Cecil B DeMille is Hollywood's most enduring legend, remembered, and often reviled, for his grandiose Biblical sagas, such as "Samson and Delilah" and his 1956 version of "The Ten Commandments". This title offers a re-examination of Hollywood's most monumental founder.

Cecil B. DeMille and American Culture demonstrates that the director, best remembered for his overblown biblical epics, was one of the most remarkable film pioneers of the Progressive Era. In this innovative work, which integrates cultural history and cultural studies, Sumiko Higashi shows how DeMille artfully inserted cinema into genteel middle-class culture by replicating in his films such spectacles as elaborate parlor games, stage melodramas, department store displays, Orientalist world's fairs, and civic pageantry. The director not only established his signature as a film author by articulating middle-class ideology across class and ethnic lines, but by the 1920's had become a trendsetter, with set and costume designs that influenced the advertising industry to create a consumer culture based on female desire. Drawing on a wealth of previously untapped material from the DeMille Archives and other collections, Higashi provides imaginative readings of DeMille's early feature films, viewing them in relation to the dynamics of social change, and she documents the extent to which the emergence of popular culture was linked to the genteel tradition.

Colossal. Stupendous. Epic. These adjectives, used by movie companies to hawk their wares, became clichélong ago. When used to describe the films of one director, they are accurate. More than any filmmaker in the history of the medium, Cecil B. DeMille mastered the art of the spectacle. In the process, he became a filmland founder. One hundred years ago, he made the first feature film ever shot in Hollywood and went on to become the most commercially successful producer-director in history. DeMille told his cinematic tales with painterly, extravagant images. The parting of the Red Sea in The Ten Commandments was only one of these. There were train wrecks (The Greatest Show on Earth); orgies (Manslaughter); battles (The Buccaneer); Ancient Rome (The Sign of the Cross); Ancient Egypt (Cleopatra); and the Holy Land (The Crusades). The best of these images are showcased here, in Cecil B. DeMille: The Art of the Hollywood Epic. This lavish volume opens the King Tut's tomb of cinematic treasures that is the Cecil B. DeMille Archives, presenting storyboard art, concept paintings, and an array of photographic imagery. Historian Mark A. Vieira writes an illuminating text to accompany these scenes. Cecilia de Mille Presley relates her grandfather's thoughts on his various films, and recalls her visits to his sets, including the Egyptian expedition to film The Ten Commandments. Like the director's works, Cecil B. DeMille: The Art of the Hollywood Epic is a panorama of magnificence-celebrating a legendary filmmaker and the remarkable history of Hollywood.

Examines the life and work of the motion picture director best known for his biblical sagas, including "Samson and Delilah" and "The Ten Commandments," discussing his complex personal life and the paradoxes existing within his films.

Friendship and other intimate (but not always amicable) relationships have received some attention in the greater field of research on early Judaism and Christianity, though not as much as deserved. This volume celebrates and builds upon the life-long work of Adele Reinhartz, covering the various permutations of relationships that can be found in the Gospel of John, the wider corpus of early Jewish and Christian literature, and cinematic re-imaginings thereof. While the issue of whether one can 'befriend' the Fourth Gospel in light of the book's legacy of antisemitism is central to many of the essays in this volume, others address other more or less likely friendships: Pilate, Paul, Lazarus, Judas, or Mary Magdalene. Likewise, the bonds between ancient texts and contemporary retellings of their stories feature prominently, with contributors asking what kinds of relationships filmmakers encourage their audiences to have with their subjects. This volume explores some of the rich variety of relationships in the ancient world, and unpacks the intricate and dynamic processes and interactions by which human relationships and societies are generated, maintained, and dissolved.

The book is a collection of fifty short pieces, ranging widely over topics briefly related to church occasions and Christian faith including Easter, Christmas, Pentecost, weddings, funerals, parenthood, prayer, belief, and hope. Their style is anecdotal, humorous and allusive.

This book uses the long and profitable career of Cecil B. DeMille to track the evolution of Classical Hollywood and its influence on emerging mass commercial culture in the US. DeMille’s success rested on how well his films presumed a broad consensus in the American public—expressed through consumer hedonism, faith, and an “exceptional” national history—which merged seamlessly with the efficient production methods developed by the largest integrated studios. DeMille’s sudden mid-career shift away from spectator perversity to corporate propagandist permanently tarnished the director’s historical standing among scholars, yet should not overshadow the profound links between his success and the rise and fall of mid-century mass culture.

New media and its enormous diffusion in the last decades of the 20th century and up to the present has greatly increased and diversified the reception of Egyptian themes and motifs and Egyptian influence in various cultural spheres. This book seeks to provide new evidence of this interdisciplinarity between Egyptology and popular culture.

From concept stage through production in Egypt to release of the film: Katherine Orrison carefully recreates the behind-the-scenes story of Cecil B. DeMille's beloved epic.

“Brianton’s well-documented study of a Hollywood controversy delves into one example of the post-WWII Red Scare” (Publishers Weekly). On October 22, 1950, the Screen Directors Guild (SDG) gathered for a meeting at the opulent Beverly Hills Hotel. Among the group’s leaders were some of the most powerful men in Hollywood—John Ford, Cecil B. DeMille, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, John Huston, Frank Capra, William Wyler, and Rouben Mamoulian—and the issue on the table was nothing less than a vote to dismiss Mankiewicz as the guild’s president after he opposed an anticommunist loyalty oath that could have expanded the blacklist. The dramatic events of that evening have become mythic, and the legend has overshadowed the more complex realities of this crucial moment in Hollywood history. In Hollywood Divided, Kevin Brianton explores the myths associated with the famous meeting and the real events that they often obscure. He analyzes the lead-up to that fateful summit, examining the pressure exerted by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Brianton reveals the internal politics of the SDG, its initial hostile response to the HUAC investigations, the conservative reprisal, and the influence of the oath on the guild and the film industry as a whole. Hollywood Divided also assesses the impact of the historical coverage of the meeting on the reputation of the three key players in the drama. Brianton’s study is a provocative and revealing revisionist history of the SDG’s 1950 meeting and its lasting repercussions on the film industry as well as the careers of those who participated. Hollywood Divided illuminates how both the press's and the public's penchant for the “exciting story” have perpetuated fabrications and inaccurate representations of a turning point for the film industry. Huffington Post Best Film Books of 2016 Praise for Hollywood Divided “An authoritative reassessment of the meetings held by the Screen Directors Guild in 1950 to consider the adoption of a loyalty oath. Brianton traces the implications for the film industry and the reputations of key filmmakers, including Cecil DeMille and John Ford. He also offers sharp and illuminating reflections on the making of Hollywood history and myth.” —Brian Neve, author of The Many Lives of Cy Endfield: Film Noir, the Blacklist and Zulu “A breakthrough book on a topic that historians, for the most part, have considered settled. Brianton’s landmark study is fresh, thorough, and balanced, a model of Hollywood historiography. In clear prose, he takes the reader through the detailed twists and turns that created both the myth and the subsequent legend of the fateful Directors Guild Meeting that occurred during a critical time in American history.” —James D’Arc, Curator, Cecil B. DeMille Papers, Brigham Young University