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1 Th~ Squaw Man Produced by the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company. Distributed via states rights. Directors: Oscar C. Apfel and Cecil B. DeMille. Scenario by Apfel and DeMille, from the play by Edwin Milton Royle. Photography: Alfred Gandolfi. Assistant cameramen: Johnny Cramer and Bert Longenecker. Film editor: Mamie Wagner Picture started: December 29, 1913. Eighteen shooting days (the company is known to have been shooting on January 20, I9 14, on location at a mansion on West Adams Boulevard in Los Angeles). Length: six reels. Cost: $15,450.25. Released: February 23, 1914. Net producer's profit: $244,700.00 Cast: Dustin Farnum Games Wynnegate), Winifred Kingston (Lady Diana), Red Wing (Nat-U-Rich), Monroe Salisbury (Sir Henry), Joseph E. Singleton (Tabywana), Billy Elmer (Cash Hawkins), Dick Le Strange (Grouchy Bill), Baby DeRue (Hal), Dick La Reno (Big Bill), Foster Knox (SirJohn), and Fred Montague (Mr. Petrie) In the fall of 1913 Cecil B. DeMille faced a bleak future. He was thirtytwo years old with a wife and daughter to support, and only amountain of debt to show for his years in the theater. DeMille's wife, actress Constance Adams, showed great patience. His creditors, on the other hand, were becoming aggressively insistent that Mr. DeMille meet his outstanding obligations. In a November 10, 1913, letter to theatrical entrepreneur George Pelton, DeMille complained, "The present conditions, theatrically, are the most unfavorable in the twelve years that I have been associated with them. The pieces that are absolute knock-outs are doing business. Nothing else is. Business on the road is ghastly."! Cecil was born on August 12, 1881, in Ashfield, Massachusetts, the second son of Henry Churchill deMille (1853-93) and Matilda Beatrice Samuel deMille (1853-1923).2 Cecil's father was a lay minister in the Episcopal Church and a leading playwright noted for his collaborations with David Belasco, the "Wizard of Broadway." Cecil's older brother, William (1878-1955), found equal success as a writer, with plays like t 2 / C~cil B. D~Mill~'s Hollywood The Woman and The Warrens ojVirginia. But Cecil's early professional life was spotty. After attending Pennsylvania Military College and the American Academy of Dramatic Arts he pursued careers as an actor, play broker, producer, and writer with great enthusiasm but with only modest success. The possibility for even modest success in the theater was rapidly disappearing in 19l3, and the reason was the movies. In the early 1900s, when Cecil DeMille first set foot on stage, there were well over three hundred theatrical touring companies. By 1912, only two hundred remained, and the number continued to decline. In New York City the devastation was even worse. Where once forty theaters flourished with popular melodrama, only one still catered to that market in 1912. The Broadway theater was alive and well, and vaudeville was in its heyday; but the audience for the "ten, twent' , thirt'" shows3 had switched its allegiance to the "theater of science," where silent shadows danced on a silver screen. The most elaborate stage setting for a theatrical warhorse like The Squaw Man could not compete with the genuine cactus and sagebrush seen in the one- and two-reel oaters cranked out by the likes of Broncho Billy Anderson in Niles, California; Romaine Fielding in Texas, New Mexico, and Colorado; or Thomas Ince in the Pacific Palisades near Los Angeles. A man of the theater could easily dismiss the movies as simplistic, childish, and lacking in real dramatic values-but, principles aside, motion pictures had become the entertainment of choice for the largest segment of the audience. At least one man believed in Cecil B. DeMille's talents, and that was producer Jesse L. Lasky. Along the way, Lasky and DeMille collaborated on several one-act operettas for the vaudeville stage, and the association led to a lasting friendship. But the royalties DeMille earned from his vaudeville playlets were not enough to live on, and even though he had an "unquestioned success"4 producing The Reckless Age on his own in the spring of 19l3, by the fall Cecil was looking for a way out of his financial woes. Jesse Lasky's brother-in-law, glove salesman Sam Goldfish, was fascinated by the movies, and this fascination led him to study the picture business. He even mounted a one-man campaign to persuade Lasky to get into film production, but the vaudeville producer would have none of it. "When Sam kept urging me to start a...

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