B. Reeves Eason
actor, assistant_director, director
- Birth name:
- William Reaves Eason
- Born:
- 1886-10-02, New York City, New York, USA
- Died:
- 1956-06-09, Sherman Oaks, California, USA
- Professions:
- actor, assistant_director, director
Biography
Before the roar of cameras, B. Reeves Eason sold fruit and vegetables; then he swapped crates for greasepaint and trod the boards of stock companies and vaudeville houses. In 1925 he turned a dusty Los Angeles crossroads—today’s La Cienega and Venice—into a thundering circus of hooves and wheels, marshaling forty-two cameras to capture the chariot stampede in the Ramon Novarro–Francis X. Bushman Ben-Hur. The sequence anchored a picture that guzzled $3.9 million, making it the costliest silent ever produced; two years earlier, MGM had already stunned the trade by paying $600,000 for the filming rights to Lew Wallace’s novel—still a silent-era record. Fourteen years later, Eason stoked another blaze, staging and shooting the fiery evacuation of Atlanta for Gone with the Wind.
Filmography
In the vault (2)
Knowledge Base
Frequently Asked Questions about B. Reeves Eason
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