DeMille's Lost City

As someone who uses the internet frequently, I'm always picking up on random pieces of information, which works out as great fodder for irl conversations or wayward blog posts. Some of these facts or stories that I pick up are amazing, humorous, or bizarre. Sometimes it's all of the above.

In 1983, an amateur filmmaker, following a cryptic clue left in an old book, found an ancient city, complete with sphinxes and a 20-ton statue of the Pharaoh, buried beneath the sand dunes of not Egypt, but Southern California. I'm not making any of this up. The man who made the discovery was Peter Brosnan, the book was the autobiography of Cecil B. DeMille, and the ancient city was the complete set to his silent classic, The Ten Commandments.

Many are familiar with the 1956 classic The Ten Commandments, but Cecil B. DeMille, who directed that movie, also directed an earlier version in 1923. He was given something upwards of $500,000 by Paramount Pictures to recreate ancient Egypt as he saw fit for his grand religious epic, back in a day when an average film only cost $100,000 to make.

$500,000 wasn't enough for DeMille, who shipped tons of wood, plaster, and other building materials to the Nipoma Dunes in California (~2 hours out of Los Angelos). He hired an 'army' of construction workers to recreate the entire city within a month, as authentic as possible, including four 35-foot-tall statues of the Pharaoh Ramses, 21 sphinxes, and city gates over a 100 feet tall, with 5,000 animals kept in a corral nearby. The money DeMille was given, as we might expect, ran out partway through filming, and seeing how extravagant his spending had been up until then, all the funders backed out, refusing to pay for anything more.

The 1920s classic was saved by a favor called on one of DeMille's personal friends, who happened to be a co-founder of the Bank of America. A.P. Giannini invested another $500,000 into the production, giving DeMille a production cost somewhere between $1.2-1.4 million (which, as I mentioned earlier, was back in a day when the average production cost was a little over $100,000).

The movie was filmed, and grossed over $4 million, but that's not the end of the story.

I don't know if it was because the cost of shipping the set back to Hollywood was too high, or if DeMille didn't want to give other film producers access to the enormously expensive set, or, more likely, a mix of both. In any case, DeMille decided not to have the set shipped back, and instead hired bulldozers to bury to work underneath the sand dunes, apparently without telling the property owners or anyone in Hollywood about it.

DeMille did make a reference to his buried set in his Autobiography, which Peter Brosnan managed to pick up. Tracing the clues left, Brosnan found the set in 1983, and miraculously it was still mostly intact.

Brosnan has been trying since then to raise enough money to have the entire set uncovered and preserved for Hollywood Heritage. Unfortunately, no one in Hollywood actually seems too interested in the project, and despite a $10,000 grant from Bank of America honoring their history with DeMille's set, The Friends of the Lost City have been unable to raise enough money to save the set.

The good news is that, as the set is buried beneath dry sand dunes and not organism-rich dirt, the rate of decomposition is greatly slowed. The bad news is that no one seems to care much for preserving the great piece of film history. We can only hope that, thousands of years from now, scientists will rediscover the Egyptian city and be terribly confused.

A 6-foot wide horse's head from the city walls (the bulge to the left is the horse's eye,
and the man's right hand is in the horse's mouth.

(You can see more on the city by visiting the Friends of the Lost City website.)