Guadalupe is the Zelig of the Central Coast -- a speck on California Highway 1 that has had more than its share of brushes with history. Portola's expedition passed through in the 1700s. Father Junipero Serra brought the first cattle. Lt. Col. John Fremont and his troops camped in town in the mid-1800s and accidentally torched its oldest adobe.In 1923, Cecil B. DeMille came to the Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes on California's Central Coast and built a movie set that still captures the imagination -- a colossal Egyptian dreamscape for the silent movie version of "The Ten Commandments."
"If 1,000 years from now archaeologists happen to dig beneath the sands of Guadalupe," DeMille wrote, "I hope they will not rush into print with the amazing news that Egyptian civilization . . . extended all the way to the Pacific coast of North America." ...
... Peter Brosnan was a 30-year-old New York University film school graduate when he first heard the story in 1982. ...
... Captivated, Brosnan embarked on a journey that has yet to end -- a quest to find DeMille's set, exhume it and produce a documentary about this unusual piece of Hollywood history. ...
... Brosnan also collected stories from locals about the dozens of films shot outside Guadalupe from the silent era to the 1940s -- a time when the dunes were Hollywood's backlot for desert movies and ranch hands had fleeting encounters with Rudolph Valentino, Douglas Fairbanks, Gary Cooper and Marlene Dietrich.
... A steady trickle of film buffs find their way to the Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes Center, where chunks of DeMille's set are on display, including a bas-relief of a pharaoh's head reassembled by Brosnan's team.
The center recently put out a news release announcing that Brosnan's documentary would be released this summer. This made Brosnan nervous, since he is still talking to Paramount about getting permission to use clips from "The Ten Commandments." ...
Digging up a piece of Hollywood history, by Mike Anton of The Los Angeles Times.
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