Mention “The Ten Commandments” to cinephiles and almost invariably they’ll think of the 1956 epic with Chuck Heston as the resolute Moses. But that was Cecil B DeMille’s second attempt at filming the Old Testament story, or his (Cold War-inspired) interpretation of it at least. Back when Hollywood was still in it’s adolescence, 1923, DeMille made a silent version of The Ten Commandments, in black and white with some sequences in Technicolor.

(Image: www.bestplaces.com)

The location chosen by DeMille for his first go at shooting the biblical epic was a barren 18-mile stretch of sand some 170 miles north of LA, at Guadalupe on California’s central coast. Today, the Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes, as they are called, are a protected sea coast and wildlife refuge (eg, for the endangered western snowy plover) and largely unchanged, but for three months in 1923 it was a hive of mega-budget movie-making activity as DeMille transformed the empty dunes into a reconstruction of an ancient Egyptian city. DeMille chose the Guadalupe dunes for the movie set because he thought it might pass for the Egyptian desert (or at least the Sahara Desert) [‘Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes’, Atlas Obscura, www.altasobscura.com].

Hollywood scale extravaganza
The set was massive scale, destined to become the director’s trademark – 120 foot high by 720 feet wide, erected by 1,500 construction workers, a twelve-story tall “Egyptian city” of plaster, wood and straw. The city’s human population comprised a further 3,500 actors✖and technicians plus 125 cooks to feed the assembled masses. Add to these impressive numbers some 5,000 animals, 300 chariots and 21 plaster sphinxes. Statues of Pharaoh Rameses were eleven metres tall and the facade had a 110-foot high gate enclosure✧ [‘The Ten Commandments, (1923 film)’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org; Bob Brier, Egyptomania: Our Three Thousand Year Obsession with the Land of the Pharaohs, (2013); www.lostcitydemille.com].

(Source: G-N Dune Center)

A Virtuous Camp DeMille?
DeMille had a huge makeshift tent city erected (nicknamed “Camp DeMille”) to house all of the personnel on the set. Perhaps, in keeping with the overtly religious theme of the film⊡, DeMille laid down strict rules of non-engagement for everyone involved on the production…men and women were billeted separately with no fraternisation allowed, no gambling, no alcohol and no coarse language [‘The Ten Commandments of 1923: The Exodus, Take One’, Patheos, 20-Apr-2012, www.patheos.com]. The alcohol ban adhered to the Prohibition rules in place in America at the time, but subsequent generations of beach-combing visitors to Guadalupe’s dunes have discovered evidence that participants on the movie set found a way round that…the debris of empty bottles of alcohol-laced cough syrup strewn all over the dunes [PJ Grisar, ‘How DeMille made his ‘Ten Commandments’ Jewish again’, Forward, 08-Apr-2020, www.forward.com].

A vanishing “Egyptian metropolis”
After filming of The Ten Commandments on the Central Coast finished in August 1923✥, what DeMille did next astounds. Instead of dismantling and hauling the costly set (the overall budget for the movie was a staggering $1.5M or more) back to Hollywood, DeMille had it bulldozed and buried in the Guadalupe dunes. The film-maker just didn’t want to be bothered with the logistics or expense of an enormous removal task and/or he didn’t want rival Hollywood film-makers or studios to get their hands on the set.

(Photo:www.fws.gov)

Unearthing cinematic artefacts
And there it sat—or shifted around in the constantly swirling winds of the dunes—for sixty years, one of Hollywood’s most expensive-ever film sets. Then in 1983 film-maker Peter Brosnan became intrigued after a chance encounter with the story, got hooked on it and spent the next 30 years searching for the site, finding it and trying (frustratingly) to excavate it. The project is ongoing, and has taken this length of time due to a combination of factors – local “red tape” (jurisdiction of the dunes falls under two separate counties); the site is a bird-life sanctuary with limited, seasonal access; plus there’s the extremely high cost of funding excavations. Over the years, archaeologists, both professional and amateur, have joined the quest to dig up DeMille’s treasure-trove. Buried replicas from DeMille’s Lost City have been unearthed including a 300-pound plaster sphinx which now resides in the Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes Center [‘There’s a Fake Egyptian City Buried in California’, (Marissa Fessenden), Smithsonian Magazine, 15-Oct-2015, www.smithsonianmag.com]. Brosnan compiled his years of research, including interviews with surviving actors, extras and other crew members, into a documentary film, The Lost City of Cecil B. DeMille, screened in 2016.

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✖DeMille also bused in some 250 Orthodox Jews as extras to give the movie a more authentic Hebrew look
✧ Rameses’ ‘temple’ contained recreations of hieroglyphics copied from the discovery of King Tutankhamen’s tomb in 1922
⊡ certainly in keeping with the sternly moralising tone of DeMille’s film
✥ only part of the film was made on the Guadalupe dunes, the wonky parting of the Red Sea scene was shot at Seal Beach in Orange County, and a modern-day morality tale DeMille tacked on to the film was shot back at the studios