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The format is approximately 12.5 inches by 9.25 inches. Illustrated front and back cover. Illustrations (some in color) Cover has some wear and soiling. The text is based on excerpts of an address by Mr. DeMille at a luncheon in his honor prior to the New York opening of "The Ten Commandments:, November, 1956. Cecil Blount DeMille (August 12, 1881 January 21, 1959) was an American filmmaker and actor. Between 1914 and 1958, he made 70 features, both silent and sound films. He is acknowledged as a founding father of American cinema and the most commercially successful producer-director in film history. His films were distinguished by their epic scale and by his cinematic showmanship. His silent films included social dramas, comedies, Westerns, farces, morality plays, and historical pageants. DeMille grew up in New York City. He began his career as a stage actor in 1900. He later began to write and direct stage plays, a few with his older brother William de Mille, and some with Jesse L. Lasky, who was then a vaudeville producer. DeMille's first film, The Squaw Man (1914), was the first full-length feature film shot in Hollywood. Its interracial love story was commercially successful, and the film marked Hollywood as the new home of the U.S. film industry. Based on continued film successes, DeMille founded Famous Players Lasky which was later reverse merged into Paramount Pictures with Lasky and Adolph Zukor. His first biblical epic, The Ten Commandments (1923), was both a critical and commercial success; it held the Paramount revenue record for 25 years. Cleopatra (1934) was his first film to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture. After more than 30 years in film production, DeMille reached a pinnacle in his career with Samson and Delilah (1949), a biblical epic that became the highest-grossing film of 1950. His last and best-known film, The Ten Commandments (1956), also a Best Picture Academy Award nominee, and it is the eighth-highest-grossing film of all time, adjusted for inflation. In addition to his Best Picture Awards, DeMille received an Academy Honorary Award for his film contributions, the Palme d'Or (posthumously) for Union Pacific (1939), a DGA Award for Lifetime Achievement, and the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award. He was the first recipient of the Golden Globe Cecil B. DeMille Award, which was named in his honor. Arnold Friberg (December 21, 1913 July 1, 2010) was an American illustrator and painter noted for his religious and patriotic works. He is perhaps best known for his 1975 painting The Prayer at Valley Forge, a depiction of George Washington praying at Valley Forge. He is also well known for his 15 "pre-visualization" paintings for the Cecil B. DeMille film The Ten Commandments which were used to promote the film worldwide and for which he received an Academy Award nomination. He has been admitted as a lifetime member of the Royal Society of Arts. The Ten Commandments is a 1956 American epic religious drama film produced, directed, and narrated by Cecil B. DeMille, shot in VistaVision (color by Technicolor), and released by Paramount Pictures. Based on the Bible's first five books and other sources, it dramatizes the story of the life of Moses, an adopted Egyptian prince who becomes the deliverer of his real brethren, the enslaved Hebrews, and thereafter leads the Exodus to Mount Sinai, where he receives, from God, the Ten Commandments. The film stars Charlton Heston in the lead role. First announced in 1952, The Ten Commandments is a remake of the prologue of DeMille's 1923 silent film of the same title. Four screenwriters, three art directors, and five costume designers worked on the film. In 1954, it was filmed on location in Egypt, Mount Sinai, and the Sinai Peninsula, featuring one of the largest exterior sets ever created for a motion picture. In 1955, the interior sets were constructed on Paramount's Hollywood soundstages. The original roadshow version included an onscreen introdu.
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