Cecil B Demille Quotes

Creativity is a drug I cannot live without.

Now, public libraries are most admirable institutions, but they have one irritating custom. They want their books back.

It is impossible for us to break the law. We can only break ourselves against the law.

The person who makes a success of living is the one who sees his goal steadily and aims for it unswervingly. That is dedication.

I might have remembered what my father once wrote to Henry George, "I never do anything by halves, and am half hearted in no cause that I embrace.

How many more are there like you? (Maggie) Enough to make the cast of a Cecil B. DeMille film look like a two-man opera. (Wren)

God gave us free agency, and then gave us the commandments to keep us free.

We cannot break the Ten Commandments. We can only break ourselves against them—or else, by keeping them, rise through them to the fulness of freedom under God. God means us to be free. With divine daring, he gave us the power of choice.

Principles are like lighthouses. They are natural laws that cannot be broken. As Cecil B. DeMille observed of the principles contained in his monumental movie, The Ten Commandments, “It is impossible for us to break the law. We can only break ourselves against the law.” While

Our modern world defined God as a ‘religious complex’ and laughed at the Ten Commandments as OLD FASHIONED. Then, through the laughter came the shattering thunder of the World War. And now a blood-drenched, bitter world — no longer laughing — cries for a way out. There is but one way out. It existed before it was engraven upon Tablets of Stone. It will exist when stone has crumbled. The Ten Commandments are not rules to obey as a personal favor to God. They are the fundamental principles without which mankind cannot live together. They are not laws — they are The Law.

Hollywood got into the act, with director Cecil B. DeMille helping erect literally thousands of granite monuments to the Ten Commandments across the nation as part of a promotional campaign for his blockbuster film of the same name.

We cannot break the Ten Commandments. We can only break ourselves against them.

In Cecil B. DeMille’s 1920 film Why Change Your Wife?, the usually glamorous Gloria Swanson played a wife who wore glasses, listened to classical music, and read such books as How to Improve Your Mind. It was obvious to the audience why her husband left her for a perfumed, short-skirted man chaser. But a happy ending was achieved when Swanson’s character ordered some sleeveless, backless dresses and devoted herself to improving her dance steps instead of her mind.

Even Hollywood got into the act, with director Cecil B. DeMille helping erect literally thousands of granite monuments to the Ten Commandments across the nation as part of a promotional campaign for his blockbuster film of the same name.

We tend to write Moses’ true personality out of the Exodus story. (Cecil B. DeMille’s classic, The Ten Commandments, portrays him as a swashbuckling figure who does all the talking, with no help from Aaron.) We don’t ask why God chose as his prophet a stutterer with a public speaking phobia. But we should. The book of Exodus is short on explication, but its stories suggest that introversion plays yin to the yang of extroversion; that the medium is not always the message; and that people followed Moses because his words were thoughtful, not because he spoke them well.

Only twice in my nearly fifty years of friendship with David Belasco did he ever disappoint me; and I am glad that experience came early. When I was perhaps seven or eight years old, he promised me, many months before my birthday, that he would give me a pony. What boy would nurse that promise to his bosom for any number of months? When the 12th of August dawned, I was downstairs early, I think before anyone else was up. I looked out at the barnyard. No pony. I waited all day. No pony. I said nothing. No pony. There were other presents, of course, and all the other excitement of a small boy’s birthday: but underneath it I was having my very first experience of a forgotten promise.

Moses, for example, was not, according to some interpretations of his story, the brash, talkative type who would organize road trips and hold forth in a classroom at Harvard Business School. On the contrary, by today’s standards he was dreadfully timid. He spoke with a stutter and considered himself inarticulate. The book of Numbers describes him as “very meek, above all the men which were upon the face of the earth.” When God first appeared to him in the form of a burning bush, Moses was employed as a shepherd by his father-in-law; he wasn’t even ambitious enough to own his own sheep. And when God revealed to Moses his role as liberator of the Jews, did Moses leap at the opportunity? Send someone else to do it, he said. “Who am I, that I should go to Pharaoh?” he pleaded. “I have never been eloquent. I am slow of speech and tongue.” It was only when God paired him up with his extroverted brother Aaron that Moses agreed to take on the assignment. Moses would be the speechwriter, the behind-the-scenes guy, the Cyrano de Bergerac; Aaron would be the public face of the operation. “It will be as if he were your mouth,” said God, “and as if you were God to him.” Complemented by Aaron, Moses led the Jews from Egypt, provided for them in the desert for the next forty years, and brought the Ten Commandments down from Mount Sinai. And he did all this using strengths that are classically associated with introversion: climbing a mountain in search of wisdom and writing down carefully, on two stone tablets, everything he learned there. We tend to write Moses’ true personality out of the Exodus story. (Cecil B. DeMille’s classic, The Ten Commandments, portrays him as a swashbuckling figure who does all the talking, with no help from Aaron.) We don’t ask why God chose as his prophet a stutterer with a public speaking phobia. But we should. The book of Exodus is short on explication, but its stories suggest that introversion plays yin to the yang of extroversion; that the medium is not always the message; and that people followed Moses because his words were thoughtful, not because he spoke them well.

Cassidy had been created by Clarence Mulford, writer of formula western novels and pulpy short stories. In the stories, Cassidy was a snorting, drinking, chewing relic of the Old West. Harry Sherman changed all that when he bought the character for the movies. Sherman hired Boyd, a veteran of the silent screen whose star had faded, to play a badman in the original film. But Boyd seemed more heroic, and Sherman switched the parts before the filming began. As Cassidy, Boyd became a knight of the range, a man of morals who helped ladies cross the street but never stooped to kiss the heroine. He was literally black and white, his silver hair a vivid contrast to his black getup. He did not smoke, believed absolutely in justice, honor, and fair play, and refused to touch liquor. Boyd’s personal life was not so noble. Born in Ohio in 1898, he had arrived in Hollywood for the first golden age, working with Cecil B. DeMille in a succession of early silents. By the mid-1920s he was a major star. Wine, women, and money were his: he drank and gambled, owned estates, married five times. But it all ended when another actor named William Boyd was arrested for possession of whiskey and gambling equipment.

I’m not just behaving like an idiot, I’m behaving like my mother – and rush around issuing desperate apologies to everyone concerned. Mum never snapped out of it, never seemed contrite, never appeared to think she was in the wrong or behaving badly. The best you could hope for was a terrible argument – in which, as ever, she had to have the last word – followed by an awkward smoothing over, a shaky truce that lasted until she went off again. As the years passed, she had elevated sulking to an epic, awesome level. She was the Cecil B. DeMille of bad moods, the Tolstoy of taking a huff. I’m exaggerating only slightly. We’re talking about a woman who didn’t speak to her own sister for ten years as a result of an argument over whether Auntie Win had put skimmed milk in her tea or not. A woman whose dedication to sulking was such that, at its height, it literally caused her to pack her entire life up and leave the country. It happened in the eighties; she fell out with me and one of Derf’s sons from his first marriage at the same time and, as a result, emigrated to Menorca. She would rather move to a foreign country than back down or apologize. There’s not an enormous amount of point in trying to reason with someone like that.

Dick Syracuse: I used to refer to us as the Cecil B. DeMille warriors.

Principles are like lighthouses. They are natural laws that cannot be broken. As Cecil B. DeMille observed of the principles contained in his monumental movie, The Ten Commandments, “It is impossible for us to break the law. We can only break ourselves against the law.

In the early seventies I starred in a full-length horror film called 'Killer Bees,' made specifically for television, and although I read the script with trepidation, I ended up thinking it was terrific and said yes. I played a German woman, the mother of Craig Stevens. We shot the film in Hollywood and on location in the beautiful Napa Valley above San Francisco. We saved the scenes with the bees for last, as Mr. DeMille had saved the lion for last in 'Male and Female.' The picture turned out to be a classic in the genre, I think, and it is rerun frequently in America and abroad. People always ask me, 'Weren't you terrified to do those scenes with the bees?' I always want to say, Not as terrified as I was to have a lion put his paw on my back in 1919, but instead I explain that I was really worried only about my ears, so I put cotton in them, and that anyway the bees were sluggish at the start, when they put them all over me, and only came alive as the lights warmed them up. Furthermore, we were told that they had all their stingers removed, but that is the kind of information it is always hard to believe.

puts the situation in a totally different light. We can see a reality that is superseded by his limited perception—a reality that is as critical for us to understand in our daily lives as it was for the captain in the fog. Principles are like lighthouses. They are natural laws that cannot be broken. As Cecil B. DeMille observed of the principles contained in his monumental movie, The Ten Commandments, “It is impossible

Much of Brennan’s early work was on the Universal Pictures lot, including Spangles (November 7, 1926), in which he plays a lunch counterman. More importantly, he was able to watch, for the first time, the great Cecil B. DeMille in action. A decade later the director would award Brennan one of his best roles in The Buccaneer. Although Universal made high quality films using important filmmakers like DeMille, it was better known as a producer of “programmers,” cheap action films with lots of thrills. Established in 1912, Universal was the oldest studio, and, as film historian Thomas Schatz puts it, “a world unto itself, a self-contained municipality devoted exclusively to making motion pictures. There were restaurants and shops and even a police force.” Universal had factory-size production facilities, including a shooting stage sixty-five feet by three hundred feet. There was no better place for Walter Brennan to get work and learn his trade in every kind of genre film.

It was of the two of us at United Artists, Mary and I, along with Cecil B. DeMille and Sam Goldwyn

Cecil B. DeMille observed of the principles contained in his monumental movie, The Ten Commandments, “It is impossible for us to break the law. We can only break ourselves against the law.

JOHN CROMWELL: The formation of the Directors Guild was not a simple matter. It brought out the deep-seated convictions of a few who felt that it was undignified. They felt that creative people like directors had no place in organizations for protection. Led by Cecil B. DeMille, the diehards tried in vain to stop the movement.