Of 'Genius' Phones and Cecil B. DeMille

In the waning days of summer as I gear up for teaching next semester at Northeastern, I find myself with a lot of time on my hands. So much so that today, I watched Cecil B. DeMille's THE TEN COMMANDMENTS. Cecil B. DeMille is one of the most successful filmmakers of all time and THE TEN COMMANDMENTS is thought to be his piece de resistance. The first glimmer that I was in for a rare treat was when the director, in a rare on-screen appearance, comes out at the beginning of the movie and tells us, the viewers, just how long and epic a movie it will be - 3 hours and 39 minutes long to be exact. "You will be walking in Moses' footsteps from some 3,000 years ago," he says without a hint of modesty.

But, if for the pageantry and spectacle if nothing else, THE TEN COMMANDMENTS - the 1956 remake of his 1923 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS...this time in technicolor - is spellbinding. Filmed in Egypt and Sinai on some of the biggest movie sets ever, the likes of Charlton Heston, as Moses, and Yul Brynner, as Pharoaoh's once-favored son, light up the screen. Even on my modestly sized television set, they were larger-than-life. It also amazed me how, in the CGI era, the scenes thought to be ahead of their times in terms of special effects seemed positively cartoonish: the burning bush, the parting of the Red Sea. Don't get me wrong: the scope and grandeur of those scenes were awesome, but the special effects were laughable by today's standards.

I read that a 73-yr-old Cecil DeMille had a near fatal heart attack during the filming of the 1956 remake because he was trying to scale the top of the massive Per Rameses set. The completion of the film was his life's crowning glory and it certainly is a pleasure to watch it unfold on the screen. In a funny way, it got me to thinking about how much easier filmmaking has become in some ways. Francis Ford Coppola's apt comment about how today even "a fat farm girl from Iowa" can get her hands on a digital camera and start directing films. And now with smart phones, I'd take it a step further and say that today's smart phones should more properly be called genius phones: On a recent vacation to Niagara Falls, I was simply stunned by the quality of the videos of the majestic falls streaming out of my phone! It was a far cry from the parting of the Red Sea, but that little thing takes a great video...

Indeed, Randy tells me that people are now making cell phone movies and that there was a course offered on it last year at BU. Ah, so we writers are going to have to adapt as well, I thought. There again Randy had me: he pointed out that he'd attended a conference last year where a paper was given on "writing for the postage stamp screen." So maybe my Blackberry video of Niagara Falls is not so far from DeMille's parting of the Red Sea after all!