Hollywood's Hidden Secrets (Full Episode) | Drain the Oceans Compilation | National Geographic

Buried beneath sand, water, dust, and time, the wild Californian West has many secrets waiting to surface. In the shadow of the looming Hollywood sign, fact may be stranger than fiction. This is a story that beggars belief. It's bizarre. It's huge. And once I'd heard it, I got so excited. There was no question I really wanted to be involved. I've always loved old Hollywood movies. As a photographer, I've always really loved black and white. It can be so expressive. But I'd never thought I'd get drawn into a search for a lost film set. The film was The Ten Commandments by Cecil B. DeMille, the classic silent movie made in 1923. Everything about the film was gigantic. The budget was an unheard of amount. The set for the master shot of the exodus of the children of Israel was huge. Nothing like it had been done before. But then, according to local legend, DeMille blew up the set after he'd finished filming and all trace of it mysteriously disappeared. Until one night in 1982, two film students come across an intriguing clue. Bruce Cardozo and Peter Brosnan were having a drink and talking about the old movies. Bruce had been reading the autobiography of Cecil B. DeMille. And he'd found a line which really intrigued him. If 1,000 years from now, archaeologists dig beneath the sands of Guadalupe, the sphinxes they will find there were buried when we had dismantled our huge set at the gates of the pharaoh's city. Peter got really excited. This built in his mind to become an obsession. Was the lost film set still there? Fired up by the idea of finding the set, Peter and Bruce set off to the Guadalupe dunes, which is 160 miles northwest of Hollywood, up on the central coast of California. Their hearts must have dropped because those dunes stretch for 18, 20 miles up the coast. Finding any semblance of a film set in that environment, it's like looking for a needle in a haystack. Refusing to give up, they decide to try again two years later. And that's when I got involved. Peter and Bruce invited me to be the official photographer. And in February 1985, we went back up to the site. Peter located a local rancher, and he told us he used to drive cattle across the dunes from time to time. And the winds are relentless coming in off the ocean. And he told us all of those dunes move except one, the big one, because the big one is full of stuff. There was something buried in the sand there. But was this DeMille's set, or was it something else? So we walked up to the crest of the big one. I couldn't believe my eyes. Spread out before us was this field of pottery shards, white and orange plaster, pieces of heavy lumber, coils of rusting steel wire, bottle tops, bits of glassware. And it spread for miles. He just kept going. I was getting goosebumps. The size, the scale, it was huge. This was the biggest set of the biggest film by the biggest filmmaker. This was Hollywood history. But how much of the set was left? Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments was a real landmark in cinema history. By the mid-1920s, Cecil B. DeMille was the most powerful director at the biggest of all studios, Paramount. DeMille starts as an actor, is interested in writing plays. When he reached Hollywood, really kind of reinvented himself as a film director. He would carry a riding crop and wear riding boots and a beret and would bark out orders. In many ways, the stereotype we now have of the old-time movie director comes from Cecil B. DeMille. We were only looking at tiny parts of the film set. We needed to know how much was left. So Peter managed to get a radar specialist who had been involved in the development of ground-penetrating radar. The results were just phenomenal. 23 anomalies, things buried in the dune. And on the very last day, we found something really magical. Very close to the surface, where the wind had blown away a lot of sand, we found eye, nose, lips, a face from one of the 20-foot-high statues guarding the sides of the gates of the Pharaoh's City. We had found DeMille's film set. But this was just the start. Could we save it? And that's when the challenges really began. The dunes are a very protected area. We weren't allowed to dig anything. Two species of bird that use it as a nesting area. Snowy plover. Lays its eggs on the ground. Permits. You can't disturb the nesting sites. No vehicles on the dune. There was a minefield of... It's very difficult to get access to. There are no mechanical devices that are allowed. We got close to giving up several times. For more than two decades, the team wrestles with setbacks. Finally, in 2012, a generous donor funds a group of skilled archaeologists with the expertise to work around the fragile dunes. And the excavation of DeMille's lost city begins. The primary goal was to locate one of the Sphinx and to preserve it as a legacy of Hollywood. When we started, we found very small pieces as if it had been blown up. DeMille was very conscious of the idea that he didn't want to leave those sets standing around so other filmmakers could dash in there and make little quickie films. And he supposedly paid to have the sets blown up and they were lost in the mists of time. We could only find bits and pieces. The question was, could we find anything of DeMille's sets still intact? A team of archaeologists is searching for the remains of a massive 1920s movie set. There is Cecil B. DeMille's set for the film, The Ten Commandments. Nearing the end of the first season, we made a series of fascinating discoveries. Various facial elements of the Sphinx, an eye, nose, lips, and one of the paws. But it was badly damaged. Then we found elements of a second Sphinx still intact, primarily the haunches. One morning I was walking around the movie set site and there was a piece of statuary sticking out of the sand and it appeared to be a hind paw. We decided to focus on excavating that Sphinx. So far we've got an ear, hopefully a cheek, and we think there's a forehead seam somewhere in there. And we're really hoping the face is intact. It's insanely exciting. The set was 800 feet long. It had 25-ton Sphinxes laid out in a double phalanx out from the gates of the Pharaoh's city. And this one seemed much more intact. When we rolled it over, it was probably the most incredible experience I've ever had on any site. We exposed the other side of the face and the paint on it was just fresh. Not, it had just seconds been exposed. Just incredible. It was beautiful. The enormity of this project gives me goosebumps today. The local museum in Guadalupe now has a dedicated display. And the Sphinx that we excavated is now a centerpiece of the Dune Center's exhibits. But we still had a big question. What would it have been like to be on DeMille's movie set in 1923? The scale of the production on the Ten Commandments was colossal. 500 carpenters, 500 painters, 400 set decorators, 1,200 electricians and gardeners. The set itself was more than 100 feet tall. The materials required were enormous. Over half a million feet of lumber, 25,000 pounds of nails, 75 miles of cable, 300 tons of plaster. There were 500 tons of elaborate sculptures, over 20 sphinxes. There were four massive statues of the pharaoh Ramses, each 35 feet tall and weighing 39 tons. Cast and crew numbered at least 3,500 men and women and children. A Camp DeMille was set up where they lived under canvas in 500 tents for weeks at a time. A single lunch required 7,500 sandwiches, 2,500 apples and oranges, and 400 gallons of coffee. 5,000 animals were used on the set. PhotoPlay Magazine called it the greatest theatrical spectacle in history. Of course, there was one final twist. What did DeMille do with the set when he was done? The local story was that the set had been blown up, but the evidence didn't support it. While walking the site, we found segments of wire such as this. We know it's a very windy area. Is this a clue? Now that we're up here, you can see that the wind is so strong that when it blows, it could tear down virtually anything. And you would have needed industrial cable such as this to stabilize the large statuary and keep it standing upright. All the film crew had to do to destroy the set was to cut the cables. And the winds did the rest and blew the set over. And as time passed, buried the site so it looks as it does today. The Ten Commandments is a huge hit and becomes Paramount's highest grossing film for the next 25 years. It was the dawn of a new era, the profitable blockbuster. And throughout the 1920s, Hollywood boomed. Of course, we all know this is gonna end. In 1929, the stock market is gonna crash. The United States is gonna go from the roaring 20s into the Great Depression. By 1933, half of the Hollywood majors were in bankruptcy and most of the rest were approaching bankruptcy. Everyone was terrified. Would Hollywood make it? Would the film industry survive? Despite the Great Depression, one industry in Los Angeles is finding new ways to survive on land and sea. There are more than a thousand shipwrecks that lie off the coast of California. It becomes a passion for me to investigate, search out, find them. The ocean has been my life all my life. Started diving with my dad when I was really young in the early 70s where I grew up, coastal town in California. I wanted to visit the deeper wrecks, so it required me taking some technical rebreather training. During that training, I came across something really amazing, something I've never expected to see. This wreck is about 10 miles off the coast of Long Beach. It's 135 to 140 feet, which is pretty deep. It's pretty dark and you don't see anything for a long time. And then out of the gloom comes this huge shape. You really feel the adrenaline rush at that time. I was just thinking, man, it is huge, bigger than anything I had dove on before. We realized we were on the stern section and then we realized that there was only half a ship there. I was thinking, where's the rest of the ship? Where's the other half? It was strange, intriguing. After that dive, I had a lot of unanswered questions. What kind of ship was she? Why did she sink? And what is she doing here just 10 miles off of Long Beach? During my next dive, we started exploring further and more than 100 feet away on the bottom, we find the other section of the ship. And I was very confused as to why the two sections of the ship were so far apart. Then we found something we never expected to ever see on a ship like this. Pieces of wood attached to the superstructure. Timber on a warship, it's a metal ship. There's no reason or place for timber. Why was that there? We started investigating the mangled wreckage area and there was a lot of metal that was pushed outward. I'd never seen anything like that before. We started diving back to the back part of the wreck and we saw the same evidence. Here's this massive warship blown in two pieces on the ocean floor. Indications of a huge explosion. And there had been no U.S. destroyer sunk off the coast of California in either World War I or World War II. So what caused that? So this is where the break is. Let's get a good angle here. You can really see that the metal is being pushed out and not in. If it was to be hit by the torpedo, the metal would have been pushed in. So it wasn't the victim of an attack of an enemy submarine. Just didn't make sense. A mysterious thousand ton warship lies wrecked just off the coast of Long Beach, California. But how and why did it sink? I needed to go back and do some more reading. As I was doing some more research, I finally found something that answered my questions. An article in the Los Angeles Times from February 22nd, 1933. It talked about a warship that had been spotted off the coast of Long Beach. It was a U.S. naval vessel, the USS Moody. Clemson-class destroyer, sub-hunter, built in Squantum, Massachusetts in 1919. Everything about her seemed to match the ship I'd been diving on. She never saw any wartime action. What's happened here? In fact, MGM Studios bought her for about $35,000 to use in a World War I movie, Hell Below. The ship that we'd been swimming on all this time had been a Hollywood movie set. Hell Below is an MGM picture from 1933, a pretty big budget film with a real all-star cast. Robert Montgomery, Robert Young. It's a tragic World War I story, but it's also got crazy comedy with Jimmy Durante. It also has romantic scenes. And it contains this wonderful battle at sea. You know, the wood I found on the wreck started to make sense. I knew it wasn't part of the original vessel. It turns out it was a set dressing. MGM producers used timber to disguise this old U.S. Navy destroyer so it looked like a World War I German warship. And then they blew it up and sunk it on camera for the film. It's not easy to sink a real warship like this. So how did they do it? So if we take the photogrammetry model and we cross-reference it to the blueprints of this destroyer, you can see right away where the vessel would have broken in half. It broke right there between those two boilers, three and four. So what the model makes clear is that the explosive charges were set in the boiler room. This first set of explosives was designed to create a massive explosion to simulate torpedo hits. And severed the ship in two whole sections. Demolition engineers placed a second set of charges in each section of the ship to destroy the bulkheads, flooding them with seawater. The moody eventually went down, giving filmmakers a rare opportunity to actually film a sinking ship. It was ingenious. It was a spectacular scene. Turns out the USS Moody wasn't the only ship that Hollywood used to make movies in the 20s and the 30s. About 25 miles west, there's the wrecks of at least nine other ships that the studios used to make different movies. In fact, so many ships were used as film sets that the actors started calling them the Hollywood Navy. Of course, with the stock market crash in 1929, the Hollywood majors had to completely reorganize themselves to survive. Buying up an old ship and then sinking it, it was worth it. Getting the most bang for their buck, putting great stuff up on the screen to impress their audience. This sequence cost MGM $35,000, but it's another example of MGM's savvy management during the Great Depression. It's creative gambles like these that keep audiences flocking to theaters despite the economic depression. And it's gold that had people flocking to California in the first place, eventually giving Hollywood life. Nothing about living here would have been easy. Nothing. Getting here, getting food in, getting shelter, everything was an uphill battle, but people did it because of the potential to go out and get rich. From a young age, I was obsessed with the Wild West. When I was a kid, my dad took me to Virginia City, a silver mining town, and I thought that was so much cooler than Disneyland. Hi! Welcome to Bodie. Thanks, how are you? Good. Gold mining here in Bodie really declined over time, and so people started to move on. That's when Bodie became more of a ghost mining town in the 1920s. My job is to preserve Bodie, freeze it in time, essentially. Today, there's about 150 buildings total. Back in the day, at the height of Bodie, about 2,000. Here we are at the crossroads, Green Street and then Main Street. This would have been the commercial core. Yeah. Right. And it was about one mile in length. Uh-huh. Wow. Jeez. There are parts that have been preserved, but there's key neighborhoods, key parts of this story that are no longer here. Do you have maps or any sort of imagery from this area to give us a sense of how many buildings would have been here? What we've been working on is trying to recreate town in that boom years, right, in the 1880s, to basically recreate in a 3D model form and bring it back to life. We're lucky here at Bodie there's lots of evidence to help fill in the gaps in this story. And I've got this image in my head, but I'm really excited to see what Bodie looked like in 3D color in 1880. What is very well studied about Bodie is the core, the downtown, and mostly the buildings, but it's been estimated that more than 90% of what's left of Bodie is things that you cannot see across the landscape. So there is so much to still investigate. The LiDAR that we're using now is called Simultaneous Location and Mapping, or SLAM, LiDAR, which is a handheld device that I can carry around and then use it to scan the landscape and the environment with great accuracy to help us understand the archaeological signature, even without digging. Starting from the signature, from the ruins, if we collect the data in 3D, we can use it to reconstruct the entire building so we can show how the past was, how buildings were before being demolished and bring the past back to life. I do photogrammetry with this drone, basically capturing images, and we're going to map this morning, basically to complement the data that Nicolas is capturing with the GeoSLAM. I've seen early photographs, I've seen maps, and one of the things that I've learned is there's still so much that we don't know. It's amazing to see it come together like this. Wow, you can really see the size of Bodi. It looks so much bigger. You would have shops, mercantiles, barber shops, markets. I think at the height, there was about 60 saloons. There's some buildings that historians have documented, although there's some interpretation of this part of town, it's very minimal. So that's an area that really is screaming for more attention. I think this could be interesting. I mean, this is definitely some type of ruin, remains of a building. Come, come, come. This is a medicine bottle. That is so cool. These are distinctive Chinese medicine bottles. So they would contain liquid or pelletized pills. How awesome. One of the first places that the word of the discovery of gold makes it is Hawaii. And China, because that's where all the ships were going out of this west coast of California. It was way easier to get to places like that via boats than it was to get across the United States. So I can tell right now we're in a Chinese residence just by the suite of artifacts, just in this one little spot. This is so exciting. Somebody's house. This is the garbage of somebody's life. So this is pretty cool. Yeah. Even the Chinese, they had a name for California, Gold Mountain, because of the potential to go out and get rich. Come see, right here, another ruin. Oh yeah. You can see here, old foundation. It looks like dry stacked masonry and maybe there's some Chinese techniques in some of that architecture. Yeah, that's what we hope. So a Chinese miner coming out to look for a gold strike would come against several obstacles. One of them was in many areas, they were not allowed to stake a claim. Chinese immigrants can't buy houses or if you have a store, fine, you have to pay 50 bucks a month, even though nobody else does. It was just one thing after another, targeting this population to kind of prevent them from putting down roots. However, they figured workarounds. They would partner with folks. They would buy used claims. These folks persisted. They were not cowered in the corners. They were still building lives. They were still being successful. Places like Bodie, it's here. These stories are just waiting to be told. A more inclusive history is a more accurate way to tell American history. It's important to correct the story because we can only move forward by having a true understanding of what has been. There's running around in a circle thing is just a figment of imagination as a movie maker. Hollywood doesn't know anything about Hollywood. They don't know anything about what I just told you. When you get into the true history and realize how complex it is, it breaks the myth. It blows the myth up. But some myths have deep roots in the truth. Back in the 1920s, Hollywood wasn't just the entertainment hub of the world. It was California's crime capital. Somewhere out there, about three miles out on the ocean floor is a remnant from LA's past, a wrecked ship called the Monfalcone. She belonged to my great-grandfather. I read a lot about the Monfalcone, about how she sank under mysterious circumstances. I really just wanna find out what actually happened. My great-grandfather, Jack Dragna, was born in Corleone, Sicily and came to Los Angeles in 1915. He was a mob boss in Los Angeles for about a quarter century. He did business with Al Capone, Benjamin Bugsy Siegel, and had a little spat with Mickey Cohen. In 1928, he and several investors purchased an old fishing barge and they turned her into a floating casino. But less than two years later, the Monfalcone sank after a mysterious fire. We've always wondered, was this an accident or did something shady happen? Shipwrecks, sunken cities, sunken trains, sunken aircraft. If it sank, I probably don't know about it. Now I wanna find out what happened to J. Michael's great-granddaddy's ship. But shipwrecks don't give up their secrets easily and certainly the Monfalcone is no different. I'm hoping we can find some signs of what actually started the fire. But I don't think it's gonna be easy. The wreck is 72 feet down. The ship itself has collapsed. More of a massive jumble of timbers than a ship now. And it's also really overgrown. To try to figure out what happened to the Monfalcone, we have to get to know her a little better. It's tough to see her underwater, but easier if we can make a 3D model of her. Oh wow, this is wonderful. It really is amazing that there's this much structural detail still visible. Originally, she wasn't actually a barge at all, but something much more impressive. The Monfalcone was just a beautiful ship. Built in Orange, Texas in 1919. It was a Barkentine schooner rig. And then the foremast, a square rig. Amazing. It had its fair share of problems. In 1923, it was coming out of New Orleans and hit a hurricane. Completely dismastered her. Then it was towed 3,000 miles to Los Angeles. And that's when your great granddaddy bought it. For him, a dismastered ship was an ingenious solution to a problem. In 1920, a new law is introduced banning the sale of alcohol. But while gambling and drinking are illegal on land, it's a different story at sea. Racketeers, they're thinking, there's gotta be a way around this. Somebody had the bright idea of a barge. How about this palace out in the waters beyond the reach of law enforcement? It is a brilliant idea. You could gamble. You could have prostitutes. You could have liquor. They just didn't see any downside to it. The Montfalcone was one of these ships and they were kind of like Sin City afloat. By combining all the scan data, we can get a pretty good picture of what the Montfalcone looks like. Inside these casino ships were total Hollywood glitz. This is what the dance pavilion on the top deck was like. I didn't realize it was that big. They had 125-foot dance floors, a seven-piece orchestra, fine dining. It looks like we're below deck here, gambling parlor. This is the actual casino. On the lower deck, roulette wheels, craps, poker tables, slot machines, and chuck-a-lock. They put a lot of money into making this thing well-equipped for gamblers. Money was no object. It's all pretty fancy, but the gambling tables, the furnishings, it's all combustible. The ship's wooden hull was made watertight with rope soaked in tar. The Montfalcone was just a giant tinderbox waiting to go up in flames. Divers are trying to establish the cause of the fire that sank a Prohibition-era gambling ship that lies wrecked 10 miles off the Californian coast. How'd it go? I think I saw a picture of your great-grandmother. That's terrible. I still see all the wood planking, like a lumberyard. Did you guys find any fire damage? We could see a little bit, but not much. There's nothing there that identifies the cause of the fire or the sinking. I think I'm about as close to the Montfalcone as I'm ever gonna get, but I still don't feel any closer to safety. I'm solving the mystery of why she sank. If we look carefully at the wreck again, we can see that all that's left is the lower portion of the hull. The ship above the waterline is completely gone, and that can mean only one thing. The fire was so intense that it burnt through the Montfalcone right down to the waterline. Most of the ship's timbers were turned to carbon and the ocean just washed them away. All the wood on the ocean floor is from below the water. The fire couldn't reach it. That's why it shows no trace of burning. I've managed to unearth a lot, but there's still the question of how the fire got started. There are a lot of theories about what happened that night, about how she caught fire, and one of them is that it was insurance scam. You know, the owners were trying to make a quick buck. So I did some more research. Montfalcone, Montfalcone. And I was actually shocked to learn they weren't insured. They lost something like $115,000 in the ship alone. Well, there was also talk about a rivalry with the owners of the competing vessel, and that was the Joanna Smith and with the Montfalcone's investors. Berkeley Daily Gazette, May 22nd, 1930. Five men hijacked a water taxi and forced it over to the Montfalcone. Several shots were fired and then the raiders took possession of the vessel. It would not be outlandish for someone to set a fire to take out the competition. So was it sabotage? Well, survivors and eyewitnesses thought it was just a simple accident. A leaky generator, neglected maintenance. I mean, even the crew thought the ship was an accident just waiting to happen. Reports say the fire began below the decks. Inside the engine room, there was a leaky oil line, spark from the generator, ignited unsecured cans of gasoline. And in no time, it was all over. The fire on the Montfalcone, was it an accident? Was it deliberately set? I don't think we'll ever know for sure. The crime wave of the prohibition years sees a whole new era for Hollywood. Pulp fiction and crime movies thrived and gangsters and femme fatales became the new stars. During those tumultuous early decades of Hollywood, the boom of the 1920s, the bust of the Great Depression, Hollywood had to continually reinvent itself. It had to continually come up with new ideas and new genres, which included the biblical epic, the film noir and gangster pictures, and of course the war film. Unlike many other industries during the Great Depression, Hollywood was able to survive and continued to entertain the world into the second half of the 20th century and beyond.