Cecil B. DeMille

Overview

Born
August 12, 1881 · Ashfield, Massachusetts, USA
Died
January 21, 1959 · Hollywood, Los Angeles, California, USA (heart ailment)
Birth name
Cecil Blount DeMille
Nicknames
- C.B.
- The Master of Spectacle
- The Master of the Biblical Epic
Height
5′ 10″ (1.78 m)

Mini Bio

Family

Spouse
Children
Parents
Relatives

Trademarks

Film epics, religious or otherwise.
Attention to detail
Films with protagonists who feel a sense of duty or leadership
Films with strong-willed women
Films with love triangles

Trivia

To promote The Ten Commandments (1956), he had stone plaques of the commandments posted at government buildings across the country. Many of them are still standing to this day, and some are now the subjects of First Amendment lawsuits.
DeMille is the subject of many Hollywood legends. According to one famous story, DeMille once directed a film that required a huge, expensive battle scene. Filming on location in a California valley, the director set up multiple cameras to capture the action from every angle. It was a sequence that could only be done once. When DeMille shouted "Action!", thousands of extras playing soldiers stormed across the field, firing their guns. Riders on horseback galloped over the hills. Cannons fired, pyrotechnic explosives were blown up, and battle towers loaded with soldiers came toppling down. The whole sequence went off perfectly. At the end of the scene, DeMille shouted "Cut!". He was then informed, to his horror, that three of the four cameras recording the battle sequence had failed. In Camera #1, the film had broken. Camera #2 had missed shooting the sequence when a dirt clod was kicked into the lens by a horse's hoof. Camera #3 had been destroyed when a battle tower had fallen on it. DeMille was at his wit's end when he suddenly remembered that he still had Camera #4, which he had had placed along with a cameraman on a nearby hill to get a long shot of the battle sequence. DeMille grabbed his megaphone and called up to the cameraman, "Did you get all that?". The cameraman on the hill waved and shouted back, "Ready when you are, C.B.!".
One of the 36 co-founders of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS).
In another famous story, DeMille was on a movie set one day, about to film an important scene. He was giving a set of complicated instructions to a huge crowd of extras, when he suddenly noticed one female extra talking to another. Enraged, DeMille shouted at the extra, "Will you kindly tell everyone here what you are talking about that is so important?". The extra replied, "I was just saying to my friend, 'I wonder when that bald-headed son-of-a-bitch is going to call lunch.'" DeMille glared at the extra for a moment, then shouted, "Lunch!".
During his silent movie days, DeMille wanted to film a romantic scene on a California beach. His plan was to film the hero and heroine walking together on the beach as the sun slowly rose over the ocean behind them. He instructed his cameramen to "film the perfect sunrise." However, his cameramen informed him that this would be impossible - the sun does not *rise* over the ocean in California. It *sets!* "Well, then get me a sun-*set*," said DeMille. "We'll use rear-screen projection, and run the film in reverse so it looks like the sun is *rising* in the background." DeMille's camera crew went to the beach and filmed the sun setting over the ocean. A few days later, DeMille filmed the scene with the two actors on a movie soundstage made up to look like the beach. The on-location film of the Pacific sunset was reversed and projected on a rear screen, so that it looked as if the sun was rising slowly on the horizon behind the two actors. The scene was filmed in one take, and DeMille was ecstatic. The following day, DeMille and his crew gathered in a studio screening room to watch the scene. The film looked perfect - until DeMille noticed something that literally reduced him to tears. The reversed "sunrise" behind the two actors looked spectacular - but the waves on the beach were flowing backwards into the ocean, and all the seagulls in the rear projection scene were flying backwards.

Quotes

The public is always right
[to his crew] You are here to please me. Nothing else on Earth matters.
Give me any two pages of the Bible and I'll give you a picture.
It was a theory that died very hard that the public would not stand for anyone dressed in clothes of another period... I got around this objection by staging what we call a vision. The poor working girl was dreaming of love and reading "Tristan and Isolde". The scene faded out, and scenes were depicted on the screen that the girl was supposed to be reading... Thus a bit of costume picture was put over on the man who bought the picture for his theater, and there was no protest from the public.
Every time I make a picture the critics' estimate of American public taste goes down ten percent.