Cecil B. DeMille

Cecil B. DeMille: The Man Who Invented Hollywood

In November 1954, on location in Egypt, a 73-year-old man climbed a 107-foot ladder to check a camera angle on the set of a Moses picture and suffered a serious heart attack at the top. He kept directing, working from behind the camera with his daughter Cecilia assisting. The film was *The Ten Commandments*; it would become the longest and most expensive production in Paramount's history and gross more than $80 million. That was the working method of the man whose name is still attached to a lifetime achievement award: total control, epic scale, and an absolute refusal to be smaller than the subject.

An Actor's Son in a Playwright's House

Born on August 12, 1881, in Ashfield, Massachusetts, DeMille was the son of Henry Churchill de Mille, a dramatist who died in 1893, and Matilda Beatrice DeMille. Theatre was the family trade rather than a family aspiration; his older brother William C. DeMille also became a playwright and director. Cecil attended Pennsylvania Military College — now Widener University — before entering the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, from which he graduated tuition-free in 1900. That same year he began working as a stage actor with Charles Frohman's theatrical company, then moved into writing and directing plays. He married Constance Adams on August 16, 1902. They had one biological daughter, Cecilia, born in 1908, and adopted three more children, among them Katherine and Richard.

The Squaw Man and the Birth of an Industry

In 1913 DeMille co-founded the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company with Jesse Lasky and Samuel Goldwyn. The following year he directed *The Squaw Man*, the first feature-length film made in Hollywood and, by release date, the first American feature. The significance is geographic as much as artistic: an industry that had no fixed address acquired one. In 1916 the Lasky company merged with Adolph Zukor's Famous Players Film Company to become Famous Players–Lasky, the corporate ancestor of Paramount. Between 1914 and 1958, DeMille made seventy features. He is acknowledged as a founding father of American cinema, and the acknowledgment is literal rather than honorific.

Spectacle as a Business Model

DeMille's signature was scale, and he treated scale as a commercial instrument. The 1923 silent *The Ten Commandments* cost $600,000, making it Paramount's most expensive production to that point; it became the studio's highest-grossing film and held its revenue record for twenty-five years. *The King of Kings* (1927), his life of Jesus, was by DeMille's own calculation viewed more than 800 million times worldwide. *The Sign of the Cross* (1932), made after his return to Paramount, has been described as the first sound film to integrate all aspects of cinematic technique. *Union Pacific* (1939) succeeded partly through a collaboration with the railroad itself. *Samson and Delilah* (1949) became Paramount's highest-grossing film up to that time.

His pictures had recurring furniture that audiences learned to expect: bathtubs, lion attacks, Roman orgies, and elaborate special effects. Martin Scorsese located the underlying craft elsewhere — in DeMille's command of enormous frames, crediting him with "the skill to maintain control not only of the lead actors in a frame but also of the many extras."

The Radio Emperor

From 1936 to 1945 DeMille hosted and directed *Lux Radio Theatre* on CBS, drawing forty million weekly listeners for an annual salary of $100,000. It made him one of the most recognizable voices in America and gave the director an unusual public identity: most filmgoers of the era knew what Cecil B. DeMille sounded like. His departure from that platform was not a career decision but an ideological one.

Politics, Unions, and the Dollar That Cost Him Radio

A Republican activist who grew steadily more conservative, DeMille was widely regarded as anti-union, though he claimed union membership himself and framed his objections as being to particular leaders — he compared Walter Reuther and Harry Bridges to dictators. In 1945 the American Federation of Radio Artists levied a mandatory $1 assessment on members. DeMille refused to pay it on principle and resigned from *Lux Radio Theatre*. He sued for reinstatement and lost at trial and again before the California Supreme Court; when AFRA expanded into television, the effect was a lifetime ban on his broadcast appearances, though he was still permitted to promote his films.

He founded the DeMille Foundation for Political Freedom to campaign for right-to-work principles and successfully lobbied for the Taft–Hartley Act, which prohibited denying employment for refusal to pay political assessments — but which did not apply retroactively to his own case. His anti-communism shaped his slate: in 1940 he abandoned a planned adaptation of Hemingway's *For Whom the Bell Tolls* over its communist themes, having already paid $100,000 for the rights. He had given his largest campaign donation to Herbert Hoover in 1928 and backed Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932, then never voted Democratic in a presidential election again.

Honors and the Award That Bears His Name

*The Greatest Show on Earth* (1952) won the Academy Award for Best Picture, with DeMille as producer, and the Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture – Drama; it also brought him his first directorial nomination. He received an Academy Honorary Award, the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award, and the Directors Guild of America Lifetime Achievement Award, and *Union Pacific* took the Palme d'Or posthumously. He was the first recipient of the Golden Globe award that now carries his name.

Why Cecil Is Called a Genius

DeMille's genius was organizational and commercial rather than lyrical, and the honest case for it should say so. He was not a stylist whose shot-making changed the grammar of film; he was the man who worked out, before anyone else had the evidence, that the feature-length narrative could be an industry, and then built the machinery to prove it. That is a rarer talent than it sounds. It required simultaneously solving a creative problem (how do you hold an audience for two hours and more), a logistical one (how do you direct crowds of extras without the frame dissolving into noise), and a financial one (how do you spend $600,000 and get it back). Scorsese's praise is precisely about that middle skill — control of the whole frame, not just the star in it.

The counter-case is substantial and was made in his lifetime. Charlton Heston, who owed him a career, conceded that DeMille was "terribly unfashionable," adding only that he was "much more than that." Critics found the films moralistic on the surface and lurid underneath, the biblical framing an alibi for the orgy scene. DeMille's own life supplied ammunition: an Episcopalian outspoken about integrity whose private conduct included adultery and mistresses, and who described his marriage as "sexually incompatible," believing his wife too "pure" to feel the passions he did. Calling him a genius of showmanship is defensible; calling him a genius of art requires an argument he rarely made himself.

Legacy

He died in Los Angeles on January 21, 1959, and was buried at Hollywood Forever Cemetery. Obituaries called him a "pioneer of movies," "the greatest creator and showman of our industry," and "the founder of Hollywood." Adolph Zukor, arguing for the 1956 remake, had put the debt more bluntly: "We have a man who made a film praising the Jewish people...We should get down on our knees to Cecil and say 'Thank you!'" His reputation went through a renaissance in the 2010s, and the annual Golden Globes ceremony still stops to hand out a trophy with his name on it — a founder's memorial disguised as a lifetime achievement award.