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53 Dynamit~ Produced and distributed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. A Cecil B. DeMille Production. Director: Cecil B. DeMille. Story by Jeanie Macpherson. Dialogue by Gladys Unger, John Howard Lawson, and Jeanie Macpherson. Art directors : Cedric Gibbons and J. Mitchell Leisen. Photography: J. Peverell Marley. Gowns: Adrian. Film editor: Anne Bauchens Picture started (sound version): January 22, 1929. Picture completed: April 13, 1929. Reshoots for silent version: May 28 to June 5, 1929. Length (sound version): I 1,540 feet (fourteen reels). Length (silent version): 10,667 feet. Negative cost: $661,123.32. Released: July 25, 1929 (premiere engagement at Carthay Circle Theater in Los Angeles). General release: December 13, 1929. Gross: $1,182,869.03 Cast: KayJohnson (Cynthia), Charles Bickford (Derk), Conrad Nagel (Roger), Julia Faye (Marcia), Muriel McCormac (Katie), and Joel McCrea (Marcia's boyfriend) With a string of box-office flops and pressure from his New York financiers, Cecil B. DeMille grew tired of running a studio. He sold his stock in Pathe to Joseph P. Kennedy and signed a three-picture contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer on August 2, 1928. Like DeMille Pictures, M-G-M was the product of Wall Street maneuvering, combining the interests of theater chain Loew's, Inc., and Metro Pictures with those of the Goldwyn Company and Louis B. Mayer Productions. But unlike the DeMille-Metropolitan-P.D.C.-Pathe combine, M-G-M became a company that was much stronger than the sum of the rather anemic predecessor companies that had come together in 1924. Boasting "More stars than there are in Heaven," M-G-M specialized in producing glossy star vehicles. In some ways, Louis B. Mayer's interest in signing DeMille was odd. Although several high-powered filmmakers-like Fred Niblo, King Vidor, and Clarence Brown-were under contract to M-G-M, it was not known as a "director's studio," and the company seemed to favor directors like Jack Conway, W.S. Van Dyke, and William Nigh-men who cut their teeth making low-budget fare and who could be depended 234 Dynamite / 235 upon to toe the mark for the front office. Over the years, strong and individualistic directors like Erich von Stroheim, Josef von Sternberg, John Ford, and Howard Hawks flirted with M-G-M but never found a comfortable home there. Initially, however, Cecil B. DeMille received a royal welcome as he moved his office the few blocks west from the DeMille-PatM Studio to the M-G-M lot. For all its success, M-G-M was the slowest among the major studios to embrace talking pictures. Still, by the time Cecil B. DeMille was signed, the handwriting was on the wall. In big city theaters silent pictures had virtually disappeared from the screen in the ten months since the premiere of The Jazz Singer, and it was clear that DeMille's first film for his new employers would be a "100% All Talking Picture." By November 20, 1929, Jeanie Macpherson delivered a massive 219-page "story and continuity" containing some 1,097 lines of dialogue . Although screenwriters Gladys Unger and John Howard Lawson would share screen credit with Macpherson for writing the dialogue, the November 20 script, on which only Macpherson is credited, contains virtually all the dialogue that would be heard in the finished film. In his autobiography, Charles Bickford states that he objected to much of the dialogue during DeMille's reading of the script and that DeMille then invited Bickford to sit with the writers as they reluctantly made revisions based on his suggestions. If this occurred as Bickford described, it certainly had little or no effect on the finished product. Only minor cuts and revisions were made in the November 20 draft as Dynamite went from script to screen.1 The story is about a young heiress who learns she will lose her fortune if she is unmarried on her twenty-third birthday. The good news is that she's in love-the bad news is that the light of her life is already married, and though a divorce is in the offing it won't occur before the deadline. The heiress marries a condemned murderer the evening before his scheduled execution, but a last-minute confession by the real murderer throws a monkey wrench into her best-laid plans. The script for Dynamite was written relatively quickly, but apparently the ideahad been in preparationfor some time. Accordingto DeMille: As far back as 1926 I read an account...

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