The Lost City of Cecil B DeMille

By Courtney LichtermanFeatures correspondent

Remnants of one of the silent film era's most epic productions lay buried along the Central California coast – until a small group of curious adventure-seekers decided to start digging.

As I looked at the rolling, empty sand dunes sandwiched between the Pacific Ocean and the quiet town of Guadalupe, California, it was hard to imagine that for a few short weeks in 1923 this area was teeming with thousands of actors, crew members and animals participating in one of the silent film era's most epic productions. That said, it was neither the movie's filming, nor even the film itself that brought this town of just 1.3 sq miles in Santa Barbara County its notoriety. That has more to do with what has remained just below the surface here for the last 100 years.

It's not unreasonable to think this relatively isolated spot along the Central California coast could resemble ancient Egypt, or at least, generalised Western perceptions of it. Although it is often cold and foggy here, I could almost imagine Guadalupe as Giza on a hot, sunny day with caravans of tassel-covered camels making their way across the expanse, their long shadows stretching across the sands where ochre-coloured pyramids dotted the horizon.

It was a comparison not lost on legendary director Cecil B DeMille, who used the area, officially known as the Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes, as the filming site for his 1923 silent epic, The Ten Commandments. Although he would go on to make another, better-known, talking version of the story more than 30 years later, it is the remnants of this first iteration that have come to captivate the imaginations of archaeologists, film buffs and the just plain curious.

Falling into the third category, I drove north from Los Angeles to Guadalupe to the Dunes Center, a tiny but fascinating museum that tells the story of the movie's filming and aftermath. Here, I learned that the celebrated filmmaker, who was known for his over-the-top productions, originally planned to film the biblical tale on location in Egypt. But when studio heads nixed the costly idea, DeMille decided to re-create the country on this small slice of coastline. Owned at the time by the Union Sugar company, the land was rented to DeMille for $10 with the stipulation that he would leave the dunes exactly as he had found them once production was complete.

100 Year Anniversary

To celebrate the centennial of the filming of The Ten Commandments, the Dunes Center is planning a celebratory weekend on 6-8 October 2023. Tentative plans include a black-tie dinner, chariot races and a sphinx-naming contest.

With the location settled, DeMille started building a set considered extraordinary for its time, enlisting the talents of Frenchman Paul Iribe, an illustrator and designer known as a master of the Art Deco style. Iribe's main set piece was an enormous Egyptian temple that took a few historical liberties by melding Egyptian motifs with a sleek 1920s aesthetic. Roughly 120ft high and 720ft wide, the structure was flanked by 21 plaster sphinxes thought to weigh a few hundred pounds each. At the time, the "City of the Pharaoh", as the set was known, was the largest movie set ever constructed.

In addition to the set, DeMille also created "Camp DeMille", a tent city for the cast and crew. "The camp was pretty amazing," remarked Dunes Center museum guide Carole Schroeder. "He set it up with street signs and a 24-hour canteen." As filming took place during prohibition, some of the 3,500 actors and crew members occasionally "borrowed" some of the film's 200 camels to hop a ride into town where they frequented the local speakeasies.

When production ended, DeMille was faced with the problem of how to make good on his "leave-no-trace" promise to Union Sugar. Although some of the set pieces and props had been pilfered by locals to use as lawn ornaments and the like (two sphinx heads ended up at a nearby golf course and a chariot was thought to have somehow found its way to a now-defunct auto parts store in town), the temple and many of the sphinxes were still left, along with other props. Too big and expensive to bring back to Los Angeles and, DeMille insisted, too valuable to leave for rival filmmakers to steal, legend has it that the director simply ordered all remnants of the event buried in the sand. There, they would languish, untouched, until the 1980s when a pair of amateur sleuths began an odyssey almost as colossal as The Ten Commandments itself.

In September 1982, Peter Brosnan was an American freelance writer and filmmaker whose oeuvres in both disciplines had recently been destroyed in a house fire. Escaping the blaze, he moved into the home of friend, fellow filmmaker and DeMille aficionado, Bruce Cardozo. Over drinks one night, Cardozo shared with Brosnan a short, somewhat cheeky passage in DeMille's 1959 autobiography in which the director cryptically confirmed the burial. The book's section reads: "If, 1,000 years from now, archaeologists happen to dig beneath the sands of Guadalupe, I hope they will not rush into print with the amazing news that Egyptian civilisation... extended all the way to the Pacific Coast of North America… The sphinxes they will find were buried there when we had finished with them."

Brosnan, a self-described "obsessive lunatic" with no prior archaeological experience, was inspired to start on what would become a decades-long quest to dig up the buried city, an adventure he eventually chronicled in a documentary, The Lost City of Cecil B DeMille.

It was not long before they found their first artefact: a portion of the horse design from the temple's edifice. "We were out there on a cold, foggy morning and there was this chunk of plaster sticking out of the sand," Brosnan recalled. "We started uncovering it and eventually, wait a minute – that's an eyeball! And we stood back and… it's a horse! One of us had brought a book with a photograph of the whole set and it was that horse."

Of that first discovery, Brosnan said, "It was magical! It was exciting! Schliemann discovering Troy could not have been more excited than we were."

Realising what a great documentary the story would make, Brosnan started interviewing surviving crew and cast members and before long was joined by a team of volunteers who wanted to help excavate the site. In a quest to conduct a more formal excavation, he applied for permits with the city of Santa Barbara. What followed is a 30-year-long story of triumphs and disappointments too long to chronicle in its biblical entirety, but suffice to say, the team eventually got permission to dig.

In 1990, Brosnan, this time along with a team led by archaeologist Dr John Parker, recovered portions of hieroglyphs and bas reliefs from the temple façade as well as pieces of costumes. L Erika Weber, executive director of the Dunes Center explained there were also some finds that gave clues to the daily life of the camp: "They found cough syrup bottles – a lot of cough syrup because it has like 7-to-12% alcohol and they couldn't get it otherwise." As Brosnan noted, the syrup was "a legitimate way to get around prohibition".

Soon after, Brosnan started shopping a rough cut of his documentary but was told by potential distributors that in order to sell it, he would need a true Hollywood happy ending. Unearth an elusive sphinx head, they advised, and you'll have a shot at selling your movie.

Towards that goal, Brosnan partnered with archaeology firm Applied EarthWorks and about 10 years ago, the team hit pay dirt, uncovering significant features of one of the sphinx heads. Art restorer Amy Higgins helped restore and piece together the face and today, visitors to the Dunes Center can see the remarkable discovery, now unofficially named "Nora" after the grandmother of the Center's previous executive director, in person.

Having finished his film, Brosnan ended his almost 30-year adventure, but in 2017, a team of archaeologists, art restorers and Dunes Center staff set out again to dig up more set pieces. Among their finds was another sphinx head now prominently displayed in the museum. On my visit, staring at her imposing, triangular face framed by a headdress and topped by an asp, I realised that were a movie of this proportion made today, these objects would most likely be replaced by CGI.

Before heading back to Los Angeles, the Center staff told me I shouldn't leave town without driving out to the dunes themselves. Although there's little to see beyond some plaster debris, they explained, it gives good sense of where the action happened.

So, I headed towards the ocean, driving until I could make out small pieces of plaster dotting the surface of the sand. The air, predictably foggy and frigid this close to the water, made it hard to see much more, but I still experienced chills, as though I was staring at Pompeii, Petra or King Tut's tomb itself. I thought of all the pieces that didn't end up on golf courses or in auto parts stores or even the Dunes Center. How many more Noras and horses and bottles of cough syrup and pieces of building facade still lie here, suffocating under the shifting sands? According to Brosnan, DeMille buried enough artefacts on the spot to "fill several museums" so the answer is probably "many".

Of what could be left, Brosnan notes that although sand is a great preservative, nature is not, and thus time is of the essence. "Archaeologists have determined that the big dune that houses most of the artefacts is eroding at a very rapid rate," he told me.

That said, it's a job that will now have to wait for the professionals as amateurs are no longer permitted to dig in the area. Until then, what's left of DeMille's "Lost City" remains under the sand, waiting to be set free.

Unearthed is a BBC Travel series that searches the world for newly discovered archaeological wonders that few people have ever seen.

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