YES, MR.DEMILLE (1959)

234 Jes> Mr. DeMitte This morbid dread of "talk/' pictures was at the core of his turbulent relationships with writers. He kept an eye peeled for any spoken word that might slow down the forward march of his plots; if it did, out it went. Experience of others had made him sensitive to pictures with too much dialogue—"artistic pic- tures that please the critics and writers and lose money at the box office." This attitude sharply reversed itself when it came to his press agents. They spared no metaphor. Their nouns rarely escaped the typewriter unescorted by a conceited adjec- tive. Their phrases rode atop ideas like a peacock plume on a tarn, hopeful that the ornament would obscure the vacuity of the idea. They were talking about DeMille pictures, and that was a different matter. He brought in name authors as well as the industry's ace scriveners, and paid them big salaries—not to write what they wanted but what he wanted. This tendency to exercise their craft independently of him has caused DeMille some of the most agonizing moments of his life. "God protect me from the writer who wants to write." He compared this type to a builder "who spends all his time on pretty shutters and scalloped flower boxes before he has put in the foundation and plumbing." He once hurled a scathing dictum at a writer who had spent several hours searching for the right adjective: "Your problem can be summed up quite easily. You've impaled yourself on a toothpick. Instead of stepping over it you're screaming with terror." In one episode for The Greatest Show on Earth Frank Cavett, one of the colony's most talented script writers, had a character saying, "Oooh! What I said!" It was the sort of thing that brought the producer out of his office on the run. "What does it mean?" said DeMille, too busy to keep up with conversational fads. Cavett told him it was mock surprise, a sort of "throw-away" piece of dialogue. "Throw away!" repeated the astonished DeMille. "We throw