Charlton Heston’s Son on ‘The Ten Commandments’ and His Dad — ‘A Great Father and Wonderful Husband’

Fraser, who actively works as a writer/director/producer, describes The Ten Commandments as essentially being the origin of the Heston family: “Dad had done several movies before that, including The Greatest Show on Earth, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture, but Moses was clearly the role that set him off on, if you’ll pardon the expression, the epic journey that he enjoyed as an actor for the next 50 years — which took him to many different genres. He didn’t get stuck in any one genre,” he continues. “He went from Epics to Westerns to Science-Fiction to Disaster films to World War II. But he was always able to sort of look back on his experience with DeMille as his sort of origin as an actor. I know he always credited him with a lot of his success.”

The way Fraser describes it, Charlton considered himself lucky to be doing the thing that he loved: pretending to be other people. “He called himself a shy kid from Backwoods, Michigan who liked to wear tights and wave swords,” he muses, “and he found a way to do that; to pretend to inhabit other lives, other worlds, other kingdoms, other characters.”

One of the other characters was astronaut George Taylor in 1968’s Planet of the Apes, which launched the franchise that is getting ready to be rebooted for a third time. That film, which had Taylor arriving from Earth’s past to its distant future where talking apes rule over savage humans, offered up one of the great iconic images of Hollywood history: his collapsing before the remnants of the Statue of Liberty as he realizes for the first time — as does the audience — that he is indeed on Earth rather than an alien planet.

Says Fraser, “Because people brought him projects that were different from each other, he was able to reinvent himself about every 10 years, and he jumped into the science-fiction genre at a time when nobody was taking it seriously. Suddenly along comes this wonderful novel by French writer Pierre Boulle, with Rod Serling collaborating on the script. It was just this fantastic chance to go off and do something completely different and play a very unsympathetic character. This astronaut Taylor is not really a very nice guy; he’s selfish and cynical and a hard-ass, which couldn’t be more opposite of Dad.”

Charlton famously hated the idea of doing a sequel to Planet of the Apes (he dismissed the idea as “More adventures among the monkeys”), and only did the first follow-up — 1970’s Beneath the Planet of the Apes — as a favor to producer Dick Zanuck, who gave the green light to the first film when everyone else said no. But then Heston played a chimp in Tim Burton’s 2001 remake. “He had fun doing it,” notes Fraser. “Again, he said, ‘Give me something new to do.’ He always wanted to do something different. Generally, though, he didn’t want to get typecast and he didn’t want to do television until much later in life when he did The Colbys, which was a very successful spin-off of Dynasty. Because he wanted to challenge himself, his feeling was, ‘If I can’t get a film, I can always go off and do a play.’ He always viewed himself as a theatrical New York actor.”

Shifting the conversation back to The Ten Commandments, the question is when you’re in an age where epics are considered to be the newest Avengers or Star Wars films, what sort of appeal does a movie like this one from the 1950s hold for today’s audience? “First of all,” Fraser suggests, “you’ve got one of the greatest stories ever told. And DeMille just embraced the available technology of the time to its fullest — things like the parting of the Red Sea. He loved doing anything he could to bring the illusion of something spectacular to the screen. I think he would have loved being alive today and working alongside James Cameron or Steven Spielberg or Quentin Tarantino. He would be very much a vibrant modern filmmaker, and I think all of those guys I just mentioned owe a big debt to Cecil B. DeMille for bringing those epics to the screen and making that such an important part of the Hollywood experience for the world.”

‘The Ten Commandments’ on Digibook

Now available from Paramount Home Entertainment is The Ten Commandments Digibook, a special collector’s edition that includes Cecil B. DeMille’s 1923 and 1956 versions of the film, plus a 16-page booklet with rare photos and background about both movies. The set also includes an in-depth, 73-minute documentary entitled “The Ten Commandments: Making Miracles,” commentary on the 1956 film by Katherine Orrison, author of Written in Stone: Making Cecil B. DeMille’s Epic, The Ten Commandments, newsreel footage of the film’s New York premiere, theatrical trailers, hand-tinted footage of the Exodus and Parting of the Red Sea sequence from the 1923 version, a two-color Technicolor segment, and photo galleries.
 
DeMille’s last motion picture made Charlton Heston a superstar and remains a cinematic triumph and perennial fan-favorite.  Filmed in Egypt and the Sinai with one of the biggest sets ever constructed for a motion picture, The Ten Commandments tells the story of the life of Moses (Heston).  Once favored in the Pharaoh’s (Yul Brynner) household, Moses turned his back on a privileged life to lead his people to freedom.