About 25 years ago I drove up to the Guadalupe Dunes area (due west of Santa Maria) to inspect the remnants of the ancient Egypt set used for Cecil B. DeMille‘s 1926 version of The Ten Commandments. It’s nothing — just a big sloping sand dune littered with chunks of cheap plaster and pieces of weather-worn lumber sticking out here and there. There’s no “lost city” — the whole legend is a con job. You might find scraps and shards of material from a 90-year-old movie set “interesting”, but I sure didn’t. The story about DeMille having dynamited and then buried the set after he finished shooting makes sense. It certainly makes no sense that he would have left the set intact for other filmmakers to use at will.
Official trailer “The Lost City of Cecil B. DeMille” [SBIFF] from dan coplan on Vimeo.
