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Thursday, April 21, 2011

Happy Easter!

I am preparing to enjoy my day off tomorrow. Sometime this weekend however I will watch this as I have always done as long as I can remember:






















Hint: If you start it before 10AM tomorrow you should be done watching it by lunch Monday!

From IMDB comes some trivia for this movie:

According to Charlton Heston's autobiography, the filming of the orgy scenes was so grueling, it prompted one female extra to exclaim, "Who do I have to f**k to get OUT of this movie?"

According to Hollywood lore, while filming the orgy sequence which precedes Moses' descent from Mount Horeb with the two stone tablets of the Ten Commandments engraved, Cecil B. DeMille was perched on top of a ladder delivering his customarily long-winded directions through a megaphone to the hundreds of extras involved in the scene. After droning on to the extras for several minutes, DeMille was distracted by one young woman who was persistently talking to the woman standing next to her. DeMille stopped his speech and addressed everyone's attention to the young woman. "Here," DeMille said, "We have a young woman whose conversation with her friend is apparently more important than listening to her instructions from her director while we are all engaged in making motion picture history. Perhaps the young woman would care to enlighten us all, and tell us what the devil is so important that it cannot wait until after we make this shot." After a moment, of silence and temporary fright, she spoke up and boldly confessed, "I was just saying to my friend, 'I wonder when that bald-headed old fart is gonna call 'Lunch!'" DeMille stared at her for a moment, paused, then lifted his megaphone, and then shouted, "Lunch!"

The orgy sequence took 3 weeks to film.

Animation was employed to create the hail as it was falling from the sky in the background, but popcorn that had been spray-painted white fell as "hail" onto the pavilion of Rameses' palace. It was light so it could not hurt the actors, it bounced like real hail; and it could be swept up and used again for additional takes of the scene. The fire that burned from the hail was created by animation.

The last line of the film "Proclaim liberty throughout all the land, unto all the inhabitants thereof" was taken from Leviticus 25:10 of The Bible. The verse is also printed, on the Liberty Bell.


Not so much any more on the liberty throughout all the land huh?

Never let it be said that Cecil B. DeMille let the newfangled "sound" thing crimp his style, huh? 

I hope everyone has a great Easter!

6 comments:

  1. I love this movie. The overacting and klunky special effects didn't age well, but it's still fun to watch.

    Happy Easter.

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  2. The "orgy sequence" scene took 3 weeks to film? Well no wonder they were hungry

    Happy Easter to you.

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  3. Happy Easter! We like Edward G. (Emanuel Goldenberg) Robinson's Brooklynese, "Where's your messiah now, Moses? Eh?"

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