YES, MR.DEMILLE (1959)

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26 Yes, Mr.,.DeMille ments and if I tell them I want a red barn they'll come up with sixty-four different red barns." To banish the problem, he took to hiring an artist or two at the start of each picture. They produced numberless sketches. Like the writers, the artists suffered through one rejected sketch after another, and only those with Mr. DeMille's initials in a corner were official. These were handed to department heads, and woe to him who de- parted in the smallest detail from the approved sketch! Few were held in greater esteem by the bungalow than the late Gordon Jennings, special effects expert. Jennings, an en- gineer, was the wizard behind many an awesome DeMille episode—the train wreck in the circus picture, siege of Fort Pitt in Unconquered, and his most monumental, the crash of the 17-ton Minoan god, Dagon, in the collapsing-temple scene in the Samson story. A part of a temple was built in full scale on a back lot at Paramount, with electrical push-button controls that enabled Jennings to set off small charges of dynamite hidden in the structure. The huge plaster idol had to fall in a certain way, in order to bring down first the right wall of the temple, then the left, DeMille instructed Jennings at great length on the demands of the script. It was not DeMille's habit to remain away from a scene of this magnitude, but on this occasion he told Jennings to go ahead alone. The engineering and construction had taken almost a year, costing $100,000. Four or five cameras were stationed on the temple set when Jennings pressed an electrical button. Muffled powder blasts sent the idol forward with a groan, its right shoulder coming to rest on a temple column, and there it stopped. Nothing else happened. Two cameras had obtained a small amount of usable footage of the movement of the 40-foot-high idol, but little else.