Lost City Found? Guadalupe Dunes unearthed secrets revealed!

One of Hollywood's amazing legends, Cecil B. DeMille, and his sister, Agnes DeMille, here at Hollywood Forever, he left something up at the Guadalupe Dunes. Let's go check it out. It was the biggest set ever built for the most expensive movie that had ever been made. The silent version of Cecil B. DeMille's epic The Ten Commandments. I feel like I'm on the set of Lawrence of Arabia. This is the Guadalupe Dunes. We're looking out over the area where some of those incredible artifacts from Cecil B. DeMille's silent version of The Ten Commandments were discovered. So this is an incredible preserve, a beautiful spot, but also a piece of Hollywood history because right out here we had excavations. We start running up this sand dune and we see a lot of debris all over the surface. But it had to be a Cecil B. DeMille set that archaeologists would be digging up. Here's another artifact from Cecil B. DeMille's Ten Commandments. The set was mentioned in his autobiography in 1959. It had pretty much been forgotten to history and a number of Hollywood historians, I'm one of them, knew about it and always wondered, you know, if it was down there. It was really covered up and nobody knew. And so a process was started back in the 80s to start getting permits to be able to dig up some of the dunes and see if it was there. And lo and behold, here it was. All of that broken plaster that you see is just the exposed surface pieces of those pharaoh statues. You want to get an idea of scale, that's a person standing there. In 2012, we were actually able to do enough fundraising to lead an archaeological project out there and they unearthed a Sphinx. That Sphinx, buried for nearly 90 years, has been partially restored and is on display at the Guadalupe Dune Center, along with other artifacts from the film. And I'm with Alexis Elias, and she is the interim director of the center. And Alexis, I had no idea this is here. And you have the biggest collection of some of the lost articles of Hollywood history right here in Guadalupe. Yeah, we do. You know, most people that walk into this museum say that exact same thing. Where did this stuff come from? Yeah, I get people coming in here asking if these are real Egyptian artifacts, which is kind of funny. But I mean, they look so real. But no, they are artifacts from a movie. But it's kind of funny. They're real artifacts from a movie, right? So people often are like, wait, are they real or fake? What are they? Is Hollywood history now real history? What are the pyramids? So and the story is Cecil B. DeMille shot the Ten Commandments out here on the dunes to look like Egypt, I guess. And when he got through, the set was buried. Is that what happened? So there are different stories. Basically, some people say buried, but because of the way that the dunes work, the wind, it's a very dynamic ecosystem. So were they buried or were they left there and then just covered over time? We're not really sure. But yeah, so they were buried eventually. And whether it was nature or man, and I know I've seen some pictures of local children back at the time playing on them and that kind of thing. So it was a little bit maybe of an attraction before they disappeared. Yeah, I think it was kind of a local secret where people would go and we have a picture of a man standing on the Sphinx in the 30s, which is why we don't think necessarily it was buried. But we don't have any pictures of the set. We just have that one random. No Instagram? There were no Instagram happened? Unfortunately, no. So tell me a little bit about I know a documentary was made. Now, how did how was the center involved in the excavations? So we manage and the acting director at the time, Doug Jensen, led the entire project. So he was actually in the sand digging. He was working with Applied Earthwork. They managed the excavation. And also, we worked with Peter Brosnan, who was the director of that documentary, The Lost City of DeMille. And so everybody came together to find these objects. You even had representation from local Native American. Yes, we have a Chumash representative on site to make sure that if anything is found, they can define where it's from, if it's from the 20s when they were in the set, if it's an artifact from that, or maybe if it's even older, like a Chumash artifact. Because a lot of locals were used in the film, right? Yeah, so there's actually one specific scene where they recruited residents of Guadalupe. It's the exodus scene where the Israelites are leaving the city. So that's kind of Guadalupe's little 15 minutes of fame, where they asked everyone, bring your mom, bring your sister, bring everyone, yeah. So I mean, that's the California. We love to cover California history. Now to switch gears real quickly, because Alexis' real background is as a scientist and preservationist, and you're here also to do what? Educate people. We want to educate people about the extremely diverse ecosystem that we're so fortunate to live in. The Central Coast is amazing, and specifically the dunes. The dunes are a one-of-a-kind. They're so unique. It's the largest coastal dune complex on the West Coast or south of San Francisco. There are a number of endangered species that are only found in the dunes. So it's really, really important for us to protect and preserve this area, because these plants and animals will be lost. Everything's very fragile here. And I encourage you, come to Guadalupe and see the Dune Center and meet Alexis and contribute to this place. Like any nonprofit, particularly in smaller towns, it needs support. This is a wonderful facility, particularly to see these artifacts from Hollywood history. And that's our look at the Guadalupe dunes and the incredible story of Cecil B. DeMille's lost city. Now let's keep going.