August 28, 2025 • 27 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, before Hollywood became the world’s movie capital, one man was already imagining films on a scale no one had ever seen. Cecil B. DeMille brought spectacle to the screen with epics like The Ten Commandments and The King of Kings, setting the standard for what cinema could be. Known as a master showman and a visionary director, DeMille helped transform Los Angeles into the heart of American filmmaking and left behind a legacy that is honored every year through the Golden Globes’ Cecil B. DeMille Award. Scott Eyman, author of Empire of Dreams, shares the story.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is Lee Habib and this is our American stories,
the show where America is the star and the American people.
When you think of Hollywood, you should think of Cecil B.
De Mill. Here to tell us, why is Scott Eiman,
author of Empire of Dreams, The Life of Cecil B. Demill.
Let's get into the story. Take it away, Scott.
Speaker 2 (00:33):
Without the Mill, there's no Hollywood, and without Hollywood, there
was no Demil. It was a perfect symbiotic relationship. He
was born in Massachusetts, but essentially he was raised in
New York City, a child of the nineteenth century theater.
Cecil's childhood when his father was alive he remembered as
a golden period. As a matter of fact, he had
very little criticisms to make of either of his parents
(00:56):
in terms of raising their children. They indulged him with
sufficient money. They were fine. His father was Henry de Mill,
an episcopalian, I guess lame minister you could call him,
and wrote plays in collaboration with David Belasco. There's no
modern equivalent for David Belasco. Blasco was a producer, a writer,
a wildly theatrical character who wore an ecclesiastical collar, in
(01:19):
spite of the fact that he was Jewish, and everybody
pretended not to notice. De Mille's mother was Jewish, his father,
as I said, was Episcopalian, and a mixed marriage in
that era was extremely unusual. There were three children in all, Cecil,
his older brother William, and a younger daughter named Agnes.
Agnes died at the age of three of meningitis, one
(01:43):
of those nineteenth century childhood diseases that swept off thousands
and thousands of children. That doesn't really exist much anymore,
and when it does, we all shake our heads and say,
my God, what a terrible tragedy. But in the nineteenth century,
that was what happened. Henry de Mill died at the
age of forty of typhoid, another thing that rarely happens anymore,
(02:03):
but in that era happened all the time. This put
Beatrice Cecil's mother, basically, her back against the wall. Henry
had been the bread earner in the family, as was
typical in that era, so she had to come up
with something. So what she did was she took their
house and turned it into school for girls, and it
was successful for a while, and then after a while
(02:24):
it wasn't successful, so at that point she became a
theatrical agent. Beatrice was a hustler because she had to be.
She had to raise her boys, and in time represented
William when he became a playwright, and also represented Cecil
when he became a playwright, but that was far in
the future. Cecil went to military school as a young boy.
(02:46):
Loathed it. Hated it. In retrospect, it's obvious because Cecil
was an alpha and not one to subjugate his own
ego to anybody else's. This was clear even at the
age of twelve. He was already taking charge of his
life and everybody else is around it. Surprisingly, his mother
was also an alpha, but they got along. They didn't
(03:07):
butt heads too too much. He was amused by her.
He respected her because of how well she had adjusted
to the death of Cecil's father and the rigor, and
the seriousness with which she raised her her son's and
how well she'd adjusted to the death of her daughter,
which of course had to be devastating for a young.
Speaker 3 (03:27):
Mother in that era.
Speaker 2 (03:29):
But he also tended to stay clear of her because
she was incredibly bossy Around Cecil b de Mill there
was only going to be one boss, and that was
Cecil B.
Speaker 1 (03:38):
De Mill.
Speaker 2 (03:39):
He followed his genetic footprint and went into the theater
as his father had, as his brother had. Unlike his
father and unlike his brother, Cecil was predominantly unsuccessful. He
was a jobbing actor for a long time. He was
a very good actor, at least as long as he
could play Cecil B. De Mill he was superb. I
(04:00):
don't know how well he could do enacting Shakespeare and
Marlowe and other plays that he was doing, but at
Cecil by de Mille he was a master. He tried
writing plays, he wasn't terribly successful, whereas Bill, his older
brother by three years, had several hit plays. Cecil collaborated
with David Belasco as his father had collaborated with David Belasco,
(04:23):
and was stunned to discover that Belasco shafted him out
of credit for what he believed was essentially his play.
Pulasco didn't give Cecil any credit, and it embittered Cecil
a great deal. He got into the movie business essentially
because there was nothing else left, and he went to
(04:45):
the movies because there was the growing thing. We're talking
now nineteen thirteen, Cecil would have been thirty two years old,
and the movies were beginning their rampant expansion out of
the nickelodeon ear into what we think of as the
feature motion picture era, which coincided with the founding of Hollywood,
which was instigated essentially by Cecil b.
Speaker 1 (05:07):
De Mill.
Speaker 2 (05:08):
He hooked up with a young man named Jesse Lasky.
The thing about Cecil and Jesse which made them so
well match was that they were both compulsive optimists. They
never really considered themselves to be beaten. They never thought
they could lose. They really believed in themselves. They believed
in each other as well. They liked each other, deeply,
deeply liked each other. So they brought in another young
(05:31):
man who had some money to invest, named Sam Goldwyn,
who was Jesse Laski's brother in law. This was the
triumpherate that formed the Laski Company, and they sent Cecil,
who had never directed a movie in his life, out
to Arizona to shoot a script they had bought of
a successful Broadway show called The Squawman.
Speaker 3 (05:50):
It was a.
Speaker 2 (05:51):
Western Now, Cecil's immersion in the world of how to
make a movie consisted of one day at the Thomas
Edison Studio in East Orange, New Jersey. He came out,
sat there and watched the make a movie, and with
typical brio some called it arrogance, thought to himself, well,
I can do this.
Speaker 3 (06:09):
This isn't so tough.
Speaker 2 (06:10):
They're not that good.
Speaker 3 (06:11):
I can do better than this.
Speaker 2 (06:13):
And they handed him about twenty five thousand dollars and
sent him out on the train to go to Arizona
to make this western. Not that Cecil had ever been
to Arizona because he never acted in Arizona, but it
was a Western, therefore, you're going to shoot in Arizona, Montana.
The train stopped in Arizona, he got off, looked around
(06:33):
and decided it wouldn't do at all because it was flat,
the light was harsh and ugly, and he asked the
conductor where the end of the line was. The conductor said, well,
los Angeles. So he got back on the train after
twenty minutes and went to the end of the line,
which was Los Angeles, and sent a wire to Jesse
back in New York about the change in plans. And
(06:55):
he got off the train in Los Angeles and realized
he had stumbled upon wonderful location for shooting movies.
Speaker 1 (07:03):
And you're listening to Scott i'man tell the story of
Cecil B. De Mill and being a product of a
mixed marriage back then, a Jewish mom and Episcopalian father.
Very unusual, indeed, and when you think about where his
film obsessions cook him, that's possibly an interesting combination and
interesting beginning. When we return more of the story of
(07:25):
Cecil B. De Mill here on our American Stories. Folks,
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(07:46):
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American stories coming. That's our American Stories dot Com. And
(08:09):
we returned to our American Stories and the story of
Cecil B. De Mill, the founder of Hollywood and one
of the main forces behind Paramount Pictures. When we last
left off, Cecil had hopped on a train and discovered
this place called California. Let's return to the story here
again is Scott Iman.
Speaker 2 (08:29):
Movies had been shot in California before Demll got there
at the end of nineteen thirteen, but they hadn't been
necessarily shot as a full time occupation. People had gone
out during the winter to get away from the New
York winters, because at this point the American movie industry
was essentially centrally located in and around New York City
(08:49):
and New Jersey. During the winter, the locations were more
difficult to get to the camera. Oil would freeze in
the camera if it got really cold, and it often
does get really cold on the East Coast, and it
was just very hard to keep up with production. Any
going to happen unless you're working indoors, and then that's claustrophobic,
and the audience liked the camera to go outdoors even then,
(09:12):
so they began looking for other places. They tried Florida.
Florida was okay, but the train from New York to
Florida stopped around Jacksonville. There was no train to Miami
or Palm Beach in that era, so the locations were
limited to kinds of moss in the trees environments, which
was limiting. But if you got off the train in
(09:32):
Los Angeles and you drove around, there were mountains, there
were deserts, there was an ocean, every kind of landscape
you would ever need to make any kind of movie
within about a two or three hour drive, and they
were free from a law enforcement of the patents company.
That was also part of the reason to get out
of New York because the Edison, the Edison Company, was
(09:56):
trying to enforce illegal patents on the camera that and
had owned, and they were exacting heavy, heavy tribute in
the terms of money if people wanted to exist under
the Edison patents. But if you got the hell out
of New York, it was much harder to enforce. I
mean it was almost impossible to get a long distance
(10:17):
call from LA to New York, let alone law enforcement.
You know, it was just very difficult. It was a
much bigger country then. But essentially the reason to get
out of the West Coast for is a production center
was scenery. So Cecil looked around and he was going
and he needed a place to make movies for the
Lanski Company, and he found a rental studio in a
(10:39):
little town called Hollywood, a bedroom suburb of Los Angeles.
The roads were dirt, there was one hotel. He rented
the studio. They put up a nice sign, a clapboards
sign over the building, and Cecil made the movie in
about three weeks. Four weeks shot the movie, and then
they sat down and waited for the money to come
(11:02):
back in. And by god, the money came back in.
The movie made about ten times when it cost, and
Cecil was named the Director General of the Latski Company,
which is about the most appropriate title anybody in Hollywood's
ever had, because from the beginning, Cecil controlled his environment,
he controlled his space. He dominated not merely the making
(11:24):
of his pictures, but he set the matrix for what
would become the Hollywood studio system. You know, there was
mass production. The first year or two, he made almost
a picture a month, a feature picture a month of
about an hour. It was a furious pace, and a
damn near killed him. But he realized he had found
his metier, he had found what he'd been put on
earth to do, and that belief in his own gift
(11:50):
never failed, never failed. His early films are extraordinary. Cecil
b the Mill was a great, great silent film director.
There's no question we're talking about the transition now from
say the Nickelodeon era, where people would open a movie
theater by renting a storefront and putting up a white
sheet and having one or two projectors and some folding chairs.
(12:13):
They'd rent from a funeral home unless the funeral home
needed them for a funeral, and that was a movie theater. Certainly,
by World War One, there's a transition taking place in
terms of exhibition as well as production towards the huge
downtown movie palaces, the equivalent of an amusement park, the
early twentieth century version of an amusement park, beauty and
(12:35):
lavishness that the people that paid twenty cents or fifty
cents or a dollar to get in could never have experienced. Otherwise.
It was more than just a place to watch a movie.
It was an environment in which to luxuriate. He wanted
his movies to reflect the environment in which they would
be shown, so he began his movies began to get longer,
(12:57):
they began to get less focused on narrative and more
focused on what you might say is pushing the envelope
in terms of subject matter, turning what was a parlor
amusement a novelty item into an art form. He and
Laski were always bound at the hip. They were very
close all their lives. Never had a crossword between them.
(13:19):
Demil and Zuker were never close, never close. Zuker was
a bottom line guy, and Demill spent a lot of money.
Demill's budgets were extremely high, as high as a million
dollars on the first version of The Gun Commandments. He
just spent and spent and spent until he thought the
picture was what it needed to be, and this drove
(13:39):
Zuker battye. Although Demill's pictures made money, Zuker still resented
the fact that Demil didn't observe what Zuker regarded as
financial sanity, you know. And this became a real sticking
point between the two of them. And finally it was
the most bitter experience I think Demill ever had. There
(14:00):
was a meeting between Zuker and Alaski and Demil and
Zucker said, Cecil, you've never been.
Speaker 3 (14:07):
One of us. Now.
Speaker 2 (14:09):
Demil took this to mean that he hadn't been a
loyal partner in the company. What I think Zuker actually
meant was that Damil was not Jewish, and that Zuker
had a hard time trusting him because of that. Because
Zucker was Jewish and Alaski was Jewish, Demil was an Episcopalian,
a religious episcopalian. In any case, it resulted in Damil
(14:30):
leaving the company after over ten years in which he
had constructed the company basically by dint of the sweat
of his brow. He went into independent production. He was
not terribly successful, and then Sound lands with both feet
in nineteen twenty seven. In nineteen twenty eight, and the
industry is convulsed. A lot of major silent filmmakers never
(14:50):
get their never get their solid footing again, for one
reason or another. In some cases they were just too
old to adjust to a different manner of storytelling. Sometimes
there was a way of farming out people whose stalaries
were regarded as onerous. There was a culling, shall we say,
Demill lands at MGM, the most successful Hollywood movie studio
there's a planet Paramount. MGM is run in a completely
(15:14):
different way than Paramount had been run. The director is
relatively unimportant. What is important is the star. MGM exists
to cultivate and promote stars. At Paramount, de Mill had
been the star. If it said as ceciblely de Mill production,
the stars were, if not irrelevant, of secondary importance. At MGM,
(15:35):
the star was of primary importance, and the director was
tertiary if that. Directors at MGM didn't have autonomy, and
de Mill always had autonomy. He made three pictures at
MGM and they cut him loose, and at that point
he's fifty years old, not a young man anymore, and
the industry is convulsing, and what is he to do? Well,
(15:58):
he goes back to Paramount where he'd started, and on
very very strict budgetary and production guidelines. He doesn't have
an unlimited budget. It's a one picture deal. It's called
The Sign of the Cross. It's a biblical picture, which
he'd been very successful with before in the Silent era.
His top line is six hundred and fifty thousand dollars
(16:21):
and it's a lavish biblical picture, and six hundred and
fifty thousand dollars in nineteen thirty two is not a
lot of money to make a lavish biblical picture.
Speaker 3 (16:28):
But he pulls it off.
Speaker 2 (16:30):
And it makes money, and then he signed to another
deal at Paramount, and with a few bumps along the way,
he stays there for the rest of his life until
his death in nineteen fifty nine. So not only was
he the founder of the company. Once he lands there
again in nineteen thirty two, he spends the next twenty
seven years there. And if you put those two two
(16:50):
terms of service together, you're looking at, you know, forty
years with one movie studio. It's an unheard of record
in Hollywood. Even in the era it was an tinerant profession.
Nobody stayed any place for forty years. It wasn't good sense.
But when he landed there again in nineteen thirty two,
he became a pillar of the studio, the pillar that
(17:12):
he'd always wanted to be, and that Zuker would not
grant him originally, But as the thirties wore on and
he made hit after hit after hit, Zuker had no
choice but to basically acquiesce to Demil's primacy in the
creative firmanent of Paramount. Demil had his own building on
the lot.
Speaker 1 (17:28):
And you've been listening to Scott Iiman, author of Empire
of Dreams, The Life of Cecil B. Demill. Pick it
up an Amazon or any of the usual suspects wherever
you buy your books. When we come back more of
the life of Cecil B. De Mill here on our
American stories. And we returned to our American stories and
(18:11):
the final portion of our story of Cecil B. Demil.
When we last left off, Cecil had created the Hollywood
studio system, something which lasts to this day. Let's return
to the story here again. Is Scott Eaman.
Speaker 2 (18:25):
By the mid thirties, he's settling into a rhythm of
big epic stories of alpha males. The acting Demil wanted
in his films never shifted. Really, it's what I call
standard of de Liver acting. You're not asking for psychological
depth or behavioral reality. You're asking for actors to give
(18:45):
a kind of stentorian, very overtly masculine performance. And the
reason he liked that kind of acting is because it's
the acting he grew up with as a boy in
the nineteenth century of New York theater. That was the
standard of acting. I think the corollary of the Mil
is James Cameron.
Speaker 3 (19:01):
I mean.
Speaker 2 (19:02):
The problem with the Mill is he's often judged by
his dialogue and by the style of acting, which is
exactly what he wanted.
Speaker 3 (19:08):
But people judge.
Speaker 2 (19:09):
Him by his dialogue, and people often make In fact,
I've made remarks about James Cameron's dialogue, which tends to
be completely on the nose and kind of theatrical and
often clunky. You know, but look at the shots. Look
at the shots. Look at what he pulls off in
spite of ridiculous premises. Don't get me started on Avatar.
(19:31):
If there's a modern equivalent to the mill it's Cameron,
because there's a certain panash, there's a certain monomania in
asserting his belief in that this will work, this movie
will work. And not only will the movie work, people
will come to see this movie. Why would people come
to see a movie about the Titanic when everybody knows
what happens, everybody knows they die.
Speaker 3 (19:51):
Okay, but he got.
Speaker 2 (19:52):
Millions and millions, tens of millions of people to come
see The Titanic over and over again, even though they
knew the ending.
Speaker 3 (19:58):
That's an achievement, it really is.
Speaker 2 (20:00):
It really is an achievement because it's the filmmaking that
seduces the audience into ignoring the fact that the dialogue
is on the nose, and this is improbable, and that's improbable,
and of course they're going to die, because that's what
happened in the Satanic to be able to counter all
those obstacles and send people out thinking this is the
(20:21):
greatest thing I've ever seen.
Speaker 3 (20:22):
In my life.
Speaker 2 (20:23):
That's an accomplishment. And that's the same kind of skill
that Demill had.
Speaker 3 (20:27):
By the war. He was grooveed. He was grooved.
Speaker 2 (20:30):
He didn't really deviate from what he knew he could
do well. In the modern era, you know, the directors
will make a left turn to do something that appeals
to them, unlike something they've already done, you know. But Demill,
Demill loved what he was. He didn't feel the need
to do a Tennessee Williams adaptation. He would go to
see those shows. He would go to the theater and
(20:51):
see those shows and appreciate them, but it's not He
understood that that wasn't his strength, and he wanted to
play to his strength, and he also didn't want to
disappoint his audience. It's a very crucial thing. He enjoyed
being successful. He didn't want to risk being unsuccessful. He'd
gone through lack of success as a young man, before
(21:12):
he got into the movies. When sound came in, he
had that rough three or four year patch.
Speaker 3 (21:16):
And it wasn't pleasant for him.
Speaker 2 (21:18):
He did not have a burning urge to seduce the
New York critics. Not his business. His business was being
Cecil b de Mill and he stuck to it all
his life. So he liked to latch on to stories
about manifest destiny, what we would now call manifest destiny,
which is more or less an outmoded philosophy. But building
(21:38):
the railroad, bringing civilization to.
Speaker 3 (21:41):
The West, that kind of thing.
Speaker 2 (21:42):
So he would latch on to, for instance, the Union Pacific,
the railroad company, and sell them the idea of making
the company through portrayal of one man building the railroad,
the hero of the movie. You know, he did the
same thing with The Greatest Show on Earth, the movie
that changed Steven Spielberg's life. To Show on Earth with
the copyrighted slogan of Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey Circus
(22:05):
Paramount paid Ringling Brothers. I believe it was two hundred
and fifty thousand dollars for the use of their winter
facilities and the use of the slogan The Greatest Show
on Earth, and John Wringling North, who was the head
of the company at Ringling Brothers at that point, even
makes a guest appearance in the beginning of the picture,
playing himself. It costs paramount twohundred fifty thousand dollars, but
(22:27):
it was worth it because the film made an incredible
amount of money. It won Best Picture of the Year,
which was a sort of career award for de mil
and it set him up to make the last picture
of his life, The Ten Commandments. On the one hand,
it was a picture he would have given his life
to make, and on the other hand it basically did
cost him his life. So of course he was drawn
to the Bible, the King James Bible. A lot of
(22:50):
his visual sense of his spectacles derived from the Bible
that his father had illustrated by Gustav Dray beautifully, so beautifully.
So he made The Ten Manment's in ninety twenty three.
Speaker 3 (23:01):
Except it was two stories.
Speaker 2 (23:03):
The first forty five minutes or so is the biblical story,
and then it fades out and switches to a modern
story that illustrates the Ten Commandments what happens if you
break the Ten Commandments. It was a big successful film,
although Adolf Zuker hated it because it costs so much.
So thirty years go by, he's coming off the Greatest
Show on Earth, which is the biggest hit of his
(23:24):
career and wins Best Picture and all that, and he
tells Paramount he wants to do the Ten Commandments strictly
the biblical story, sound color, VistaVision, the whole nine yards,
and he wants to make it in Egypt on location.
The board of directors is just panicky. They have no
(23:45):
idea how much that's going to cost. This is off
the charts money. The budget comes in at twelve million dollars.
I think it was the largest budget in Hollywood history
up to that time. I mean, the Gull at the
Wind only costs four Well, this is a recipe for
such death, insanity, what have you. But they couldn't say no.
He was Cecil b. De Mill, what are you gonna do?
(24:06):
You get a gulp and you're gonna write the check.
So they wrote the check. Pre production began. They built
those huge gates of rameses over in Egypt. Of course,
the money sequence, aside from the Party of the Red Sea,
which was done back in Hollywood, was the Exodus, the
giant Exodus scene, which had eight thousand extras, ten thousand extras,
(24:27):
just massive amount of extras. And the mill is running
up and down a ladder, a seventy foot ladder. Checking
camera angles from the top of the set looking down
on the Jews leaving Egypt. The money shot, and he
suddenly gets crushing pain in his chest. He cannot get
(24:47):
down the ladder, so they have to get a stretcher
and get him down that way. So he's had a
massive heart attack on location in Egypt. Now this is
a crisis, This is a real crisis, because nobody else
can direct to cecyl Be the movie except Cecilby to Milt.
So what happened was he directed about another week's worth
of locations. They went back to Hollywood, so there was
(25:09):
a four like a six week period before he actually
had to start directing again. And in that six weeks
he got back enough so that he could pick up
directing the rest of the film. But that was the
sequence that basically began his slide. The last year of
his life, he had three or four heart attacks, and
there was no in that era, there was nothing you
(25:31):
could do. There was no stints, there was nothing. A
bad heart was a bad heart. You know, good luck,
change your diet and don't get stressed out. That was
about the the sum total of treatment for coronary disease.
He didn't blink. The dailiness of making movies was what
kept him alive even after The Ten Commandments was released
(25:52):
and was just a huge earth shattering hit. He didn't retire,
couldn't retire. He planned another picture. He was going to
make a movie Lord Baden Powell, the founder of the
Boy Scouts, and he produced a remake of The Buccaneer,
a film he'd made in nineteen thirty eight that he
had Anthony Quinn direct because he couldn't direct it. Anthony
Quinn was his son in law at that point. Anthony
(26:12):
Quinn had married his daughter, and he liked Quinn because
Quinn was kind of assertive and masculine and aggressive in
the same way that De Mill was. Quinn didn't do
a very good job on it, never directed again, as
a matter of fact, but that was the last thing
that was built as of Cecil B. De Mill production,
and he died a few months after it was released.
But I'm sure in his mind if he'd known that
(26:33):
in advance. He would have made the picture anyone and
the heart attack be damned, because that's the kind of
attitude he had. He didn't have any imitators, He really didn't,
because I think people understood that he was inevitable.
Speaker 1 (26:47):
And a terrific job on the production and editing by
our own Monty Montgomery and his special thanks to Scott Iiman,
author of Empire of Dreams, The Life of Cecil B.
De Mill Again go to Amazon with the usual suspects
and pick up copy of his book, and what a story.
There were no imitators, SESSL. B. DeMille was a one
of a kind, and it turns out he just loved
(27:09):
being cessil B. DeMille. An American dream story if ever
there was here on our American stories.
This is Lee Habib and this is our American stories,
the show where America is the star and the American people.
When you think of Hollywood, you should think of Cecil B.
De Mill. Here to tell us, why is Scott Eiman,
author of Empire of Dreams, The Life of Cecil B. Demill.
Let's get into the story. Take it away, Scott.
Speaker 2 (00:33):
Without the Mill, there's no Hollywood, and without Hollywood, there
was no Demil. It was a perfect symbiotic relationship. He
was born in Massachusetts, but essentially he was raised in
New York City, a child of the nineteenth century theater.
Cecil's childhood when his father was alive he remembered as
a golden period. As a matter of fact, he had
very little criticisms to make of either of his parents
(00:56):
in terms of raising their children. They indulged him with
sufficient money. They were fine. His father was Henry de Mill,
an episcopalian, I guess lame minister you could call him,
and wrote plays in collaboration with David Belasco. There's no
modern equivalent for David Belasco. Blasco was a producer, a writer,
a wildly theatrical character who wore an ecclesiastical collar, in
(01:19):
spite of the fact that he was Jewish, and everybody
pretended not to notice. De Mille's mother was Jewish, his father,
as I said, was Episcopalian, and a mixed marriage in
that era was extremely unusual. There were three children in all, Cecil,
his older brother William, and a younger daughter named Agnes.
Agnes died at the age of three of meningitis, one
(01:43):
of those nineteenth century childhood diseases that swept off thousands
and thousands of children. That doesn't really exist much anymore,
and when it does, we all shake our heads and say,
my God, what a terrible tragedy. But in the nineteenth century,
that was what happened. Henry de Mill died at the
age of forty of typhoid, another thing that rarely happens anymore,
(02:03):
but in that era happened all the time. This put
Beatrice Cecil's mother, basically, her back against the wall. Henry
had been the bread earner in the family, as was
typical in that era, so she had to come up
with something. So what she did was she took their
house and turned it into school for girls, and it
was successful for a while, and then after a while
(02:24):
it wasn't successful, so at that point she became a
theatrical agent. Beatrice was a hustler because she had to be.
She had to raise her boys, and in time represented
William when he became a playwright, and also represented Cecil
when he became a playwright, but that was far in
the future. Cecil went to military school as a young boy.
(02:46):
Loathed it. Hated it. In retrospect, it's obvious because Cecil
was an alpha and not one to subjugate his own
ego to anybody else's. This was clear even at the
age of twelve. He was already taking charge of his
life and everybody else is around it. Surprisingly, his mother
was also an alpha, but they got along. They didn't
(03:07):
butt heads too too much. He was amused by her.
He respected her because of how well she had adjusted
to the death of Cecil's father and the rigor, and
the seriousness with which she raised her her son's and
how well she'd adjusted to the death of her daughter,
which of course had to be devastating for a young.
Speaker 3 (03:27):
Mother in that era.
Speaker 2 (03:29):
But he also tended to stay clear of her because
she was incredibly bossy Around Cecil b de Mill there
was only going to be one boss, and that was
Cecil B.
Speaker 1 (03:38):
De Mill.
Speaker 2 (03:39):
He followed his genetic footprint and went into the theater
as his father had, as his brother had. Unlike his
father and unlike his brother, Cecil was predominantly unsuccessful. He
was a jobbing actor for a long time. He was
a very good actor, at least as long as he
could play Cecil B. De Mill he was superb. I
(04:00):
don't know how well he could do enacting Shakespeare and
Marlowe and other plays that he was doing, but at
Cecil by de Mille he was a master. He tried
writing plays, he wasn't terribly successful, whereas Bill, his older
brother by three years, had several hit plays. Cecil collaborated
with David Belasco as his father had collaborated with David Belasco,
(04:23):
and was stunned to discover that Belasco shafted him out
of credit for what he believed was essentially his play.
Pulasco didn't give Cecil any credit, and it embittered Cecil
a great deal. He got into the movie business essentially
because there was nothing else left, and he went to
(04:45):
the movies because there was the growing thing. We're talking
now nineteen thirteen, Cecil would have been thirty two years old,
and the movies were beginning their rampant expansion out of
the nickelodeon ear into what we think of as the
feature motion picture era, which coincided with the founding of Hollywood,
which was instigated essentially by Cecil b.
Speaker 1 (05:07):
De Mill.
Speaker 2 (05:08):
He hooked up with a young man named Jesse Lasky.
The thing about Cecil and Jesse which made them so
well match was that they were both compulsive optimists. They
never really considered themselves to be beaten. They never thought
they could lose. They really believed in themselves. They believed
in each other as well. They liked each other, deeply,
deeply liked each other. So they brought in another young
(05:31):
man who had some money to invest, named Sam Goldwyn,
who was Jesse Laski's brother in law. This was the
triumpherate that formed the Laski Company, and they sent Cecil,
who had never directed a movie in his life, out
to Arizona to shoot a script they had bought of
a successful Broadway show called The Squawman.
Speaker 3 (05:50):
It was a.
Speaker 2 (05:51):
Western Now, Cecil's immersion in the world of how to
make a movie consisted of one day at the Thomas
Edison Studio in East Orange, New Jersey. He came out,
sat there and watched the make a movie, and with
typical brio some called it arrogance, thought to himself, well,
I can do this.
Speaker 3 (06:09):
This isn't so tough.
Speaker 2 (06:10):
They're not that good.
Speaker 3 (06:11):
I can do better than this.
Speaker 2 (06:13):
And they handed him about twenty five thousand dollars and
sent him out on the train to go to Arizona
to make this western. Not that Cecil had ever been
to Arizona because he never acted in Arizona, but it
was a Western, therefore, you're going to shoot in Arizona, Montana.
The train stopped in Arizona, he got off, looked around
(06:33):
and decided it wouldn't do at all because it was flat,
the light was harsh and ugly, and he asked the
conductor where the end of the line was. The conductor said, well,
los Angeles. So he got back on the train after
twenty minutes and went to the end of the line,
which was Los Angeles, and sent a wire to Jesse
back in New York about the change in plans. And
(06:55):
he got off the train in Los Angeles and realized
he had stumbled upon wonderful location for shooting movies.
Speaker 1 (07:03):
And you're listening to Scott i'man tell the story of
Cecil B. De Mill and being a product of a
mixed marriage back then, a Jewish mom and Episcopalian father.
Very unusual, indeed, and when you think about where his
film obsessions cook him, that's possibly an interesting combination and
interesting beginning. When we return more of the story of
(07:25):
Cecil B. De Mill here on our American Stories. Folks,
if you love the great American stories we tell and
love America like we do, we're asking you to become
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(07:46):
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Go to our American Stories dot com now and go
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American stories coming. That's our American Stories dot Com. And
(08:09):
we returned to our American Stories and the story of
Cecil B. De Mill, the founder of Hollywood and one
of the main forces behind Paramount Pictures. When we last
left off, Cecil had hopped on a train and discovered
this place called California. Let's return to the story here
again is Scott Iman.
Speaker 2 (08:29):
Movies had been shot in California before Demll got there
at the end of nineteen thirteen, but they hadn't been
necessarily shot as a full time occupation. People had gone
out during the winter to get away from the New
York winters, because at this point the American movie industry
was essentially centrally located in and around New York City
(08:49):
and New Jersey. During the winter, the locations were more
difficult to get to the camera. Oil would freeze in
the camera if it got really cold, and it often
does get really cold on the East Coast, and it
was just very hard to keep up with production. Any
going to happen unless you're working indoors, and then that's claustrophobic,
and the audience liked the camera to go outdoors even then,
(09:12):
so they began looking for other places. They tried Florida.
Florida was okay, but the train from New York to
Florida stopped around Jacksonville. There was no train to Miami
or Palm Beach in that era, so the locations were
limited to kinds of moss in the trees environments, which
was limiting. But if you got off the train in
(09:32):
Los Angeles and you drove around, there were mountains, there
were deserts, there was an ocean, every kind of landscape
you would ever need to make any kind of movie
within about a two or three hour drive, and they
were free from a law enforcement of the patents company.
That was also part of the reason to get out
of New York because the Edison, the Edison Company, was
(09:56):
trying to enforce illegal patents on the camera that and
had owned, and they were exacting heavy, heavy tribute in
the terms of money if people wanted to exist under
the Edison patents. But if you got the hell out
of New York, it was much harder to enforce. I
mean it was almost impossible to get a long distance
(10:17):
call from LA to New York, let alone law enforcement.
You know, it was just very difficult. It was a
much bigger country then. But essentially the reason to get
out of the West Coast for is a production center
was scenery. So Cecil looked around and he was going
and he needed a place to make movies for the
Lanski Company, and he found a rental studio in a
(10:39):
little town called Hollywood, a bedroom suburb of Los Angeles.
The roads were dirt, there was one hotel. He rented
the studio. They put up a nice sign, a clapboards
sign over the building, and Cecil made the movie in
about three weeks. Four weeks shot the movie, and then
they sat down and waited for the money to come
(11:02):
back in. And by god, the money came back in.
The movie made about ten times when it cost, and
Cecil was named the Director General of the Latski Company,
which is about the most appropriate title anybody in Hollywood's
ever had, because from the beginning, Cecil controlled his environment,
he controlled his space. He dominated not merely the making
(11:24):
of his pictures, but he set the matrix for what
would become the Hollywood studio system. You know, there was
mass production. The first year or two, he made almost
a picture a month, a feature picture a month of
about an hour. It was a furious pace, and a
damn near killed him. But he realized he had found
his metier, he had found what he'd been put on
earth to do, and that belief in his own gift
(11:50):
never failed, never failed. His early films are extraordinary. Cecil
b the Mill was a great, great silent film director.
There's no question we're talking about the transition now from
say the Nickelodeon era, where people would open a movie
theater by renting a storefront and putting up a white
sheet and having one or two projectors and some folding chairs.
(12:13):
They'd rent from a funeral home unless the funeral home
needed them for a funeral, and that was a movie theater. Certainly,
by World War One, there's a transition taking place in
terms of exhibition as well as production towards the huge
downtown movie palaces, the equivalent of an amusement park, the
early twentieth century version of an amusement park, beauty and
(12:35):
lavishness that the people that paid twenty cents or fifty
cents or a dollar to get in could never have experienced. Otherwise.
It was more than just a place to watch a movie.
It was an environment in which to luxuriate. He wanted
his movies to reflect the environment in which they would
be shown, so he began his movies began to get longer,
(12:57):
they began to get less focused on narrative and more
focused on what you might say is pushing the envelope
in terms of subject matter, turning what was a parlor
amusement a novelty item into an art form. He and
Laski were always bound at the hip. They were very
close all their lives. Never had a crossword between them.
(13:19):
Demil and Zuker were never close, never close. Zuker was
a bottom line guy, and Demill spent a lot of money.
Demill's budgets were extremely high, as high as a million
dollars on the first version of The Gun Commandments. He
just spent and spent and spent until he thought the
picture was what it needed to be, and this drove
(13:39):
Zuker battye. Although Demill's pictures made money, Zuker still resented
the fact that Demil didn't observe what Zuker regarded as
financial sanity, you know. And this became a real sticking
point between the two of them. And finally it was
the most bitter experience I think Demill ever had. There
(14:00):
was a meeting between Zuker and Alaski and Demil and
Zucker said, Cecil, you've never been.
Speaker 3 (14:07):
One of us. Now.
Speaker 2 (14:09):
Demil took this to mean that he hadn't been a
loyal partner in the company. What I think Zuker actually
meant was that Damil was not Jewish, and that Zuker
had a hard time trusting him because of that. Because
Zucker was Jewish and Alaski was Jewish, Demil was an Episcopalian,
a religious episcopalian. In any case, it resulted in Damil
(14:30):
leaving the company after over ten years in which he
had constructed the company basically by dint of the sweat
of his brow. He went into independent production. He was
not terribly successful, and then Sound lands with both feet
in nineteen twenty seven. In nineteen twenty eight, and the
industry is convulsed. A lot of major silent filmmakers never
(14:50):
get their never get their solid footing again, for one
reason or another. In some cases they were just too
old to adjust to a different manner of storytelling. Sometimes
there was a way of farming out people whose stalaries
were regarded as onerous. There was a culling, shall we say,
Demill lands at MGM, the most successful Hollywood movie studio
there's a planet Paramount. MGM is run in a completely
(15:14):
different way than Paramount had been run. The director is
relatively unimportant. What is important is the star. MGM exists
to cultivate and promote stars. At Paramount, de Mill had
been the star. If it said as ceciblely de Mill production,
the stars were, if not irrelevant, of secondary importance. At MGM,
(15:35):
the star was of primary importance, and the director was
tertiary if that. Directors at MGM didn't have autonomy, and
de Mill always had autonomy. He made three pictures at
MGM and they cut him loose, and at that point
he's fifty years old, not a young man anymore, and
the industry is convulsing, and what is he to do? Well,
(15:58):
he goes back to Paramount where he'd started, and on
very very strict budgetary and production guidelines. He doesn't have
an unlimited budget. It's a one picture deal. It's called
The Sign of the Cross. It's a biblical picture, which
he'd been very successful with before in the Silent era.
His top line is six hundred and fifty thousand dollars
(16:21):
and it's a lavish biblical picture, and six hundred and
fifty thousand dollars in nineteen thirty two is not a
lot of money to make a lavish biblical picture.
Speaker 3 (16:28):
But he pulls it off.
Speaker 2 (16:30):
And it makes money, and then he signed to another
deal at Paramount, and with a few bumps along the way,
he stays there for the rest of his life until
his death in nineteen fifty nine. So not only was
he the founder of the company. Once he lands there
again in nineteen thirty two, he spends the next twenty
seven years there. And if you put those two two
(16:50):
terms of service together, you're looking at, you know, forty
years with one movie studio. It's an unheard of record
in Hollywood. Even in the era it was an tinerant profession.
Nobody stayed any place for forty years. It wasn't good sense.
But when he landed there again in nineteen thirty two,
he became a pillar of the studio, the pillar that
(17:12):
he'd always wanted to be, and that Zuker would not
grant him originally, But as the thirties wore on and
he made hit after hit after hit, Zuker had no
choice but to basically acquiesce to Demil's primacy in the
creative firmanent of Paramount. Demil had his own building on
the lot.
Speaker 1 (17:28):
And you've been listening to Scott Iiman, author of Empire
of Dreams, The Life of Cecil B. Demill. Pick it
up an Amazon or any of the usual suspects wherever
you buy your books. When we come back more of
the life of Cecil B. De Mill here on our
American stories. And we returned to our American stories and
(18:11):
the final portion of our story of Cecil B. Demil.
When we last left off, Cecil had created the Hollywood
studio system, something which lasts to this day. Let's return
to the story here again. Is Scott Eaman.
Speaker 2 (18:25):
By the mid thirties, he's settling into a rhythm of
big epic stories of alpha males. The acting Demil wanted
in his films never shifted. Really, it's what I call
standard of de Liver acting. You're not asking for psychological
depth or behavioral reality. You're asking for actors to give
(18:45):
a kind of stentorian, very overtly masculine performance. And the
reason he liked that kind of acting is because it's
the acting he grew up with as a boy in
the nineteenth century of New York theater. That was the
standard of acting. I think the corollary of the Mil
is James Cameron.
Speaker 3 (19:01):
I mean.
Speaker 2 (19:02):
The problem with the Mill is he's often judged by
his dialogue and by the style of acting, which is
exactly what he wanted.
Speaker 3 (19:08):
But people judge.
Speaker 2 (19:09):
Him by his dialogue, and people often make In fact,
I've made remarks about James Cameron's dialogue, which tends to
be completely on the nose and kind of theatrical and
often clunky. You know, but look at the shots. Look
at the shots. Look at what he pulls off in
spite of ridiculous premises. Don't get me started on Avatar.
(19:31):
If there's a modern equivalent to the mill it's Cameron,
because there's a certain panash, there's a certain monomania in
asserting his belief in that this will work, this movie
will work. And not only will the movie work, people
will come to see this movie. Why would people come
to see a movie about the Titanic when everybody knows
what happens, everybody knows they die.
Speaker 3 (19:51):
Okay, but he got.
Speaker 2 (19:52):
Millions and millions, tens of millions of people to come
see The Titanic over and over again, even though they
knew the ending.
Speaker 3 (19:58):
That's an achievement, it really is.
Speaker 2 (20:00):
It really is an achievement because it's the filmmaking that
seduces the audience into ignoring the fact that the dialogue
is on the nose, and this is improbable, and that's improbable,
and of course they're going to die, because that's what
happened in the Satanic to be able to counter all
those obstacles and send people out thinking this is the
(20:21):
greatest thing I've ever seen.
Speaker 3 (20:22):
In my life.
Speaker 2 (20:23):
That's an accomplishment. And that's the same kind of skill
that Demill had.
Speaker 3 (20:27):
By the war. He was grooveed. He was grooved.
Speaker 2 (20:30):
He didn't really deviate from what he knew he could
do well. In the modern era, you know, the directors
will make a left turn to do something that appeals
to them, unlike something they've already done, you know. But Demill,
Demill loved what he was. He didn't feel the need
to do a Tennessee Williams adaptation. He would go to
see those shows. He would go to the theater and
(20:51):
see those shows and appreciate them, but it's not He
understood that that wasn't his strength, and he wanted to
play to his strength, and he also didn't want to
disappoint his audience. It's a very crucial thing. He enjoyed
being successful. He didn't want to risk being unsuccessful. He'd
gone through lack of success as a young man, before
(21:12):
he got into the movies. When sound came in, he
had that rough three or four year patch.
Speaker 3 (21:16):
And it wasn't pleasant for him.
Speaker 2 (21:18):
He did not have a burning urge to seduce the
New York critics. Not his business. His business was being
Cecil b de Mill and he stuck to it all
his life. So he liked to latch on to stories
about manifest destiny, what we would now call manifest destiny,
which is more or less an outmoded philosophy. But building
(21:38):
the railroad, bringing civilization to.
Speaker 3 (21:41):
The West, that kind of thing.
Speaker 2 (21:42):
So he would latch on to, for instance, the Union Pacific,
the railroad company, and sell them the idea of making
the company through portrayal of one man building the railroad,
the hero of the movie. You know, he did the
same thing with The Greatest Show on Earth, the movie
that changed Steven Spielberg's life. To Show on Earth with
the copyrighted slogan of Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey Circus
(22:05):
Paramount paid Ringling Brothers. I believe it was two hundred
and fifty thousand dollars for the use of their winter
facilities and the use of the slogan The Greatest Show
on Earth, and John Wringling North, who was the head
of the company at Ringling Brothers at that point, even
makes a guest appearance in the beginning of the picture,
playing himself. It costs paramount twohundred fifty thousand dollars, but
(22:27):
it was worth it because the film made an incredible
amount of money. It won Best Picture of the Year,
which was a sort of career award for de mil
and it set him up to make the last picture
of his life, The Ten Commandments. On the one hand,
it was a picture he would have given his life
to make, and on the other hand it basically did
cost him his life. So of course he was drawn
to the Bible, the King James Bible. A lot of
(22:50):
his visual sense of his spectacles derived from the Bible
that his father had illustrated by Gustav Dray beautifully, so beautifully.
So he made The Ten Manment's in ninety twenty three.
Speaker 3 (23:01):
Except it was two stories.
Speaker 2 (23:03):
The first forty five minutes or so is the biblical story,
and then it fades out and switches to a modern
story that illustrates the Ten Commandments what happens if you
break the Ten Commandments. It was a big successful film,
although Adolf Zuker hated it because it costs so much.
So thirty years go by, he's coming off the Greatest
Show on Earth, which is the biggest hit of his
(23:24):
career and wins Best Picture and all that, and he
tells Paramount he wants to do the Ten Commandments strictly
the biblical story, sound color, VistaVision, the whole nine yards,
and he wants to make it in Egypt on location.
The board of directors is just panicky. They have no
(23:45):
idea how much that's going to cost. This is off
the charts money. The budget comes in at twelve million dollars.
I think it was the largest budget in Hollywood history
up to that time. I mean, the Gull at the
Wind only costs four Well, this is a recipe for
such death, insanity, what have you. But they couldn't say no.
He was Cecil b. De Mill, what are you gonna do?
(24:06):
You get a gulp and you're gonna write the check.
So they wrote the check. Pre production began. They built
those huge gates of rameses over in Egypt. Of course,
the money sequence, aside from the Party of the Red Sea,
which was done back in Hollywood, was the Exodus, the
giant Exodus scene, which had eight thousand extras, ten thousand extras,
(24:27):
just massive amount of extras. And the mill is running
up and down a ladder, a seventy foot ladder. Checking
camera angles from the top of the set looking down
on the Jews leaving Egypt. The money shot, and he
suddenly gets crushing pain in his chest. He cannot get
(24:47):
down the ladder, so they have to get a stretcher
and get him down that way. So he's had a
massive heart attack on location in Egypt. Now this is
a crisis, This is a real crisis, because nobody else
can direct to cecyl Be the movie except Cecilby to Milt.
So what happened was he directed about another week's worth
of locations. They went back to Hollywood, so there was
(25:09):
a four like a six week period before he actually
had to start directing again. And in that six weeks
he got back enough so that he could pick up
directing the rest of the film. But that was the
sequence that basically began his slide. The last year of
his life, he had three or four heart attacks, and
there was no in that era, there was nothing you
(25:31):
could do. There was no stints, there was nothing. A
bad heart was a bad heart. You know, good luck,
change your diet and don't get stressed out. That was
about the the sum total of treatment for coronary disease.
He didn't blink. The dailiness of making movies was what
kept him alive even after The Ten Commandments was released
(25:52):
and was just a huge earth shattering hit. He didn't retire,
couldn't retire. He planned another picture. He was going to
make a movie Lord Baden Powell, the founder of the
Boy Scouts, and he produced a remake of The Buccaneer,
a film he'd made in nineteen thirty eight that he
had Anthony Quinn direct because he couldn't direct it. Anthony
Quinn was his son in law at that point. Anthony
(26:12):
Quinn had married his daughter, and he liked Quinn because
Quinn was kind of assertive and masculine and aggressive in
the same way that De Mill was. Quinn didn't do
a very good job on it, never directed again, as
a matter of fact, but that was the last thing
that was built as of Cecil B. De Mill production,
and he died a few months after it was released.
But I'm sure in his mind if he'd known that
(26:33):
in advance. He would have made the picture anyone and
the heart attack be damned, because that's the kind of
attitude he had. He didn't have any imitators, He really didn't,
because I think people understood that he was inevitable.
Speaker 1 (26:47):
And a terrific job on the production and editing by
our own Monty Montgomery and his special thanks to Scott Iiman,
author of Empire of Dreams, The Life of Cecil B.
De Mill Again go to Amazon with the usual suspects
and pick up copy of his book, and what a story.
There were no imitators, SESSL. B. DeMille was a one
of a kind, and it turns out he just loved
(27:09):
being cessil B. DeMille. An American dream story if ever
there was here on our American stories.
Host
Lee Habeeb
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