GOD BLESS HOLLYWOOD! Ten Commandment monuments DeMille's work

[underpants]

This was the final Jeopardy question two nights ago so I had to check it out.

GOD BLESS HOLLYWOOD!!!!!!!!!!!

http://homepage.mac.com/dmhart/iblog/C437552202/E1370747465/


Frank Rich in an article in the New York Times talks about the moral and political hijacking of a poor, near-dead woman in Florida (whose husband wants her to die naturally) by the religious right. He starts the article with a very interesting comment about the crusade of the director Cecil B. DeMille in the 1950s to both promote his film the Ten Commandments and to do his bit for the American fight against godless communism, to place thousands of concrete "replicas" of the Ten Commandments (as if anyone actually knows what they looked like) on the lawns of Court Houses across the nation. Rich writes:

"As DeMille readied his costly Paramount production for release a half-century ago, he seized on an ingenious publicity scheme. In partnership with the Fraternal Order of Eagles, a nationwide association of civic-minded clubs founded by theater owners, he sponsored the construction of several thousand Ten Commandments monuments throughout the country to hype his product. The Pharaoh himself - that would be Yul Brynner - participated in the gala unveiling of the Milwaukee slab. Heston did the same in North Dakota. Bizarrely enough, all these years later, it is another of these DeMille-inspired granite monuments, on the grounds of the Texas Capitol in Austin, that is a focus of the Ten Commandments case that the United States Supreme Court heard this month."




Ten Commandments Monuments Tied to 1956 Film
24 March 2005
http://www.voanews.com/english/AmericanLife/Only-In-America-SearsArchives.cfm

This summer, the U-S Supreme Court is expected to rule on two cases involving the public display of the biblical Ten Commandments.

The current cases involve a Ten Commandments monument at the Texas State Capitol, and framed copies in two Kentucky courthouses. The Supreme Court has been asked to decide whether these displays violate the Constitutional separation of church and state.

And here's a fascinating footnote: Granite monuments to the Decalogue -- including the one in Texas -- date to 1951. That's when a Minnesota judge asked a defendant if he realized he'd broken the Ten Commandments. The young man said he had never heard of them.

Hollywood director Cecil B. DeMille learned of this and saw it as the perfect opportunity to boost his new movie, which just happened to be an epic version of The Ten Commandments story. DeMille and a fraternal group called the Eagles paid to install a couple hundred Decalogue tablets in important public spaces across America.