Back in the day, they didn’t have things like “CGI” and “special effects.” If a script called for, say, a giant sphynx, you had to build that sphynx. Luckily, everyone went to the movies all the time back then so the studios had lots of money to waste on that kind of thing. In 1923, Cecil B. Demille built the largest film set ever at the time in Guadalupe, CA outside Santa Maria for his epic The Ten Commandments. When they finished shooting, rather than pay what it would cost to transport the whole thing back to Hollywood, they just buried it and/or left it there. And now, archaeologists have uncovered a 15-foot-tall, 91-year-old sphynx that was once a prop.
The gist of it is that archaeologists are now digging up our fake history which is old enough that it has become real history, which feels like it should be a metaphor or something.
The roughly 15-foot-tall (4.6 meters) sphinx is one of 21 that lined the path to Pharaoh’s City in the 1923 silent hit, directed by Cecil B. DeMille. He later remade the film, with Charlton Heston as Moses, in 1956.
The facade to Pharaoh’s City stood an estimated 12 stories tall and about 720 feet (219 meters) across. “It’s giant,” Jenzen said.
Legend has it that after filming ended, the movie crew dynamited the set and buried the sphinxes in a trench, but Jenzen has found little evidence of such a dramatic end. Instead, the wind, rain and sand likely collapsed and buried a large part of the set under the ever-shifting dunes. The sphinxes are in roughly the same place they were during filming, he said.
The Sphynx is currently being restored, and will reportedly be available for viewings in mid to late 2015. Meanwhile, it seems Hollywood was always a den of sin:
The first excavation took place in the 1990s, when the Dunes Center, then a part of the Nature Conservancy, had archaeologists comb through the abandoned movie site. They found dozens of small artifacts, including tobacco tins and cough syrup bottles — likely holding a substitute for alcohol during the Prohibition Era, which lasted from 1920 to 1933, Jenzen said.
“What objects like that tell us is that there wasn’t a whole lot to do at the making of this movie,” he said. “These guys had a lot of really good times before takes.” [LiveScience]
I can’t wait until they uncover the ancient orgy grounds. The petrified merkin forest, as I like to call it. They had 2500 people working on that film and used jello for parts of the parting of the Red Sea sequence, I guarantee you some of them were getting weird.