expansive natural locales. Also from the start, DeMille loved to mix highly theatrical hokum with often pious sentiments and technical finesse, which made him more cherished by audiences than critics . Yet it was his natural flair for screen storytelling and his patent sincerity that make his films so enduringly entertaining and their messages, in some instances, valid even still. It is important to see his work and those of his contemporaries, most notably D.W. Griffith, as expressions ofa Victorian sensibility committed to uplift as much as entertainment. Nobody would ever place DeMille on the same level of artistic genius as Griffith, but time and again Birchard shows how far more complex and wide-ranging a filmmaker DeMille really was, capable of sympathies and concerns for the individual and for society that are at odds with his conservative political image. What is also surprising to learn is that Paramount head Adolph Zukor kept as tight a rein as possible on his stardirector and especially resented maintaining a separate production unit for him. Long simmering tension between the two men would finally erupt in the wake of cost overruns on the original Ten Commandments, leading DeMille to be forced out of Paramount for a difficult seven-year period, during which he nevertheless showed just as strong a flair for talkies as he had for silents. DeMille returned to Paramount in the depths of the Great Depression and soon hit the long successful stride that would sustain his career until the end of his life in 1959. DeMille had a reputation for being the most imperial of directors on the set, but Birchard argues effectively that this was his way of keeping outsized egos on either side of the camera in line, and that DeMille was remarkably loyal, going to...