Burbank played a role in director Cecil B. DeMille’s legacy
A century ago, a young man named Cecil B. DeMille traveled West to launch a career in the still new art and business of moviemaking. He had a script called “The Squaw Man,” a partner in the Lasky Feature Play Co, and a train ticket. His destination was... Arizona?
DeMille and his wife pawned their silver to fund the trip, but when he got off the train in Flagstaff, he realized this wasn’t where he needed to be. He kept moving and ended up in Los Angeles, where he got to work making the town’s very first feature-length film, and shot key scenes at Oak Crest Ranch in Burbank, now the site of Forest Lawn Cemetery.
It marked a major step in establishing Hollywood as the center of the moviemaking world, and was the beginning of DeMille’s hugely successful career as a producer-director, stretching to his final film, 1956’s “The Ten Commandments.”
His history is the story of the sweeping Hollywood spectacle, which is documented in a lavish new book, “Cecil B. DeMille: The Art of the Hollywood Epic” (Running Press), co-written by his granddaughter, Cecilia DeMille Presley, and film historian Mark A. Vieira.
“He didn’t want to bore an audience. He told stories. But they always had to be stories that helped the world,” says Presley, who is vice chair of the National Film Preservation Foundation. “His father was a lay minister in the Episcopal Church, and everybody helped everybody else, so that’s what he wanted to do.”
The book, released in December and already in its second printing, gathers previously unpublished artwork and photographs of artifacts from across DeMille’s four decades as a filmmaker. It’s same artwork that Presley grew up with.
She says now that she understood who her grandfather was “when I was born. It came with the territory.”
Presley moved in with her grandparents when she was 8. Her childhood was spent as a “lot brat,” growing up amid the soundstages of Paramount, while her grandfather led the production of various epic films in the manner of a military campaign.
On one of the book’s first pages is a photograph of DeMille directing a scene from 1949’s “Samson and Delilah,” as his granddaughter watches. She accompanied him to the 1953 Academy Awards, where DeMille was handed both the Irving Thalberg Award for contributions to filmmaking and also the Best Picture Oscar for “The Greatest Show on Earth.”
“When you make big pictures — really, any pictures — it’s so intense and collaborative and you all have to be on the same page,” Presley says. “You all have work to do and the director oversees it and has his own vision. It’s a big deal, especially for DeMille, who directed thousands of people.”
At home in the hills of Los Feliz, the director surrounded himself with props, paintings and other artifacts from his decades in Hollywood. The same was true at his massive Paradise Ranch, in the wilderness now known as Lake View Terrace, where he kept horses and got his exercise by pruning trees.
“Grandfather had a lot of things. He saved everything,” Presley recalls. “He thought of motion pictures as a history, and people didn’t when they were first starting.”
After DeMille’s death, his family donated a large number of papers and artworks to various institutions: 100,000 pieces of literature to Brigham Young University, a collection of original scripts to USC, rare photographs to the Motion Picture Academy. His granddaughter kept about 1,000 pieces that she especially liked.
Presley also sought to preserve not only the films of her grandfather, but the important works of an entire industry she grew up in. “In the late ‘50s, they had no ideas about saving films. They were throwing them away,” she says, noting that “Gone with the Wind” art was whitewashed so the board could be reused.
It was a common attitude then. Movies were still a young industry, and preserving its history seemed to many in the executive suite a distraction from the bottom line. Some of that early Hollywood history was discarded or neglected and was lost forever.
When Vieira was collecting material for his 2009 book on producer Irving Thalberg, he found no surviving personal artifacts “but a couple of cuff links.” Other legacies were carefully preserved, which he knew was true for DeMille. He approached Presley with the book idea repeatedly over the years, and when she agreed, it allowed Vieira to explore the DeMille oeuvre in unprecedented depth.
Vieira says the book’s chapter on “The Squaw Man” is the most accurate account of the production, correcting errors in the past that have become conventional wisdom. The film was shot in various locations in Burbank, Chatsworth, Hemet and Mt. Palomar.
“I got to hold the original script, see the addresses of people who were in the film,” says Vieira, the author of several books on Hollywood history, including “George Hurrell’s Hollywood” two years ago. “I did rewrite that story fairly extensively.”
He also got to photograph many props and costumes, including Charlton Heston’s Moses robes from “The Ten Commandments.” Seeing that piece of history up close was a startling privilege, he says. “This was in a category of its own.”