DeMille

Last week a merger was announced which concerns everyone remotely connected with the show business, even those persons whose connection amounts merely to a liking for vaudeville or for going to movies on Saturday night. The Keith-Albee-Orpheum circuits merged with the Producers' Distributing Corp., a company better known simply by the name of its principal owner, Cecil Blount De Mille. By the terms of consolidation the De Mille Co. will furnish the theatres of the circuit with "a definite and important program of photoplay entertainment." The Keith-Albee-Orpheum circuit is the only large circuit in the U. S. that has never engaged in producing cinemas; now it becomes practically the official exhibitor for De Mille features, Metropolitan productions, Christie comedies.

De Mille pictures generally deal, in a spectacular manner, with the problems which confront adult society women of ancient or modern times. "I want to show human life as vividly as possible, but always some bit of life that has real meaning and purpose," Mr. De Mille has said. Roses flung on marble stairs, ladies dropping languid importunity in boudoirs through which Gounod's "Ave Maria" wanders like an oddly-chosen perfume, not infrequently assist the meaning and purpose of Mr. De Mille's productions; he has also become famous for ballroom scenes in which the heroine (who has entered from a side door, disguised as a buttercup) is unmasked by her lover amid an extraordinary profusion of confetti and colored paper tape. But a taste for indoor panoramas has not seriously deranged Mr. De Mille's genuine sense of drama; it is perhaps the natural development of his very panoramic career.

His father, Henry C. De Mille, was a playwright; Cecil wrote plays too, studied the theatre for many years before he went into moving pictures. One day in 1913 he was having lunch with Jesse L. Lasky.

"Why don't you go into moving pictures?" said Lasky.

"I will if you will," replied De Mille, and the two forthwith drafted articles of incorporation on the back of a menu card.

The company, Famous Players-Lasky, hired a stable in Los Angeles for a studio and there made The Squaw Man; next year De Mille produced The Cheat and The Golden Chance, and moved out of the stable. He told dramatic stories--biblical, historical, educational--so successfully that when he travels now he takes with him a retinue of secretaries, lawyers, agents, etc., that often requires an entire hotel floor.

Director De Mille quitted the Famous Players-Lasky Corp. last year to become Vice President in charge of production of the Producers' Distributing Corp. Still more lately he formed a new Cinema Corporation of America with ten millions of capital and the extensive Cecil De Mille Studios, where he means to direct two or three pictures a year.