We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
THE SIGN OF THE BOSS 165 Implacably, DeMille weighed the dangers. He made a point always of holding one solid trump in reserve. Should an actor show the least inclination to back away from a dangerous as- signment, DeMille would stoutly come forward, with studied gravity to alert the company to the imminence of a tour de force, then perform the feat himself in the grand manner of a Shakespearean tragedian. For the Samson picture he had engaged a 6-f oot-5,260-pound wrestler named 'Wee Willie" Davis to play a character called the King's Wrestler. In his big scene, Wee Willie was to snare Victor (Samson) Mature with a bullwhip thirty feet long, the end of the whip to wind sharply around Matured waist. The actor was questioning DeMille closely on the possible effects of this maneuver, it being evident that Matured confidence in Wee Willie as a handler of the bullwhip was not overwhelming. In reply, DeMille strode out onto the set, and struck a muscular pose twenty feet from the bearded giant. "Okay, Willie, let me have it" Willie brought the whip forward from a long back- hand swing, snapping it sharply around DeMille's chest, which was protected only by his shirt. It left a welt as thick as a pencil, but no one that day knew of the injury. DeMille walked loftily back to his high chair. He said it was as simple as that, and suggested they get on with the picture. Later, in the wedding-brawl scene, DeMille stepped into the breach for Bill Farnum, brother of Dustin. Bill faced the task of being struck by a plaster block hurled from a balustrade by Mature in the midst of the free-for-all, which, as the Bible intimates, reached quite a nasty stage. DeMille went through the movements necessary, he said, to avoid injury when being hit on the chest by seventy pounds of plaster. "One has to roll with it," he said. He waved to Mature to hurl the object. Mature, eyes gleam- ing, raised the chunk over his head and let go with more elan than the occasion seemed to warrant. The full force of the blow sent the sixty-eight-year-old producer to the floor with an alarm-