The Lost City of DeMillc Emerges from the Desert Sands of California
For 75 years, the majestic dunes that tower over this humble coastal village have held one of Hollywood’s oldest and strangest secrets.
Cedi B. DeMille, a founding father of motion pictures, once chose this remote, wind-swept site 170 miles (270 kilometres) north of Los Angeles to erect a plaster replica of ancient Egypt and stage his 1923 silent epic “The Ten Commandments.” It had all the right touches, on a monumental scale — from the walls of a pharaoh’s city rising 10 stories high to an avenue of nearly two dozen five-ton sphinxes lining the sand. That had never been anything like it, and it remains one of the largest movie sets ever built.
But once the cameras stopped rolling and a cast of thousands sent packing, it all vanished. Then in his memoirs, DeMille dropped a playful hint of the historic set’s mysterious fate. “If 1,000 years from now, archaeologists happen to dig beneath the sands of Guadalupe," he wrote, “I hope they will not rush into print with the amazing news that Egyptian civilization, far from being confined to the Valley of the Nile, extended all the way to the Pacific Ocean of North America."
They will not. Because now, in an only-in-Califomia endeavour as sublime as it is ridiculous, what's left of the lost duty of DeMille may soon be saved by an authentic archaeological dig like none other.
That all of the Egyptian relics to be excavated are fake hardly matters, at least not to the small and zealous band of filmmakers and archaeologists leading the unusual project, or to the curious towns around here that are beginning to help pay for it. Inside the new Dunes Discovery Center along the creaking and dusty old main street of Guadalupe (population 6,000), some worn, fragile DeMille props that already have been discovered are even being displayed reverently in glass cases, as if they were priceless artifacts.
“Digging up a fake Egyptian city in California is hard to do without laughing, I know,” said Peter Brosnan, 46, a documentary filmmaker who has made the buried set his abiding pastime. “But this is an important piece of early 20th century American history. It’s about the only set left from the era of silent film. We know it’s down there in the sand, and we think it’s mostly intact.”
Chunks of artful plaster are not all they are after. The sheer size of DeMille’s production also makes it a rich time capsule preserved in a mountain of sand, with abundant emblems of daily life from the 1920s. Something always turns up when the sands shift, such as cough syrup bottles once used to hold sips of alcohol.
To make the film, DeMille marched an army of 2,500 actors from Los Angeles and kept them captive there for two months in an elaborate tent city assembled on the 18-mile stretch of dunes. More than 1,500 construction workers also came to build the mammoth biblical set.
DeMille, who remade the film in the 1950s in Egypt with Charlton Heston playing Moses, even hired musicians to lug instruments into the sands of Guadalupe and play for the huge cast as it worked. But their performances on the set ended one day when a runaway horse-drawn chariot crashed into the orchestra pit.
“At first I thought that doing a real dig for this was a little strange,” said John Parker, an archaeologist who has worked extensively at the dunes. “In order not to destroy this stuff we have to use the same techniques we would use as if this was a 10,000-ycar-old prehistoric site. But along with the film history we find, it could be a great way to see what life was like here in the 1920s.”
By the time he was finished, DeMille had spent $1.4 million filming the biblical epic, a huge sum at the time. And he was way over budget. Mr. Brosnan said he suspects that DeMille buried the set because it was the cheapest option he had. Other film historians contend that he also may have been worried that another director would sneakily use it and release a similar movie faster.
Archaeologists are convinced that more than one third of the film set is long gone, ravaged by time and the powerful forces of nature along the ocean here. But after using ground-penetrating radar to probe the dunes, some of which slope as high as 500 feet (150 metres), they believe they finally know exactly where everything that’s left has been entombed. Many of the sphinxes, as well as several 35-foot statues of a pharaoh king that DeMille put outside the walls of his phony Egyptian city seem fairly well preserved, they said.
They really did a good job hiding it,” said Liz Scott-Graham, the programme manager at the Dunes Discovery Center, the non-profit group that owns the dunes and treats them like a nature preserve. “You would never know it’s all still there."