Cecil B. DemIlle with Baxter and Yul Brynner

 Cecil B. DeMille picked Charlton Heston for the role of Moses in "The Ten Commandments" (1956) because he bore a resemblance to Michelangelo's statue of Moses in Rome, Italy. Heston played Michelangelo in "The Agony and the Ecstasy" (1965).

Legend has it that Anne Baxter's character's name was changed from "Nefertiti" to "Nefretiri" because DeMille was afraid people would make "boob" jokes. In reality, DeMille was sticking to history: Rameses II's Queen was actually named Nefretiri. Nefertiti, by contrast, lived about sixty years earlier, and was the Queen of Amenhotep IV (named Akhenaten later in his reign). These events were depicted in another film, "The Egyptian" (1954). Nefretiri means "beautiful companion" in Egyptian.

Audrey Hepburn was originally slated for the role of Nefretiri; DeMille reluctantly decided to pass on her after she was judged "too slender" (reportedly a presumably polite euphemism for "flat-chested").

Edward G. Robinson said DeMille saved his career by hiring him for this movie. Robinson had been almost blacklisted for his left-wing political activism, and offers of work had dried up as a result. DeMille hiring Robinson for this movie undermined the Hollywood blacklist.

The orgy sequence was so difficult to film, partly because DeMille wanted it to look like an orgy without showing anything on-screen that was inappropriate for children. This led to seemingly contradictory direction for the actors and actresses, who were trying to be tame, but were then told that they didn't look like they were having an orgy.

According to Hollywood lore, while filming the orgy sequence that precedes Moses' descent from Mount Horeb with the two stone tablets on which the Ten Commandments are engraved, 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 talking to another woman standing next to her. DeMille stopped his speech and directed 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 an embarrassed pause, the young woman spoke up and boldly confessed, "I was just saying to my friend here, 'I wonder when that bald-headed old fart is gonna call 'Lunch!'" Nonplussed, DeMille stared at the woman for a moment, paused, then lifted his megaphone and shouted, "Lunch!"

Cecil B. DemIlle (below with Baxter and Yul Brynner)!

Cinema symphony