A famed movie set buried in the sand

A Brooklyn Man's Quest to Preserve History

BY TINA SUSMAN | STAFF CORRESPONDENT

July 10, 2005

GUADALUPE, Calif. - For those who thought "Sideways" and the Michael Jackson trial were the most star-studded events to hit central California, Peter Brosnan would like to direct you to this sand-blasted town of dunes, railway tracks and broccoli fields.

Long before the "Sideways" buddies guzzled their way through the region's chic vineyards, decades before cabernet sauvignon flourished in the rich soil or the pop star made headlines, Hollywood established its presence here by building one of the most lavish movie sets ever: a replica of ancient Egypt for Cecil B. DeMille's 1923 silent version of "The Ten Commandments."

When filming was over, the set vanished, presumably dragged off the dunes, taken to Hollywood and forgotten as sound stages and on-location filming rendered things such as fake, 5-ton sphinxes and 35-foot statues of the Pharaoh Ramses obsolete.

Fast forward to 1983, when a combination of nature's wrath and Brosnan's curiosity about all things Hollywood, honed as a film student at New York University, kick-started one of the oddest archaeological excavations ever undertaken - an effort to uncover the not-so-ancient ancient city that was not removed from the dunes after all.

The story begins with Brosnan, a 52-year-old Brooklyn native, chatting with a fellow film buff 22 years ago. "He told me a crazy story about a guy burying sphinxes in California," said Brosnan, who lives in Los Angeles and who, for the record, is no relation to actor Pierce Brosnan. His parents live in Port Jefferson.

A tale of sphinxes

Intrigued by the strange tale, Brosnan began investigating and discovered that DeMille had acknowledged in his 1959 autobiography to burying at least the sphinxes in the dunes. Just as Brosnan was enlisting the help of Guadalupe locals and archaeologists to search for them, nature offered its own assistance with El Niño, a climatic phenomenon that ravaged California's coast in 1983.

Piers were knocked down, highways were washed away, and best of all for Brosnan, the spectacular sands of the Guadalupe Dunes shifted.

"That series of storms kicked about three feet of sand off the dunes. For the first time in 60 years there was literally acres of statuary sticking out of the sand," Brosnan said. "We realized there weren't just sphinxes buried there - probably the whole set was there."

That would include some two dozen sphinxes, four Ramses statues, and the 120-foot-high gates guarding the Pharaoh's city, all made of plaster, which provided the backdrop for more than 3,000 actors and 5,000 animals that appeared in the movie.

As with DeMille's silent epic, which was nearly derailed when Paramount bosses balked at the then-unheard-of budget of more than $1 million, Brosnan's project has been hobbled by money issues.

'No interest in its history'

Even with multimillion-dollar budgets the norm for today's Hollywood productions, Brosnan has not persuaded studios to save what he says is the greatest set remaining from the golden age of silent films.

He thought the 80th anniversary of "The Ten Commandments" might spur interest, but it didn't. Neither did Paramount's marking of the studio's 90th anniversary in 2002. Now, Brosnan hopes that the new attention on this relatively isolated region as a result of "Sideways" and the Jackson trial - held 10 miles away in Santa Maria - will generate interest.

About $35,000 has been raised, but Brosnan says letters to Paramount seeking about $140,000 more have been ignored.

"Hollywood just has no interest in its own history," said Brosnan, adding that his last request was sent about two months ago. "I guess if they could figure out a profit motive in digging up old sets we'd get some help, but until then, nothing."

Paramount seems flummoxed by the situation. "Are you sure this guy isn't a kook?" spokeswoman Nancy Bannister said when asked about Brosnan's quest.

She had never heard of the buried set and couldn't find anyone at Paramount who had. That may be because the most memorable scene from the movie, the parting of the Red Sea, wasn't filmed at the dunes but at Paramount studios, where a giant pool of gelatin doubled as the roiling waterway.

But the excavation effort has its own Web site, www.lostcitydemille.com, and skeptics can view chunks of the set at the Dunes Center in downtown Guadalupe. There, a lion's face and a sphinx's foot sit in a display case, along with smaller pieces uncovered naturally by sand shifts or salvaged by Brosnan.

Most people in Guadalupe, a town of 5,700 people about 180 miles north of Los Angeles, are familiar with the set and with DeMille's reason for burying it rather than carrying it away. Not only was it cheaper to knock it down and cover it up, it ensured that no rival studios could use the set.