NARRATOR: Remnants of a lost city, buried in the sand.
KELVIN: Finding anything in that environment,
it's like looking for a needle in a haystack.
MARY: This is the front paw of the sphinx.
What's surprising is the size of it.
NARRATOR: Giant statues and the ruins of a Pharaoh's palace.
But this is not the Egyptian Desert, it's California.
JONATHAN: The sets were the biggest that had ever been built.
NARRATOR: When you drain Hollywood.
KELVIN: This is Hollywood history.
NARRATOR: Nothing is what it seems.
DOUG: This is in phenomenal shape.
You'll never see anything like this anywhere else.
MARY: It was beautiful.
KELVIN: But, could we save it?
This is a story that beggar's 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 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 auto biography of Cecil B DeMille
and he'd found a line which really intrigued him,
"If a thousand 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
of 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 a 160 mi north west of Hollywood,
up on the central coast of California.
Their hearts must have dropped because those dunes stretched
for 18, 20 mi up the coast.
Finding any semblance of a film set in that environment,
it's like looking for a needle in a haystack.
NARRATOR: Refusing to give up, they decide to try again, two years later.
KELVIN: 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.
I was so excited.
It was going to be a really exciting ride.
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. It 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?
JONATHAN: The movies are my life.
I've lived life with the movies and through the movies.
I got into movies first when I was in elementary school.
After school, I'd watch the classics of the Hollywood cinema.
The films, of course, were in black and white in those days; wonderful dialogue,
glamorous stars, fabulous stories.
Cecil B DeMille's, The Ten Commandments, was a real landmark in cinema history.
By the mid 1920's, 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.
KELVIN: 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 ft 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 used it as a nesting area;
the snowy plover it lays its eggs on the ground, the permits,
you can't disturb the nesting sites.
No vehicles on the dunes, there was a minefield of red tape.
It's very difficult to.
There are no mechanical devices are allowed.
We got close to giving up several times.
NARRATOR: 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.
MARY: I have been working as an historical
archaeologist for a lot of years when it was
suggested that I might be able to work on the lost city project.
I said, "Absolutely, let's go for it."
The primary goal was to locate one of the sphinxes
and to preserve it as a legacy of Hollywood.
When we started, we found very small pieces, as if it had been blown up.
JONATHAN: DeMille was very conscious of the idea
that he didn't want to leave those sets
standing around, so other film makers 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.
MARY: We could only find bits and pieces.
The question was, "Could we find anything of DeMille's set still intact?"
for the remains of a massive 1920's movie set.
MARY: 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 a 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.
DOUG: One of the exciting finds was this make-up tin
showing that people did use make-up pigment.
It would have closed something like this and opened like this,
it looks like there's still remnants of some of the grease on the interior.
This is an Eastman Kodak film canister.
The EAS here is an identifying marker that let us
know it is a film canister from 1923.
JONATHAN: In the Ten Commandments, in the great sequence of the Exodus,
we have shots that are done in Technicolor, with two primary colors.
DeMille is one of the very, very first major film makers to put
Technicolor sequences into his film,
and they're really quite striking.
MARY: As exciting as these discoveries were,
nothing really prepared us for what we found next.
DOUG: 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.
RYAN: 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.
JONATHAN: This set was an amazing undertaking.
DeMille had to create everything from scratch, in somewhat,
kind of, harsh circumstances, on sand dunes, in bad weather.
MARY: It looks like we have virtually the whole thing.
DOUG: It's incredible. MARY: More than I expected.
DOUG: You'll never see anything like this again, ever, anywhere else.
KELVIN: The set was 800 ft long, it had 20 five
tonne sphinxes laid out in a double phalanx
out from the gates of the Pharaoh's City, and this one seemed much more intact.
MARY: The next challenge became how to remove it and preserve it.
DeMille's set was created of plaster, framed around wooden framework,
and as soon as you exposed it to the air, the chemistry began to change,
and it began to crumble, and to fall apart.
AMY: I never would have thought I'd be digging up Egyptian statuary
in the dunes of southern California.
I'm a building restoration artist in Hollywood, working on historic buildings,
movie palaces for 20 years.
I was brought into the project because of my plaster restoration experience.
This is the scary party 'cause I don't want to go too deep.
We tried various different ways to stabilize the plaster in the field.
We used B-72, acrylic resin, we brushed this on and used gauze.
It wasn't working out very well.
The plaster is so soft. This is to try to stop it.
It can be damaged just by a brush, or your hand,
and the gauze wouldn't actually hold the piece together.
So, we improvised.
We found that using expandable insulation foam,
commonly used to insulate houses,
was a great tool in the field,
a support to get larger pieces out of the sand.
MARY: After having worked the last few years with just pieces here and there,
to see the whole reveal is just incredible.
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,
it had just seconds been exposed,
just incredible.
It was beautiful.
KELVIN: The enormity of this project gives me goosebumps today.
DOUG: The local museum in Guadalupe now has a dedicated display
and the sphinx that we excavated is now a centerpiece
of the Dune Centre's exhibits.
But we still had a big question, "What would it have been like
to be on DeMille's movie set in 1923?"
JONATHAN: 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 ft tall.
The materials required were enormous; over half a million feet of lumber,
25,000 lbs. of nails, 75 mi of cable. 300 tons of plaster.
There were 500 tons of elaborate sculptures.
Over 20 sphinxes.
There were four massive statues of the Pharaoh Rameses,
each 35 ft tall and weighing, 39 tons.
Cast and crew, numbered at least 35 hundred men, 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 75 hundred sandwiches,
25 hundred apples and oranges and 400 gallons of coffee.
5000 animals were used on the set.
Photo Play Magazine called it, "The greatest theatrical spectacle in history."
MARY: 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.
DOUG: While walking the site, we found segments of wire such as this.
We know it's a very windy area. Is this a clue?
MARY: 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.
DOUG: And you would have needed industrial cable such as this
to stabilize the large statuary and keep it standing upright.
MARY: 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.
NARRATOR: 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 1920's, Hollywood boomed.
JONATHAN: But of course, we all know this is gonna end.
In 1929, the Stock Market is going to 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.
JOAN: Everyone was terrified. Would Hollywood make it?
Would the film industry survive?
one industry in Los Angeles is finding new ways to survive,
on land and sea.
DANNY: There are more than a thousand shipwrecks
that lie off the coast of California.
It's become kind of a passion for me to investigate,
search out, find them.
The ocean has been my life all my life.
I started diving with my dad when I was really young in the early 70's
where I grew up in a 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'd never expected to see.
This wreck is about 10 mi off the coast of long beach.
It's in 135 to 140 ft, 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 like and 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 mi off of Long Beach?"
KEVIN: I'm a, Lieutenant Commander, in the US Navy Reserve.
When I was active duty, I served aboard two warships.
Now I own a marine exploration company,
and we go and search for lost ship and aircraft wrecks.
MELODIE: I work with Kevin as a, Spatial Scientist,
we use remote sensing and photogrammetry to study coastal environments.
So, I specialize in meteorology, oceanography
and even things like shipwrecks.
To create a photogrammetry model, we take a video using an ROV, an underwater robot.
And we extract thousands of photographs,
and put them together to create a three D model.
We can start to see things maybe we wouldn't have seen diving underwater.
The question is, what will it show us?
The cool thing about this photogrammetry model is that
we can manipulate the wreck and look at it
from a bird's eye view, or turn it around.
DANNY: That is really cool.
MELODIE: Can see this wreck has been down here a long time.
You can see some of the growth on portions of the wreck.
DANNY: Can we zoom in on this little area right here?
MELODIE: Sure. DANNY: Right here, look at that.
There's a really clear, there's a gun mount right there.
MELODIE: Oh yeah. DANNY: Wow. Look at that.
Can we go up to, like, the bow section? MELODIE: Yeah.
DANNY: Right there, that's the torpedo too.
I'm at a loss for words for that really.
So, this clearly looks like a warship, but, what kind?
And what is she doing here?
During my next dive, we started exploring further,
and more than a 100 ft away, from 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 super structure.
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 the massive warship,
blown in two pieces, on the ocean floor,
indications of a huge explosion and there had been no U.S.
destroyers sunk of the coast of California in either World War One or World War Two.
So, what caused that?
MELODIE: So, this is where the break is, let's get a good angle here.
You can really see that the metal has been pushed out and not in.
DANNY: If it was to be hit by a torpedo, the metal would have been pushed in.
So, it wasn't the victim of an attack of an enemy submarine.
It just didn't make sense.
just off the coast of, Long Beach, California.
But how and why did it sink?
DANNY: 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 US Naval vessel, the USS. Moody,
a Clemson Class Destroyer, a sub hunter, built in, Squantum,
Massachusetts in 1919.
Everything about her seemed to match the ship I'd been diving on,
but 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.
JONATHAN: 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.
DANNY: You know, the wood I'd 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 US Navy destroyer so it looked like
a world war one German warship.
JONATHAN: And then they blew it up and sunk it on camera for the film.
(explosion)
DANNY: It's not easy to sink a real warship like this, so, how did they do it?
MELODIE: So, if we take this 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.
DANNY: It broke right there, between those two boilers, three and four.
MELODIE: Hmm mm.
KEVIN: So, what the model makes clear is that
the explosive charges were set in the boiler room.
(explosion)
This first set of explosives was designed
to create a massive explosion to simulate torpedo hits,
and severed the ship in two hull 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.
DANNY: Turns out the USS Moody wasn't the only ship
that Hollywood used to make movies in the 20's and the 30's.
About 25 mi 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 'em the, Hollywood Navy.
JONATHAN: Of course, with the stock market crash,
in 1929, the Hollywood majors had to completely
reorganise 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.
NARRATOR: It is creative gambles like these
that keep audiences flocking to theatres, despite the economic depression.
JOAN: Gambling was the life blood of Hollywood's movie moguls.
Where there's a lot of money, there are gonna be people there
who wanna separate you from that money;
bookies, racketeers, gangsters,
they all flooded into Hollywood like bees to honey.
They knew that there was a big pot and they couldn't wait.
MICHAEL: Back in the 1920's,
Hollywood wasn't just the entertainment hub of the world,
it was California's crime capital.
Somewhere out there, about 3 mi 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'd read a lot about the Monfalcone,
about how she sank under mysterious circumstances,
I really just wanna find out what actually happened.
This is my great grandfather, Jack Dragna, he was born in Corleone,
Sicily and came to Los Angeles in 1915.
He was the 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.
I've always wondered was this an accident, or did something shady happen?
DAVID: Ship wrecks, sunken cities, sunken trains,
sunken aircraft, if it's sank, I've probably dove on it.
Now I wanna find out what happened to J. Michael's great grand-daddy'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 ft 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.
MICHAEL: Oh, wow.
This is wonderful.
DAVID: 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-rigged,
and then the foremasts and square-rigged. MICHAEL: Amazing.
DAVID: It had its fair share of problems.
In 1923, it was coming out of New Orleans and hit a hurricane,
it completely dismasted her.
Then it was towed 3,000 miles to Los Angeles,
and that's when your great grand-daddy bought it.
For him a demisted ship was an ingenious solution to a problem.
NARRATOR: 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.
JOAN: 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 can have liquor.
They just didn't see any downside to it.
The Monfalcone was one of these ships
and they were, kind of, like, sin city afloat.
DAVID: By combining all the scan data, we can get a pretty good picture
of what the Monfalcone looks like.
Inside, these casino ships were total Hollywood glitz.
This is what the dance pavilion on the top deck was like.
MICHAEL: I didn't realize it was that big.
DAVID: They had a 125 ft dance floors, a seven-piece orchestra, fine dining.
MICHAEL: It looks like we're below deck here, gambling parlor.
DAVID: This is the actual casino, on the lower deck; roulette wheels, craps,
poker tables, slot machines and chuck-a-luck.
MICHAEL: They put a lot of money into making this thing well equipped for gamblers.
DAVID: 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 ropes soaked in tar.
The Monfalcone was just a giant tinderbox waiting to go up in flames.
of the fire that sank a prohibition era
gambling ship that lies wrecked, 10 mi off the Californian coast.
MICHAEL: How'd it go?
MAN: I think I saw a picture of your great-grandmother.
DAVID: (laughs) That was terrible.
STEVE: You could still see all the wood planking.
It looks like a lumber yard.
MICHAEL: Did you guys find any fire damage?
MAN: We could see a little bit, but not much.
STEVE: There's nothing there that identifies the cause of the fire or the sinking.
MICHAEL: I think I'm as close to the Monfalcone as I'm ever going to get,
but I still don't feel any closer to solving the mystery of why she sank.
DAVID: 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 Monfalcone,
right down to the waterline.
(explosions)
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 line,
the fire couldn't reach it.
That's why it shows no trace of burning.
MICHAEL: I've managed to unearth a lot,
but there's still the question of how the fire got started.
There's a lot of theories about what happened the night
about how she caught fire and one of them
is that it was an insurance scam,
you know, the owners were trying to make a quick buck.
So, I did some more research.
Monfalcone, Monfalcone.
And I was actually shocked to learn they weren't insured.
They lost something, like, a 115,000 in the ship alone.
Well, there is also talk about a rivalry
with the owners of the competing vessel and that was the, Johanna Smith,
and with The Monfalcone's investors.
Berkeley Daily Gazette, May 22nd 1930, "Five men hijacked a water
taxi and forced it over to the Monfalcone.
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,
a spark from the generator, ignited unsecured cans of gasoline
and, in no time, (explosion) it was all over.
JOAN: The fire on the Monfalcone, was it an accident?
Was it deliberately set?
I don't think we'll ever know for sure.
NARRATOR: The crimewave 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.
JONATHAN: 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 has 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.
(explosion)
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.
Captioned by SubTitlePro LLC