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This is Danielle Fischel from Pod Meets World. Parents, quick question. When is the last time you won snack time? The other day, I handed my son a perfectly portioned Pinterest-level snack and He traded it for a Mott's applesauce pouch. I'm not mad, just impressed.
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When you think of Hollywood, you should think of Cecil B. DeMille. Here to tell us why is Scott Iman, author of Empire of Dreams, The Life of Cecil B. DeMille. Let's get into the story.
Take it away, Scott. Without DeMille, there's no Hollywood, and without Hollywood, there was no DeMille. It was a perfect symbiotic relationship. He was born in Massachusetts, but essentially he was raised in New York City, a child of the 19th 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 in terms of raising their children. They indulged him There was sufficient money, they were fine. His father was Henry de Mille, an Episcopalian, I guess lay minister you could call him, and wrote plays in collaboration with David Belasco. There's no modern equivalent for David Belasco.
Belasco was a producer, a writer, and a wildly theatrical character who wore an ecclesiastical collar in spite of the fact that he was Jewish. And everybody pretended not to notice. DeMille'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 uh meningitis. One of those 19th 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 19th century, that was what happened. Henry DeMille died at the age of 40 of typhoid, another thing that really.
Rarely happens anymore, but in that era, it 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 a school for girls. And it was successful for a while. And then after a while, 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, you know, raise her boys and in time represented uh 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, 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 12.
He was already taking charge of his life and everybody else's around it. Surprisingly, his mother was also an alpha. But they got along. they didn't 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'd raised her. or sons. And how well she'd adjusted to the death of her daughter, which of course had to be devastating for a young mother in that era. But he also tended to stay clear of her because she was incredibly bossy. Around Cecil B.
DeMille, there was only going to be one boss, and that was Cecil B. DeMille. 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. DeMille. He was superb. I don't know how well he could do enacting Shakespeare and and Marlowe and other plays that he was doing.
But at at Cecilby de Mille he was a master. He tried writing plays. He wasn't terribly successful. Um. 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 and was stunned to discover that Belasco shafted him out of credit for what he believed was essentially his play. Pelasco 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. Yeah.
Uh And he went to the movies because uh there was the growing thing. We're talking now 1913. Cecil would have been thirty two years old. And the movies were beginning their rampant expansion out of the Nickelodeon era into what we think of as the feature motion picture era, which coincided with the founding of Hollywood, which was instigated essentially by Cecilby DeMille. He hooked up with a young man named Jesse Lasky.
The thing about Cecil and Jesse which made them so well matched 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 man who had some money to invest named Sam Goldwyn, who was Jesse Lasky's brother-in-law. This was the triumph that formed the Lasky 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 Squaw Man. It was a 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. This isn't so tough. They're not that good. I can do better than this.
And uh they handed him uh about $25,000 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'd never acted in Arizona. But it was a Western, therefore you're going to shoot it in Arizona or Montana. The train uh stopped in Arizona. He got off.
looked around, 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 20 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 he got off the train in Los Angeles and realized he had stumbled upon a wonderful location for shooting movies. And you're listening to Scott Iman tell the story of Cecil B.
DeMille. 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. Fuck him. That's possibly an interesting combination, interesting beginning.
When we return, more of the story of Cecily DeMille here. on our American story. Folks, if you love the great American stories we tell and love America like we do, We're asking you to become a part of the Our American Stories family. If you agree that America is a good and great country, please. Make a donation.
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Offers are subject to change and certain restrictions may apply. Good morning, welcome to Today. From back to school to tackling your to-do list, the Today Show is your best start to the day. It's a new season and every morning, we're here to help you take it all on. as the forecast calls for football all across the country.
Blockbuster stars, live concerts, and so much more. Wake up to where it's all happening. We're getting back to all of it, and the best way to start is together. Watch The Today Show, weekday mornings at 7 a.m. on NBC.
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customers through Payword Interactive Inc. terms and conditions apply. And we return to our American stories and the story of Cecil B. DeMille, 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. Movies had been shot in California before DeMille got there at the end of 1913, 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 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. It ain't going to happen. unless you're working indoors, and that's claustrophobic.
And the audience liked the camera to go outdoors, even then.
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 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 law enforcement of the patents company. That was also part of the reason to get out of New York because the Edison company was trying to enforce illegal patents. On the camera that Edison had owned, and they were exacting heavy, heavy tribute in 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 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 as a production center was scenery.
So. Cecil looked around and he was going, and he needed a place to make movies for the Lasky Company, and he found a rental studio. in a 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 clapboard sign, over over the building. And Cecil made the movie in about three weeks, four weeks. Shot the movie.
And then they sat down and uh waited For the money to come back in, and by God, the money came back in. The movie made about ten times what it cost. And Cecil was named. the director general of the Lasky 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 of his pictures, but he set the matrix for what would become the Hollywood studio system. In other words, mass production. For 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 it damn near killed him.
But he realized he had found his Maitier he had found what he had been put on earth to do. And that belief. in his own gift never failed him. never failed him. His early films are extraordinary.
Cecil B. DeMille 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 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 I. 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 20th century version of an amusement park, beauty and lavishness that the people that paid 20 cents or 50 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 his movies began to get longer. 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. what was a parlor amusement a novelty item. into an art form. He and Lasky were always bound at the hip.
They were very close, all their lives. Never had a crossword between them. DeMille and Zucker were never close. Never close. Zucker was a bottom-line guy.
And the mill spent a lot of money. DeMille's budgets were extremely high, as high as a million dollars on the first version of the Ten Commandments. He just spent and spent and spent until he thought the picture was what it needed to be. And this drove Zucker baddie. although DeMille's pictures made money.
Zucker still resented the fact that DeMille didn't observe what Zucker 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 DeMille ever had. There was a meeting between Zucker and Lasky and DeMille. And Zucker said, Cecil, you're not.
You've never been one of us.
Now, DeMille took this to mean that he hadn't been a loyal partner in the company. What I think Zucker actually meant was that Demil was not Jewish. and that Zucker had a hard time trusting him because of that, because Zucker was Jewish and Lasky was Jewish. DeMille was an Episcopalian, a religious Episcopalian. In any case, it resulted in DeMille 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 1927 and 1928.
And the industry is convulsed. A lot of major silent filmmakers never get their uh 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 salaries were regarded as onerous. There was a culling, shall we say. The mill lands at MGM. the most successful Hollywood movie studio they've supplanted Paramount. MGM.
Is run in a completely different way than Pigamount had been run. The director is relatively unimportant. What is important is the star. MGM exists to cultivate and promote stars. At Paramount.
DeMille had been the star. If it said at Cecil B. DeMille production, the stars were, if not irrelevant, of secondary importance. At MGM, the star was of primary importance. The director was tertiary, if that.
Directors at NGM didn't have autonomy, and DeMille, always had autonomy. He made three pictures of MGM. and they cut them loose. And at that point, he's 50 years old. not a young man any more, and the industry is convulsing, and what is he to do?
Well, 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 Styland era. His top line is $650,000. And it's a lavish biblical picture.
And $650,000 in 1932 is not a lot of money to make a lavish biblical picture. but he pulls it off 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 1959.
So, not only was he the founder of the company, once he lands there again in 1932, he spends the next 27 years there. And if you put those two terms of service together, You're looking at you know 40 years with one movie studio. It's an unheard of record in Hollywood. Even in the era, It was an itinerant profession. Nobody stayed any place for 40 years.
It wasn't good sense. But When he landed there again in 1932, He became. A pillar. Of the studio, the pillar that he'd always wanted to be and that Zuker would not grant him. originally.
But as the 30s wore on, they made hit after hit after hit. Zucker had no choice but to basically acquiesce to DeMille's primacy in the creative firmament of Aramau. Tamil had his own building on the lot. And you've been listening to Scott Iman, author of Empire of Dreams: The Life of Cecil B. DeMille.
Pick it up at Amazon. or any of the usual suspects wherever you buy your books. When we come back, more of the life of Cecil B. DeMille. Here.
on Our American Stories. When you're a pro, you need a project partner who delivers results. Ferguson Home understands that selection and availability are critical to transforming visions into realities. That's why they offer the best selection of home improvement products, spanning the latest trends, traditional styles, unique finishes, and smart technologies. From coordinated job site delivery to online project management tools, they tailor their services to support your goals.
Their experienced associates know construction inside and out, helping you find exactly what you need to exceed your expectations. And I can tell you personally that my contractor used Ferguson Homes and exceeded our expectations and his. With more than 250 showrooms nationwide, Ferguson Home is your trusted partner from concept to completion. Whether you're managing large-scale projects or perfecting a single detail, they have the expertise and selection to help you succeed. Visit your local Ferguson Home showroom or go to FergusonHome.com to discover kitchen, bath, and lighting solutions that set your projects apart.
Ferguson Home, where it all comes together. Explore top brands like Kohler at FergusonHome.com or visit your local showroom. This Labor Day, say goodbye to spills, stains, and overpriced furniture with washablefas.com, featuring Anibay, the only machine washable sofa inside and out, where designer quality meets budget-friendly pricing.
Sofas start at just $6.99, making it the perfect time to upgrade your space. Anibay's pet-friendly, stain-resistant, and interchangeable slip covers are made with high-performance fabric built for real life. You'll love the cloud-like comfort of hypoallergenic, high-resilience foam that never needs fluffing and a durable steel frame that stands the test of time. With modular pieces, you can rearrange anytime. It's a sofa that adapts to your life.
Now through Labor Day, get up to 60% off-site-wide at washablesofas.com. Every order comes with a 30-day satisfaction guarantee. If you're not in love, send it back for a full refund. No return shipping, no restocking fees, every penny back. Shop now at washablesofas.com.
Offers are subject to change and certain restrictions may apply. Good morning, welcome to Today. From back to school to tackling your to-do list, the Today Show is your best start to the day. It's a new season and every morning, we're here to help you take it all off. as the forecast calls for football all across the country.
Blockbuster stars, live concerts, and so much more. Wake up to where it's all happening. We're getting back to all of it, and the best way to start is together. Watch The Today Show, weekday mornings at 7 a.m. on NBC.
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of Cecile B. DeMille. When we last left off, Cecil created the Hollywood Studio system.
Something which lasts to this day. Let's return to the story here again. is Scott Iman. By the mid-30s, he's settling into a rhythm of Big epic stories of alpha males. the acting DeMille wanted in his films never shifted, really.
It's what I call stand-and-deliver acting. You're not asking for psychological depth or behavioral reality. You're asking for actors to give 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 19th century of New York theater. That was the standard of acting.
I think the corollary to the mill is James Cameron. I mean, the problem with DeMille is he's often judged by his dialogue and by the style of acting, which is exactly what he wanted. But people judge 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. If there's a modern equivalent to DeMille, it's Cameron, because there's a certain panache. 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, okay? But he got millions and millions, tens of millions of people to come see the Titanic over and over again, even though they knew the ending. That's an achievement. It really is.
It really is an achievement. Because it's the film making 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 Titanic. To be able to counter all those obstacles and send people out thinking this is the greatest thing I've ever seen in my life, that's an accomplishment. And that's the same kind of skill that the mill had.
By the war, he was grooved. He was grooved. He didn't really deviate from what he knew he could do well. In the modern era, you know, directors will make a left turn to do something that appeals to them, unlike something they've already done, you know. But DeMille.
DeMille 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 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. This is 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 he got into the movies. When sound came in, he had that rough three or four year patch. And it wasn't pleasant for him. He did not have a burning urge to seduce the New York critics. Not his business.
His business was being Cecil B. DeMille. 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 out-moded philosophy. But building the railroad, bringing civilization to the West, that kind of thing.
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. He did the same thing with The Greatest Show on Earth, the movie that changed Steven Spielberg's life. The greatest show on earth with the copyrighted slogan of Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey Circus. Paramount paid Ringling Brothers, I believe it was $250,000 for the use of their winter facilities. and the use of the slogan, the greatest show on earth.
And John Ringling 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 cost Paramount $250,000. But 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 DeMille, 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 his visual sense of his spectacles derives from the Bible that his father had illustrated by Gustave Doré. Beautifully so, beautifully so. He made the Ten Commandments in 1923, except it was two stories. The first.
45 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 Zucker hated it because it cost so much.
So, 30 years go by. He's coming off the greatest show on earth, which is the biggest hit of his 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. Location. The board of directors is just panicky. They have no idea how much this is going to cost.
This is off-the-charts money. The budget comes in at $12 million. I think it was the largest budget in Hollywood history up to that time. I mean, the go-out the wind only cost four.
Well this is A recipe for sudden death, insanity, what have you. But They couldn't say no. He was Cecil B. DeMille. What are you going to do?
You're going to gulp and you're going to write the check.
So they wrote the check. Pre-production began. They built those huge gates of Ramesses over in Egypt. Of course, the money sequence, aside from the parting of the Red Sea, which was done back in Hollywood, was the Exodus. the giant Exodus scene, which had 8,000 extras, 10,000 extras, just massive amount of extras.
And DeMille is running up and down a ladder, a 70-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 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 a Cecil B. DeMille movie except Cecil B. DeMille. So What happened was he directed about another week's worth of locations.
They went back to Hollywood.
So there was a four or six, 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 could do. There was no stents. There was nothing a a bad heart was a bad heart. You know, good luck. Change your diet and and don't get stressed out.
That was about 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, and it 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 about Lord Baden-Powell, the founder of the Boy Scouts. And he produced a remake of The Buccaneer, a film he made in 1938, that he had Anthony Quinn direct because he couldn't direct it. Anthony Quinn was his son-in-law.
At that point, Anthony Quinn had married his daughter. And he liked Quinn because Quinn was kind of assertive and masculine and aggressive in the same way that DeMille 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 billed as a Cecil B. DeMille production.
And he died a few months after it was released. But I'm sure in his mind If he'd known that in advance. he would have made the picture anyway. 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 inimitable. And a terrific job on the production and editing by our own Monty Montgomery. And a special thanks to Scott Iman, author of Empire of Dreams, The Life of Cecil B. DeMille. Again, go to Amazon with the usual suspects.
and pick up a copy of his book. And what a story There were no imitators Theseleby de Mill was a one of a kind. And it turns out he just loved being. Thessal B. DeMille.
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Water is life. But do you know that almost half of the homes on the Navajo Reservation do not have clean running water? With your support, St. Bonaventure Indian Mission and School is ready to give water to Navajo families.
So we invite you to help provide this precious gift of life to those in need. Contrary to many average Americans, Navajo families survive on just 10 gallons of water per day. You can help support St. Bonaventure's water delivery program by going to stbonaventuremission.org. This is an iHeart Podcast.
