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.
