UCLA

This dissertation looks to the career of epic cinema pioneer Cecil B. DeMille in order to grasp the role of the research department in the Hollywood studio system. Situated at the intersections of three areas of study—scholarship on the form and social function of popular historical representation; theorizing on the archive as a site of knowledge production; and studies on film authorship that attend to the historical underpinnings of aesthetic choices—the dissertation explores the following questions in particular: What were the industrial standards on which studio researchers based the success and authenticity of their work? And what can we know about the research process as it relates to the production and reception of DeMille’s brand of spectacular cinema?

I offer this study as an intervention into previous scholarship on research practice in Hollywood, which too often stresses cinema’s divergence from the factual record and draws a rigid binary between academia’s histories and the “unprofessional” ones derived from research departments. This study takes a different approach by examining a wider range of archival materials, including studio library circulation records, scaled prop sketches based on photographs and artifacts, and researcher correspondence with historical consultants and museum curators. By expanding our archival horizons, I argue, we can think about studio research more productively (and more accurately) as a distinct production culture operating in varied and often unpredictable relations to academic historiography. In doing so, we can appreciate DeMille’s cinema not as something to be judged against the implicitly accurate products of the academy but on its own terms, as an institution that exerted continual influence on mass-historical perceptions. I have found that although DeMille did indeed publicize his academically-inspired standards of contemporaneity and breadth, his use of research must be examined along more media-specific lines, which has not been done before. Without recourse to the historian’s footnote in order to establish an indexical relationship to the past, DeMille used historical research in order to create an immersive, detail-rich brand of spectacle that brought audiences a sense of authentic experience.