YES, MR.DEMILLE (1959)

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82 Yes, Mr. DeMille of pure sense-satisfying pleasure, dancing girls, satyrs springing from the walls to join in the revel, and a rider upon a black charger who was dressed in skin and followed by a swarm of hideous barbarians more like animals than men." The rider was Thomas Meighan on his way with a battery of vandals to per- form the historic sacking of Rome. In this early period DeMille began to entertain a notion that the studio was rejecting manuscripts that would have made excellent pictures, largely because story readers were young or untrained and lacked story sense, He had had a few quarrels with the front office over this general problem. One day, to test his theory, he asked a secretary to write out in longhand a lengthy synopsis of one of Jeanie's scenarios, Male and Female, which he was filming at the time on a nearby sound stage. The synopsis was turned over to a relative, who in turn mailed it to the studio, stating in her letter that she hoped the story was good enough for the studio to purchase. The manuscript was returned to the sender marked, NOT SUITABLE AS MOTION PICTUBE MATERIAL. "Can you believe it?" DeMille chortled. "And we were mak- ing Male and Female not fifty yards away from the very office that turned it down/' With high satisfaction he harangued the studio for months, pointing to the incident as an example of the sort of thing a director has to put up with from studio executives. Though the record is considerably to the contrary, DeMille would admit publicly that he had only one disaster in choosing his stories. This was an item called Four Frightened People, filmed in Hawaii back in 1933 with Claudette Colbert and Herbert Marshall. The picture cost $500,000 and had to gross one million dollars in order to break even. A studio executive wired DeMille after seeing an opening showing: JUST SAW FOUR FRIGHTENED PEOPLE. SUGGEST WE CALL IT FIVE FRIGHTENED PEOPLE. Loss on the picture was around $750,000. Reviewing her lengthy association with DeMille, having