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3 Th~ Call of th~ North Produced by the jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company for Paramount release. Director: Cecil B. DeMille. Scenario by Cecil B. DeMille from the play by George Broadhurst, and based on the novel The Conjuror's House, by Stewart Edward White. Art director: Wilfred Buckland. Photography: Alvin Wyckoff Picture started: june 6, 1914. Length: 4,789 feet (five reels). Cost: $16,540.52. Released: August I I, 19 14. Gross: $52,284.48 Cast: Robert Edeson (Graehme Stewart, the father, and Ned Stewart, the son), Theodore Roberts (Galen Albret, the factor [broker or agent]), Winifred Kingston (Virginia, the factor's daughter), Vera McGarry Uulie), jode Mullally (Picard, julie's lover), Florence Dagmar (Elodie), Milton Brown (Me-En-Gan), Horace B. Carpenter (Rand), Cecilia deMille (a small child), Sydney Deane (McTavish), and Fred Montague Uack Wilson) Although contracts were in place by May 1914, the Paramount distribution agreement was not scheduled to go into effect until August of that year. To finance production in the interim the Lasky Company printed its own money by means of an elaborate stock maneuver. "We realize that we must have Fifty Thousand Dollars more in cash in order to be more comfortable during the summer months," Jesse Lasky wrote DeMille on May 26, 1914. . . . There is now Thirty-five Hundred Dollars in the Treasury stock, which we are going to divide among the present stockholders by way of stock dividends.... [An additional five hundred thousand shares will be created.] Then there will be Fifty Thousand Dollars of stock actually issued [i.e., sold] and each stockholder will get a stock dividend of seven hundred percent. ... That will make Four Hundred Thousand Dollars issued and outstanding and as we are increasing to Five Hundred Thousand Dollars [in stock], it leaves One Hundred Thousand Dollars [in stock] in the Treasury.l 19 20 / CedI B. DeMille's Hollywood With this sort of wizardry going on, it is no wonder there was a stock market panic in 1914. By selling 10 percent of their new stock issue and using an immediate stock dividend as a sales incentive, while at the same time protecting and increasing the majority interest of the original principals and diluting the equity position of the new investors, the Lasky Feature Play Company managed to raise the fifty thousand dollars. Today the Securities and Exchange Commission would require a disclaimer stating that "motion pictures are a highly speculative investment." Still, the foolhardy souls who bought into Lasky's half-million-dollar house of cards soon reaped benefits beyond their wildest dreams. As the financial wheels were turning in New York, Cecil B. DeMille was preparing his second solo production in Hollywood. The Call ofthe North was based on a 1908 play by George Broadhurst, which in tum was adapted from Stewart Edward White's 1903 novel The Conjuror's House. Today a novelist might sell paperback rights and motion-picture rights to reap the greatest benefit from his literary labors. In the early 1900s writers sold serialization rights, low-price hardcover reprint rights, and theatrical adaptation rights. That a story set in the great outdoors like The Conjuror's House could inspire a stage adaptation seems odd, but the situation was not unusual. Jack London sold theatrical rights to his novel The Sea Wolf, which over the years was adapted into an unsuccessful full-length play and a highly popular vaudeville playlet. D.W. Griffith's epic film The Birth ofa Nation (1915) was based not so much on the Reverend Thomas Dixon's 1906 novel The Clansman as it was on Dixon's theatrical adaptation of his own book. Before movies, American theater was dominated by melodramatic plays that relied on elaborate mechanical devices to create their effects. In 1890 Joseph Arthur's Blue Jeans featured a hero lashed to a log inching ever closer to the blade of a buzz saw. By 1899 Gen. Lew Wallace's BenHur was playing on Broadway, complete with chariot race! Train crashes, horse races, and pitched battles all found their way to the stage, and audiences accepted the conventions of theatrical "realism" used in their presentation. Early films sought to exploit this theatrical tradition, but the results were often surreal. In The Miller's Daughter (Edison, 1905), the despondent heroine walks along a real New York street in one shot and jumps from an obviously painted stage setting of a bridge in another. Movie audiences quickly rejected the substitution ofpaintedbackdrops fornatural settings...

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