YOU WON'T BELIEVE WHO SHOWED UP THE TOUGHEST MOVIE STUNT MEN

The Girl Who Tamed the Pharaoh's Army.

When Cecil B. DeMille filmed his epic The Ten Commandments—the original silent movie version of 1923—the production was a spectacle of almost unimaginable scale. Consider the chariot scenes alone: they required an entire week to shoot. At one point, DeMille was spending up to forty thousand dollars a day. The action sequences were lavish beyond compare.

To bring his vision to life, three hundred chariots were meticulously manufactured for the epic. Each was to be drawn by a team of stallions worth ten thousand dollars and driven by… well, that is the rest of the story.

C.B. DeMille needed hundreds of chariot drivers, but he faced a monumental problem: the art of charioteering had been a lost skill for millennia. Lacking anyone specifically trained for the task, DeMille recruited Hollywood cowboys and real-life soldiers. The cowboys knew their way around horses and had ample motion picture experience. The soldiers were rugged physical specimens from the 2nd Battalion of the 76th Field Artillery—"Presidio boys" from Monterey. In command of these soldiers was Lieutenant Tony McAuliffe, who would later become famous during World War II for his gallant stand at the Battle of the Bulge. But for now, there was another battle to be fought in the service of the Pharaoh's army.

At first, a friendly rivalry sprang up between the movie cowboys and the artillerymen, each group claiming superior skill at the reins of an Egyptian chariot. However, the challenge of chariot driving quickly proved more formidable than either had imagined. DeMille had even stationed a 20-piece orchestra on location to set the mood for the actors. On the first day of shooting, the chaos began. One driver lost control of his chariot and drove it straight through the string section, while his comrades collided in a massive, ancient-style traffic jam.

In fact, the Ten Commandments as millions eventually saw it was almost never completed. When DeMille later ordered his charioteers to charge down a steep, treacherous sand dune, they outright refused. These big, strong, brawny movie cowboys and those fierce fighting men from the United States Army itself took one look over the Southern California dune, another look at the tricky contraptions they were driving, and told DeMille unequivocally: no.

With an unprecedented movie budget at stake and time running out, what was director DeMille to do?

He turned to a stunt person and issued a command: "Take a chariot up on that high sand dune and drive it down."

At DeMille's demand, the task was performed. Not just once, but successfully and repeatedly, until the humiliated cowboys and soldiers were forced to admit that it could, indeed, be done. And with the cameras rolling, they finally did it for him.

He had chagrined his charioteers into action through the example—not of a stunt man—but of a stunt girl. To prove that the Pharaoh's army could safely do what they were told, this girl took the reins of a chariot and guided it over that towering dune without ever having performed a single movie stunt in her entire life.

The young lady who drove up and down that dune that afternoon, cheerfully and even giggling with laughter—the girl who led motion picture professionals and the United States Army into battle—was Cecilia DeMille, director Cecil B. DeMille's own daughter. She was twelve years old.

And now you know the rest of the story.