In choosing a screenwriter, Bronston turned to his familiar collaborator Philip Yordan, whose resume included Broken Lance (1954), Johnny Guitar (1954) and The Harder They Fall (1956), as well as the aforementioned Bronston-produced sagas. While he would ultimately overextend his company, and be effectively out of business by the mid-'60s, Bronston had some of the most imposing cinema spectacles of the period to his credit, including El Cid (1961), 55 Days at Peking (1963) and Circus World (1964). DeMille's 1927 silent that had set the standard for depicting the story of Christ on film. With MGM's involvement for distribution, Bronston set his sights on an $8 million remake of Cecil B. At that point, he became a pioneer in the industry practice of locating epic-scale productions in Spain, and thereby ameliorating the massive costs involved. While he had set himself up as an independent producer by the mid-'40s, his achievements had been relatively undistinguished until the late '50s. The Rumanian-born Bronston first tied his career to the film industry in the early '40s, when he went to work at MGM's French unit after his graduation from the Sorbonne. Samuel Bronston, who had some of the most lavishly mounted film productions of the era to his credit, made his contribution to the cycle with King of Kings (1961), an impressive and thoughtful retelling of the life of Christ. Primarily attributable to the industry's desire to pull out all the stops in its battle with the new medium of television for the American public's leisure time, producers sought to render the world's most fundamentally known and revered stories on the grandest possible scale. For a brief span between the mid-'50s and the mid-'60s, the genre of the Biblical epic had a foothold in Hollywood unlike any other time before or since.