The Man Who Built Hollywood: The Story of Cecil B. DeMille

On this episode of Our American Stories, when you think of the parting of the Red Sea, you probably think of movie director Cecil B. DeMille, who turned Bible stories he turned into epic films like "The Ten Commandments," starring Yul Brenner and Charlton Heston. But there is much more to the story of this man who helped turn Los Angeles into the film capital of the world.

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Episode Transcript

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. DeMille.
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. There
was sufficient money. They were fine. His father was Henry
de Mill, 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. Blasco was a producer,
a writer, a wildly theatrical character who wore an ecclesiastical collar,

(01:19):
in 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

(01:40):
three of meningitis, one 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,

(02:01):
another thing that rarely happens anymore, 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 a school for girls, and it was successful for

(02:23):
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 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. Loathed it.

(02:47):
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 butt heads too too much.

(03:09):
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 mother in that era. But

(03:30):
he also tended to stay clear of her because she
was incredibly bossy around Cecil. B to mill there was
only going to be one boss, and that was Cecil B.

Speaker 1 (03:39):
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 in 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,

(04:24):
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 it 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. De Mill. He

(05:08):
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 man

(05:32):
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. It was a Western Now,

(05:52):
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 could
do this. This isn't so tough. They're not that good.
I could do better than this. And they handed him

(06:15):
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 it in Arizona, Montana. The train
stopped in Arizona, he got off, looked around and decided
it wouldn't do at all because it was flat, the

(06:36):
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 said a wire to Jesse
back in New York about the change in plans. And
he got off the train in Los Angeles and realized

(06:58):
he had stumbled upon oh, 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. Interesting
beginning when we return more of the story of Cecil B.

(07:26):
De Mill here on our American Stories. Folks, if you
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(07:47):
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That's our American Stories dot Com. And we returned to

(08:10):
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 Demill 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 Edison
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 is a production center was scenery.
So Cecil looked around and he was going he needed
a place to make movies for the Lanski Company, and
he found a rental studio in a little town called Hollywood,

(10:41):
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 back in. And by god,

(11:03):
the money came back in. The movie made about ten
times went a 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

(11:23):
not merely the making 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

(11:43):
put on earth to do, and that belief in his
own gift never failed, never failed him. 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

(12:06):
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 One,
there's a transition taking place in terms of exhibition as
well as production towards the huge downtown movie palaces, the

(12:29):
equivalent of an amusement park, the early twentieth century version
of an amusement park, beauty and 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

(12:50):
movies to reflect the environment in which they would be shown,
so he began 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, turning what was a parlor amusement
a novelty item into an art form. He and Lasky

(13:13):
were always bound at the hip. They were very close
all their lives. Never had a crossword between them. Demill
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 Ten Commandments. He

(13:34):
just spent and spent and spent until he thought the
picture was what it needed to be, and this drove
Zuker battie. Although Demill's pictures made money, Zuker still resented
the fact that Demill 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

(13:57):
the most bitter experience I think Demill ever had. There
was a meeting between Zucker and Alaski and Demil, and
Zucker said, Cecil, you've never been one of us.

Speaker 1 (14:08):
Now.

Speaker 2 (14:09):
Demil took this to mean that he hadn't been a
loyal partner in the company. What I think Zucker 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 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's said as cecile by de
Mill production, the stars were, if not irrelevant, of secondary importance.
At MGM, the star was of primary importance. The director

(15:38):
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. 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 nineteen fifty nine.

(16:41):
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 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 that era. Was
itinerant profession. Nobody stayed any place for forty years. It

(17:04):
wasn't good sense. But when he landed there again in
nineteen thirty two, 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 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 firmament of Bearmount. Demil had his

(17:27):
own building on the lot.

Speaker 1 (17:29):
And you've been listening to Scott Iiman, author of Empire
of James, 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 Eiman by the.

Speaker 2 (18:25):
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 deliver acting.
You're not asking for psychological depth or behavioral reality. You're
asking for actors to give a kind of stentorian, very

(18:47):
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 miss is James Cameron. I mean
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, but people judge him by his dialogue,

(19:12):
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

(19:32):
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. Okay,
But he got millions and millions, tens of millions of

(19:54):
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
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 Dannic to be able

(20:17):
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 Demil had. By the war. He was grooveed. He
was grooved. 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

(20:37):
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 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

(21:00):
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 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.

(21:23):
His business was being Cecil B. De Mill and he
stuck to it all his life. So he liked to
latch onto stories about manifest destiny, what we would now
call manifest destiny, which is more or less an outmoded philosophy.
But building the railroad, bringing civilization to the West, that
kind of thing. So he would latch on to, for instance,

(21:45):
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.

Speaker 1 (21:54):
You know.

Speaker 2 (21:55):
He did the same thing with The Greatest Show on Earth,
the movie that changed Steven Spielberg's life. Greatest Show on
Earth with the copyrighted slogan of Ringling Brothers, Barnum and
Bailey Circus 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

(22:16):
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 cost Paramoun two hundred fifty thousand dollars,
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 Demil, and
it set him up to make the last picture of

(22:38):
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 derived from the Bible that his father
had illustrated by Gustave Durey beautifully, so beautifully. So he

(22:59):
made The Ten Commandments in nineteen twenty three, except it
was two stories. 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

(23:21):
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 yarns, and he wants to make it
in Egypt on location. The board of directors is just panicky.

(23:44):
They have no 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 so death, insanity, what have you.
But they couldn't say no. He was cecil b to

(24:05):
mill what are you gonna do? 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 parting 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, just massive amount

(24:28):
of extras, and de 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 down the ladder,

(24:48):
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 bet mill 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 a four

(25:10):
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.

(25:31):
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
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 was just

(25:53):
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'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 Quinn had
married his daughter, and he liked Quinn because Quinn was

(26:16):
kind of assertive and masculine and aggressive in the same
way that The 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 a 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 in advance.
He would have made the picture anyone and the heart

(26:37):
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 and a.

Speaker 1 (26:47):
Terrific job on the production and editing by our own
Monty Montgomery and his special thanks to Scott Aiman, author
of Empire of Dreams, The Life of Cecil B. De
Mill Again go to Amazon with the usual suspects and
pick up a copy of his book, And what a story.
There were no imitators. Cessil B. DeMille was a one
of a kind, and it turns out he just loved

(27:09):
being Cescil B. DeMille. An American dream story if ever
there was here on our American stories.