"The Lost City of Cecil B. DeMille" officially kicks off the festival’s new “DOCtoberFest” series, which will feature six award-winning documentaries premiering over seven days.
Producer Daniel Coplan will lead a discussion and Q&A session after both screenings of “The Lost City of Cecil B. DeMille”. His co-producer and the director of the film Peter Brosnan will join the conversation via Skype.
In 1923, pioneer filmmaker Cecil. B. DeMille built the largest set in movie history for his silent (and early Technicolor) epic, “The Ten Commandments”. It was called “The City of the Pharaoh.”
When filming was completed, DeMille ordered that the entire edifice be dismantled and secretly buried. And there it lay, forgotten, for the next 60 years — the “lost city of Cecil B. DeMille.”
In 1983, a group of determined film buffs — inspired by a cryptic clue in DeMille's posthumously published Autobiography — located the remains of the set.
When filmmaker Peter Brosnan heard that there were ancient Egyptian Sphinxes buried somewhere in the California Dunes, it sparked his imagination and he embarked on what turned out to be a thirty-year battle to prove the existence of these Sphinxes and the discovery of the Lost City.
“The Lost City of Cecil B. DeMille” is a compelling story about two obsessed men. One, Cecil B. DeMille, who invented the way stories are told via the moving image and told the story of Moses twice; and, the other, Peter Brosnan obsessed with proving the existence of an ancient city in the middle of nowhere.
The film answers the question: Why did DeMille remake “The Ten Commandments?” And it is an iconic tale of a reluctant hero, who finally surrenders to his destiny and accepts that he was chosen to follow this quest and tell this story.
“What an extraordinary story. I thought I knew all there was to know about Peter Brosnan’s discovery of ‘The Ten Commandments’ set in the California desert, but I was wrong. While documenting his obsessive, thirty-year odyssey he also traces Cecil B. DeMille’s fascinating saga. The result is a rare combination of film and cultural history.” — Leonard Maltin
Enjoy the film and stay for the post-show Q&A discussion with producer Daniel Coplan (live) and co-producer/director Peter Brosnan (via Skype) after both shows.