Epic filmmaker: Cecil B. DeMille helped shape movies from the early silents

HOLLYWOOD — Patrick Stanbury made a surprising discovery while he was researching the life of Cecil B. DeMille — the director wasn't such a bad guy after all.

"We approached the film very much with a sense of who we thought DeMille was. And we thought he was a person who had a very high opinion of his own place in film history and in the birth of cinema but that this was not a view shared by many other people," said the award-winning filmmaker, whose documentary, "Cecil B. DeMille: American Epic," appears in two parts Tuesday and Wednesday on Turner Classic Movies. "And the thing that surprised us as soon as we started interviewing was — we're not finding anybody who could speak ill of him."

Well, there was one person. There's a clip of director Sidney Lumet disparaging DeMille: "I don't think he had an original bone in his body nor an original thought in his head."

But those comments came when the producers "threw in a question about DeMille" while doing an interview for a documentary about Charlie Chaplin.

"When we spoke to him further, it turned out he knew very little about DeMille," Stanbury said. "He hadn't seen any of the silent pictures, and two-thirds of DeMille's career was silent. And that was his most creative period as a filmmaker.

"So it represents a popular misconception . . . that he had no talent."

And people who knew him — including Angela Lansbury, Charlton Heston and composer Elmer Bernstein, as well as DeMillle's son and granddaughter — gave Stanbury and his partner, Kevin Brownlow, a picture of the director they didn't expect.

"Everybody we found had a great deal of affection (for him), which was a surprise and a revelation to us," Stanbury said. "DeMille inspired an enormous amount of loyalty in people." And he "had people working with him, for him throughout what was a very long career." A career that included 70 films, beginning with "The Squaw Man" in 1914 and continuing through "The Ten Commandments," the 1956 remake of his own 1923 film.

More than just a director, writer, producer and personality — he hosted the "Lux Radio Theatre" from 1936-45 and appeared as himself in the 1950 film "Sunset Boulevard." DeMille was a genuine Hollywood pioneer as one of the founders of Paramount and one of the molders of the movie industry.