Raiders of the lost city - uncovering the simulated City of Pharaoh in Guadalupe, CA

Sunset, Oct, 1997 by Peter Fish

* John Parker kneels and scoops sand with cupped hands. "Ahh," he says. "The sphinx's paw."

It is a moment of some drama, a moment that, were this a silent film, might be succeeded by a subtitle - "If these stones could speak!" - then a dissolve to Egypt in the time of the pharaohs. But the paw is not stone; it's plaster. The tale it tells is of the kingdom of Hollywood, a pharaoh named Cecil B. DeMille, and the making of The Ten Commandments.

"DeMille realized movies could fill a screen with things you couldn't see anywhere else," says Peter Brosnan, the screenwriter and documentary film-maker who, with archaeologist Parker, is attempting to excavate DeMille's lost City of the Pharaoh.

Certainly no one outside the movie industry would dream of re-creating an Egyptian royal city on a windblown stretch of the Santa Barbara County coast. In 1923 DeMille was already a jodhpur-clad avatar of Hollywood extravagance. His next silent epic, he announced, would be inspired by nothing less than the Ten Commandments. Most of his movie would be a morality play set in Jazz Age San Francisco. But as prologue, DeMille would tell the story of Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt. DeMille would therefore need pharaohs and slaves and chariot drivers and sand. Lots of sand.

And so it came to pass that DeMille built his plaster of paris Xanadu on the long stretch of dunes outside Guadalupe, California. City of the Pharaoh was a press agent's dream. Sixteen hundred laborers built hieroglyph-covered walls 110 feet tall, flanked by four statues of Ramses II and 21 sphinxes, 5 tons each. DeMille populated his city with 2,500 actors and extras, housing them in tents on an adjacent dune.

But lo, the resulting movie proved a mixed bag. "The second, modern part is kind of unwatchable," Brosnan admits. But the film triumphed where it counted, grossing a then-amazing $4 million.

DeMille's city met a cloudier fate. At filming's end, the director toppled the city, using a horse-drawn bulldozer to bury some of it in a ditch. "It was common practice to find out where directors had made a movie with an expensive set," Parker says. "Rival companies would film a cheapie there and release it first. Tearing the set down was DeMille protecting his patent."

City of the Pharaoh slumbered beneath the sands for 60 years. Then, as Brosnan says, "a friend told me this bizarre story about DeMille." Brosnan got a local to take him over the dunes. "We found ourselves in a field of plaster statuary - there had been big storms, and more set was uncovered than had been seen in 30 years."

Brosnan decided to excavate the city and film a documentary about DeMille's making of The Ten Commandments. "When Peter first called me, I thought he was nuts," Parker says. But the story won him over. Parker and a team of students grid-mapped the site. They brought in ground-penetrating radar to scan the sands, and hit pay dirt: the dune-entombed remains of DeMille's dream.

Were this a movie, you would now cut to flapping calendar leaves, indicating the passage of time. Brosnan hoped to excavate the city in two or three years. It's been 14. One might think Hollywood would finance this exploration of its own past. One would be wrong. "The rest of the world appreciates our movies as art," says Brosnan. "We look at it as business. When Hollywood sees a way of making money out of this, then they'll have some interest."

The trouble is, dunes move: the Guadalupe Dunes shift 3 feet a year, exposing the set to vandals and the elements. Parker estimates that one-third of the set has been destroyed; the remainder may last only 15 more years.

Next year is the 75th anniversary of The Ten Commandments. Brosnan hopes the anniversary may inspire some studio head to save City of the Pharaoh. No stranger to story pitches, Brosnan makes a good one. "On the one hand, it's a fun story, it's daffy. On the other hand, we're trying to preserve a precious piece of film history."

In the meantime, John Parker stands on a dune hoping this epic may yet have a sequel. After all, DeMille himself hoped the future might enjoy his buried joke. In his autobiography, he wrote: "If, a thousand years from now, archaeologists happen to dig beneath the sands of Guadalupe, I hope that they will not rush into print with the amazing news that Egyptian civilization, far from being confined to the valley of the Nile, extended all the way to the Pacific Coast of North America."

City of the Pharaoh is off-limits to visitors, but exhibits on it can be seen at the Nature Conservancy's Dunes Discovery Center, 951 Guadalupe St. Guadalupe, CA; (805) 343-2455.