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238 Yes, Mr. DeMitte Frank, a former New York advertising account executive, remembered his first story conference with DeMille. He says he had to struggle to keep a straight face when DeMille issued these instructions: 'Write it the way I lay it out and when you have finished, bring it back to me and 111 tell you why youVe done it all wrong." On one memorable occasion a topflight writer, in the midst of agonized efforts to evolve something pleasing to DeMille, felt pretty good about one of DeMille's penciled criticisms- What I've crossed out I dont like. What I haven t crossed out I am dissatisfied with. Usually, the writer said, his material bore such cryptic denunciations as: This is baloney; This isnt the way we talked about it; My God! or simply a huge NO. DeMille once tipped off a couple of newly hired hands on how to get along with him; he asked them to look up the 45th Psalm. They did. It read: My tongue is the pen of the ready writer. From this hint they soon developed the knack of listen- ing carefully during story conferences to DeMille's plot sugges- tions and bits of dialogue and later weaving them into a script. He told two other such laborers, "Your job is to please me. Nothing else on earth matters." DeMille took great pride in lines of dialogue which he thought up himself, though there is considerable evidence of struggles with writers intent on changing them. Some even tried to discard them. For a scene in Unconquered, DeMille suggested a line for the heroine—"Nothing for nothing is given here/' It puzzled the writers, so they left it out of their draft of the scene. DeMille put it back in, and when the writers rewrote the scene, the line was again omitted. Once more DeMille penciled it back in, then took the draft down to them personally and demanded that they explain why they were taking it out. They said they didn't understand it.