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Film Firsts |
Especially during the silent era, when the film industry
was in its infancy, DeMille created many new ways to solve problems
and to enhance the film experience. The following is a list of known
DeMille innovations:
- First full length film (6 reels) Squaw Man, 1914
- First screen credits with Squaw Man: prior to this actors were
not credited in films.
- First to use indoor lighting: In Warrens of VA he showed interior
night scenes without blazing sunlight showing through the windows
and doors.
- First to vary light intensity in scenes.
- First fight between women on the screen in "Carmen", 1915.
- First domestic dealing with upper crust in their own environment, "The
Cheat", 1915.
- Created the film preview:
- Made stars: Bebe Daniels, Wanda Hawley, Agnes Ayres, Letrice
Joy, Nita Naldi, Jacqueline Logan, Vera Reynolds, Jetta Goudal,
Wallace Reid, Thomas Meighan, Sessue Hayakawa, Theodore Roberts,
Jack Holt, Monte Blue, William Boyd, Rod La Rocque, Joel McCrea,
Robert Preston and his most notable, Gloria Swanson.
- In Male and Female – revolutionary treatment of sex and
its establishment of DeMille as a pace-setting director of the
early post war years.
- First director to remake a picture and produce the same film three times
successfully (Squaw Man 1914, 1918 and 1931).
- First to direct crowds.
- First electric speaker system.
- First to show that films could depict sex and violence if virtue
triumphed at the end. DeMille always closed his pictures with the
hymn rather then the orgy, and if the route to the divine was full
of sensuous detours, the final victory was all the more meaningful.
- First to pan from downstairs to upstairs window in a single take.
This was the forerunner of the camera boom.
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