Unearthing the 'Lost City of Cecil B. DeMille': A filmmaker's decades-long journey to find 'Ten Commandments' site
Gwynne Watkins
September 29, 2017
When recent film-school graduate Peter Brosnan learned that the set of Cecil B. DeMille’s 1923 epic The Ten Commandments was buried in the sand dunes of central California, he thought his next documentary would be “a slam dunk.” He and his friends decided to hire an archaeologist, unearth DeMille’s life-size replica of an ancient Egyptian city, and interview locals who had worked on the silent film, creating a unique portrait of Hollywood’s formative years. This was in 1982. On Oct. 3, 2017, Brosnan’s long-gestating documentary, The Lost City of Cecil B. DeMille, will be released on digital and VOD. Why did it him take more than 30 years to make this film? That is half the story of the documentary, which is basically the movie that Brosnan originally envisioned, interwoven with three and a half decades of thwarted attempts to excavate DeMille’s giant sphinxes and Art Deco statuary from the sands of Guadalupe, Calif.
https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/unearthing-lost-city-demille-filmmakers-journey-find-ten-commandments-site-184419682.html
