A Story Idea Each Day for a Month — Day 22

Today’s story: The Fight to Preserve DeMille’s ‘Lost City’:

In 1983, filmmaker Peter Brosnan set out to unearth a city buried beneath the desert sands near Guadalupe, Calif. The treasures below included sphinxes, hieroglyphs and sections of a Pharaoh’s city. Their provenance, however, was not an ancient civilization but 1920s Hollywood. 
For his 1923 black-and-white epic The Ten Commandments, legendary auteur Cecil B. DeMille embarked on a production so mammoth and extravagant that the studio threatened to discontinue funding. At the conclusion of filming, DeMille ordered that the set be dismantled and secretly buried in the desert. 
DeMille went on to remake a longer film — same subject, same title, but in lurid color — in 1956. That’s the version — starring Charlton Heston as Moses — that is familiar to most movie fans of today.
A clue in DeMille’s autobiography led Brosnan to the site of the original epic, and he has been working since the 1980s with archaelogist John Parker on excavating and preserving the 1923 set’s remains. The “Lost City” is closed to the public, but pieces of it are on display at the Dunes Center in Guadalupe, Calif.

Had you ever heard of DeMille’s “Lost City”? I hadn’t. Here’s another article:

GUADALUPE, Calif. — Strong winds scour the dunes, which hide a curious history. Nails and fragments of concrete are scattered everywhere. Steel cables, carved pieces of wood and slabs of painted plaster poke out of the ground, ghosts rising from the grave. 
In 1923, Cecil B. DeMille came to the Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes on California’s Central Coast and built a movie set that still captures the imagination — a colossal Egyptian dreamscape for the silent movie version of “The Ten Commandments.” 
Under the direction of French artist Paul Iribe, a founder of the Art Deco movement, 1,600 craftsmen built a temple 800 feet wide and 120 feet tall flanked by four 40-ton statues of the Pharaoh Ramses II. Twenty-one giant plaster sphinxes lined a path to the temple’s gates. A tent city sprung up to house some of the 2,500 actors and 3,000 animals used to tell the story of Moses leading the Israelites to the Promised Land. 
“Your skin will be cooked raw. You will miss the comforts of home. You will be asked to endure perhaps the most unpleasant location in cinema history,” DeMille told his army of actors. “I expect of you your supreme efforts.” 
When he was done, the set proved too expensive to haul away but too valuable to leave intact for rival filmmakers to poach. DeMille had it bulldozed into a 300-foot-long trench and covered with sand. 
Peter Brosnan was a 30-year-old New York University film school graduate when he first heard the story in 1982. Over beers one night, a former college roommate laid out the tale of DeMille’s lost city. 
“I thought my friend was nuts,” Brosnan said. 
Then his friend showed him DeMille’s autobiography, in which the director seemed amused at the prospect that his city would be unearthed someday. 
“If 1,000 years from now archaeologists happen to dig beneath the sands of Guadalupe,” DeMille wrote, “I hope they will not rush into print with the amazing news that Egyptian civilization…extended all the way to the Pacific coast of North America.” 
Captivated, Brosnan embarked on a journey that has yet to end — a quest to find DeMille’s set, exhume it and produce a documentary. 
The project would take him from film industry archives to the living rooms of aging ranchers who worked as extras on “The Ten Commandments.” He filmed their stories: How the “Hollywood boys” got thrown from unbroken horses, how a local 10-year-old with no acting experience played the pharaoh’s son, how the director ferried 240 elderly Jews from Los Angeles to witness the Exodus re-enacted. 
Brosnan also collected stories from locals about the dozens of films shot outside Guadalupe from the silent era to the 1940s. 
Clarence Minetti, 92, is among the few still around with a connection to those days. He appeared in “The Last Outpost,” a 1935 film starring Cary Grant. The dunes stood in for colonial Iraq. 
“We were British soldiers or something,” Minetti said. “Paid $5 a day for me and my horse.” 
Guadalupe’s golden era ended in the mid-1940s when studios traded the wilds of Santa Barbara County for location shooting in the Sahara and Middle East. 
Minetti pointed Brosnan to one dune out of the hundreds that flow across the spectacular nature preserve. In June 1983, Brosnan and two friends climbed Minetti’s dune with brooms and a movie camera. Hours later they hit pay dirt: dozens of pieces of statuary, including a bas-relief of a horse head. 
Brosnan’s discovery of the buried set in 1983 made headlines worldwide. Later, a grant from Bank of America, which helped bankroll DeMille’s movie, allowed for radar to pinpoint large forms, including the Ramses II statues. 
Brosnan and archaeologist John Parker developed an excavation plan. DeMille’s estate offered encouragement. A Smithsonian Institution curator showed interest in displaying pieces of the set. The 75th anniversary of “The Ten Commandments” in 1998 brought more headlines but not enough money. 
“We were young, idealistic and thought: What a wonderful movie this is going to make! We thought certainly we could get some money from Hollywood and we’d be finished with this project in a year or two,” Brosnan said.

How about a documentary about Brosnan, his quixotic efforts to unearth the “Lost City”? There is the Plotline — all the business about the actual excavation — and the Themeline — what sort of toll this enormously long effort takes on Brosnan. Because at some point, doesn’t the quest itself become bigger than the object of the quest? 
If nothing else, I just thought this was an interesting Hollywood tale worth sharing.

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