Cecil B. DeMille

FRom Empire of Dreams:
As he was readying the production, Cecil wrote the playwright Stewart Edward White, "I am about to produce The Warrens of Virginia, and expect to kill a lot of perfectly good actors and some good horses. Why don't you come down and see the fun?" White responded: "Nothing would please me better ... especially if you will guarantee to kill a lot of actors." Cecil began The Warrens on December 5, finished it on January 9, 1915, and it was released on February 15. Cecil remembered that it was on that picture that
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he devised what he referred to, with some exaggeration, as "the birth of artificial [screen] lighting." "When we first went to California, everything was sunlight. No artificial light was employed. Having come from the stage, I wanted an effect, so I borrowed a spotlight from an old theater in Los Angeles [DeMille later remembered it was the Mason Opera House] when I was taking a photograph of a spy. The spy was coming through a curtain and I lighted half of his face [with] only just a smash of light from one side, the other side being dark. I saw the effect on the screen and carried out that idea of lighting all through the rest of the picture, that is, a smash of light from one side or the other." When DeMille sent the finished picture east, Sam Goldfish sent a violent telegram: "Have you gone mad? Do you expect us to be able to sell a picture for full price when you show only half of the man?" "This isn't an exaggeration," DeMille would insist when telling the story in later years. "This is exactly as it occurred. . . I was really desperate. As I told you, the director has to go through; he has to do something. So Allah was very kind to me and suggested the phrase 'Rembrandt lighting.' I sent a telegram to New York saying 'If you fellows are so dumb that you don't know Rembrandt lighting when you see it, don't blame me.' The sales department said, 'Rembrandt light-ing! What a sales argument!' They took the picture out and charged the exhibitor twice as much for it because it had Rembrandt lighting." The story sounds a little too well rounded, the stuff of anecdotal history, but both DeMille and Lasky remembered the same set of circumstances and the same responses. Actually, "Rembrandt" lighting soon became "Lasky" lighting, because early filmmakers understood the importance of what a later generation called branding. "I was trying to get composition and light and shadow," DeMille would recall, "and I would say to [Alvin Wyckoff] 'You mustn't make this part so light, under the table mustn't be light—it should be dark and the back corner of the room shouldn't be light—it should be dark.' So they all said, 'He likes it contrasty'— contrasty!—that was the phrase. There were some terrible battles because of that, because that meant expose it for contrast. It didn't mean shadow it, it just meant make the whites whiter and the blacks blacker." DeMille films began to use spotlighting for dramatic effect, in the same way that it was used on the stage: to guide the viewer's eye and to heighten a dramatic moment with harsh pools of light in the midst of darkness. The result, as histo-rian Lea Jacobs noted, is "confined and shallow areas of illumination, sharp-edged shadows and a palpable sense of the directionality of light." DeMille's lighting was innovative for the movies, although it seems likely that he was adapting the techniques of David Belasco to the screen. but his concern with composition and lighting makes him a true innovator in a period where the principal concern was recording a clean unambiguous image.

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This is the way it was: Visitors stayed at the Hollywood Hotel, a wooden building at Hollywood and Highland that ran half a block fronting on Highland. It looked like a slightly shopworn summer hotel, with rocking chairs lined up on the front veranda. The lobby was small, and in the dining room food was served in white porcelain bowls that looked like bird baths. The rooms had matting instead of carpeting, the beds were iron, the windows had white net curtains, and there was a small closet with three hooks. "The odor," remembered Bessie Lasky, "was like left-over food that had been fried in stale bacon fat." The atmosphere was sleepy and depressing, the boarders "looking blank and useless, rocking alone on the porch, filling the air with futility and gloom, transparent in their shabby clothes." To get to the studio, people would either be picked up by the studio car, or rent horses and ride down Vine Street and tie the horses off in front of the barn with a large wooden sign: "Lasky Studio." Directly across the street was an orange grove with an old stucco house in the middle. People who had never been far west—or far south—would marvel at the orange blossoms and the way their scent could perfume the air for hundreds of yards, or the way the pepper trees on Vine swayed in the breeze. The hotel would send over box lunches: cold chicken, a hard-boiled egg, a piece of tomato, a bread and butter sandwich, and salt and pepper. Chairs would placed around the perimeter of the set. There, remembered Bessie Lasky, "the handsome, picturesque young director in puttees, boots and cap . . . acted out the scenes for the people and put on the best show himself."