A special 1920s-themed unveiling party will be held Friday, June 12, at 6:30 p.m. at the center. Tickets are $25 and can be purchased online at dunescenter.org . 
 
 The center at 1065 Guadalupe St. in Guadalupe is open Wednesday through Sunday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. 
 
 The Ten Commandments exhibit featuring a sphinx body and other artifacts will be on display at the Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes Center starting Saturday, June 13. 
 
 Less than a mile south of the Santa Barbara-San Luis Obispo county line sits a blue house with a secret: Inside rests a 92-year-old headless sphinx. 
 
 The plaster sphinx is a set piece left over from Cecil B. DeMille’s silent film epic, “The Ten Commandments,” which was filmed in the Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes in 1923. And now it lives in the unassuming Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes Center in Guadalupe. 
 
 The sphinx was recently removed from the dunes as part of a $120,000 excavation project and will be unveiled Friday in a new exhibit featuring the 10½-foot sphinx body, customized artwork, a separate sphinx head from a 2012 excavation and artifacts such as tobacco tins, bottles and photos from DeMille’s film set. 
 
 Lost in time 
 
 DeMille chose the Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes for the prologue of “The Ten Commandments” because of its similarity to the Egyptian desert. He constructed 100-foot-tall gates, four 35-foot pharaoh statues and 21 sphinxes; a temporary city camp also set up shop near the set to house the workers. 
 
 Though the camp was marketed as “wholesome” in contemporary newspaper articles, artifacts from the recent excavation show that workers still managed to sneak in contraband, Dunes Center Executive Director Doug Jenzen said. 
 
 “In reality, it looks like everyone was having a pretty good time,” he said. 
 
 Jenzen said a number of Guadalupe residents also were enlisted as extras for the movie — the center has several photos from the filming that it is asking locals to look through to identify relatives or friends. 
 
 After filming concluded, DeMille left the gigantic set out in the dunes for unknown reasons, even though he was under contract with Santa Barbara County to return the dunes to the state they had been in before filming, Jenzen said. 
 
 Some speculate that he went over budget and couldn’t afford to disassemble and truck the large sets back to Hollywood. Others say he simply didn’t want it being used again in other films (a common practice in the movie industry at the time). 
 
 Whatever the reason, the “Lost City of DeMille” was left to be covered up by the sands of time. 
 
 A ‘buffalo wing’ in the sand 
 
 In 1990, shifting winds uncovered parts of the set, and local historical and conservancy groups began a 25-year excavation of the site. 
 
 In 2012, the Dunes Center and San Luis Obispo-based archaeological firm Applied Earthworks Inc. uncovered parts of a giant sphinx head, which it took back to the center’s museum for restoration and display. 
 
 Initially, the center planned to return to the site to remove the rest of the sphinx’s body once it obtained more funding, Jenzen said. 
 
 When they returned in October 2014, however, Jenzen and his team found that the winds had moved the sand and exposed the plaster statue to the elements, spreading pieces everywhere and making it difficult to handle them. When they attempted to pull the statue from the sand, the pieces crumbled, he said. 
 
 “It’s just so sad when that happens; it just crumbles in your hands,” Jenzen said. “And then it’s frustration. It’s just a roller coaster of emotion.” 
 
 Luck was on their side, however, when Jenzen and Burbank-based art restorer Amy Higgins noticed what looked like a “giant white buffalo wing” in the sand, he said. 
 
 “It was just sticking out of the sand,” Jenzen said. “We pointed it out to the archaeologist and were like, ‘Hey, what is this thing?’ ” 
 
 After some excavation, the group uncovered “Nora,” a roughly 101⁄2-foot section of one of the 21 original sphinx statues that was soon named after Jenzen’s late grandmother. A portion of Nora’s back leg had been sticking out of the sands — the “buffalo wing” Jenzen and Higgins had spotted. 
 
 Nora on view 
 
 Nora looks a little worse for wear compared with the shining white spectacle she once was. Through the cracks and plaster, a bullet hole is evident in her stomach, as well as some graffiti that says, “May 1930.” Her head and front legs are still somewhere under the dunes.But that doesn’t lessen the excitement for Higgins, who has spent the past year painstakingly piecing Nora back together for the exhibit. 
 
 “I hesitate to say we’ve ‘restored’ her,” Higgins said as she pulled back a plastic tarp covering the sphinx body last week. “Restore implies that you are going to see something looking brand new, like we would take it back to its primo condition in 1923, but that’s not what we wanted to do here. We wanted it to look like an artifact.” 
 
 The rest of Nora may still be underneath the sands, and Jenzen said he hopes to get back out there in October and excavate the top half of the sphinx before it can be exposed to the air like the other excavated sphinx. 
 
 To do that, the Dunes Center is looking for about $85,000 to fund the next phase of excavation. 
 
 In the meantime, Nora and several other artifacts from the site — including tobacco tins, “cough syrup” bottles, a piece of preserved burnt toast from the film camp, the 2012 restored sphinx head and several photos from the film set — will be on display at the Dunes Center starting Saturday. The new exhibit will also feature art-deco themed travel posters created by artist Steve Thomas. 
 
 The center will hold a 1920s-themed unveiling party for the new exhibit on Friday. 
 
 “It’s really great,” Jenzen said of the project. “Even though (the set) is a replica of Ancient Egypt, it’s, you know, our own local version of Ancient Egypt. It’s a piece of the local history.” ||||| After spending more than 90 years in the sandy dunes of Guadalupe, California, a majestic plaster Hollywood sphinx, created for the 1923 blockbuster silent film "The Ten Commandments," is making its 21st century debut. 
 
 Researchers excavated the fragile plaster of Paris sphinx from the dunes in 2014, and let it dry for several months before art restorers used Elmer's Glue to piece it back together. It's now housed at the Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes Center in Southern California, and goes on display for the public tomorrow evening (June 12). 
 
 "It's been pretty phenomenal," said Doug Jenzen, the executive director of the Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes Center. "We're putting the final touches on the exhibit right now." [See Photos of the Old and Refurbished Hollywood Sphinxes] 
 
 The sphinx and its companions were the brainchild of director Cecil B. DeMille and his film crew. The silent movie had an enormous set to show the grandeur of Pharaoh's City, which was lined with 21 regal sphinxes, each standing 35 feet (11 meters) tall when they were on their pedestals. 
 
 Artifacts left by the crew suggest they had a good time on the set while making the movie. Archaeologists found tobacco tins and medicine bottles — the latter likely a ruse that carried moonshine because "The Ten Commandments" was filmed during America's Prohibition Era (1920-1933), when alcohol wasn't allowed, Jenzen said. 
 
 After filming ended, the crew apparently left the movie set to the elements. The statues were weathered by the rain, fog and wind and eventually buried by the sand on the ever-shifting dunes. 
 
 "In the process of putting [the sphinx] back together, the art restorer also found graffiti on it that said 'May 1930,'" Jenzen told Live Science. "It corresponds to all of the photos we have of people in the 1930s going out to the dunes and posing with these Egyptian statues that are sticking out of the sand." 
 
 The researchers also found evidence that people used the sphinxes for target practice, Jenzen said. They also uncovered a burned piece of toast, likely from an uneaten 1920s sandwich. 
 
 "Somehow this piece of toast made it through the elements of being exposed," Jenzen said. "It's definitely not edible anymore." 
 
 Sphinx restoration 
 
 Artifacts stay better preserved under dry desert conditions. But Guadalupe is naturally humid, giving researchers a unique challenge. 
 
 "The minute the plaster statuary is exposed to the humidity in the air, it turns to mush and crumbles," Jenzen said. "So you need to have a team of people there who are able to pull the sand away and excavate it all simultaneously." 
 
 The team works to repair damage from more than nine decades in the desert. Credit: Dunes Center, Guadalupe, CA. 
 
 But hiring a large crew of people is expensive; the small team involved only had time to excavate part of the sphinx — half of its chest and hind legs. [Photos: Uncovering Sphinxes from 1923 'The Ten Commandments'] 
 
 They also excavated it in a very California-like way. They wrapped the plaster in foam and pillows to protect it, and the placed it on plywood that had surfboards underneath it. 
 
 "The surfboards acted as sleds," Jenzen said. "It's an ecologically sensitive area and we couldn't have any cars or vehicles on it." 
 
 They let the partial sphinx sit inside for several months, letting it dry out and shrink to its original size. Then, restorers spent about five weeks piecing the chucks together with Elmer's Glue, largely because it's reversible, said Amy Higgins, an art restorer who worked on the sphinx. 
 
 The sphinx was in about 50 pieces, and she called "the fragility of it" the most challenging part. But now it sits about 10.5 feet long, 4.5 feet high and 3.5 feet deep, (3.2 by 1.4 by 1 meters). 
 
 In the meantime, researchers took a trip to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Beverly Hills, and ended up looking through about 1,500 photographs that DeMille had taken of the set so they would have a better idea of the sphinxes' production, Jenzen said. 
 
 "There's one picture that we found, it's kind of funny. It's a bunch of guys going to work one morning out in the dune, and the whole dune was just littered with sphinx parts." 
 
 The new exhibit will show photos from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, as well as the sphinx body, and a sphinx face and paw. 
 
 After seeing the exhibit, enthusiasts may also want to see "The Lost City of Cecil B. DeMille," a new movie about the making of the movie by Peter Brosnan, Jenzen said. They can also see a paw of another sphinx that the researchers mailed to the U.S. Department of the Interior's POP! Exhibit in Washington, D.C., he added. 
 
 Follow Laura Geggel on Twitter @LauraGeggel. Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science. ||||| "If 1,000 years from now, archaeologists happen to dig beneath the sands of Guadalupe, I hope they will not rush into print with the amazing news that Egyptian civilization, far from being confined to the valley of the Nile, extended all the way to the Pacific coast of North America." 
 
 -- "The Autobiography of Cecil B. DeMille," 1959 
 
 For 90 years, the shifting sands of the Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes have concealed a secret: the remains of a massive movie set and tent city constructed for one of Hollywood's most influential filmmakers. 
 
 Part of an 18-mile stretch of California's Central Coast, the site just south of the border between San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara counties served as a key location in Cecil B. DeMille's 1923 film "The Ten Commandments." But as memories of the production faded, DeMille's plaster-and-concrete metropolis vanished. 
 
 "DeMille buried a virtual cinema museum in the Guadalupe Dunes, and we've just begun mining that treasure," said Los Angeles filmmaker Peter Brosnan, whose upcoming documentary, tentatively titled "The Lost City of Cecil B. DeMille," details his decades-long quest to locate and excavate the remains of the "Ten Commandments" set. 
 
 Now some of those long-lost treasures will be displayed for the first time at the Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes Center in Guadalupe. They'll be unveiled June 14. 
 
 "There's definitely an intrigue about those buried artifacts," said Doug Jenzen, Dunes Center executive director. 
 
 
 
 
 
 Renowned for its enormous cast, monumental sets and groundbreaking special effects, "The Ten Commandments" pairs the Biblical story of Moses leading his people out of Egypt and into the Promised Land with the modern-day tale of two brothers vying for the same woman. 
 
 "For this project, DeMille needed the desert and he needed the Red Sea," Brosnan said, but filming in the Middle East was deemed too expensive. "Guadalupe offered everything he needed visually." 
 
 Famous Players-Lasky Corp., now Paramount Pictures, approved a production budget of $750,000 -- a substantial sum rivaled only by the budget for 1923's "The Covered Wagon" -- and leased land from the now-defunct Union Sugar Company. 
 
 In May 1923, construction began on DeMille's City of the Pharaohs. Roughly 1,500 workmen, most of them local, spent six weeks building an ancient Egyptian city designed by Paul Iribe, one of the founders of the Art Deco movement. 
 
 Four 35-foot-tall statues of Ramses II guarded a 110-foot gate, while 21 sphinxes, each weighing five tons, lined the avenue leading up to the entrance. "This was all before the age of computer-generated images. You wanted a big city, you had to build a big city," Brosnan explained. 
 
 The tent city, constructed to house and feed more than 2,000 cast and crew members, was no less impressive. U.S. Army soldiers stationed at the now-closed Presidio of San Francisco handled logistics such as supplies and transportation. 
 
 According to Robert S. Birchard, past president of the preservation organization Hollywood Heritage Inc. and president of the Society for Cinephiles, poor weather and other factors pushed the production over budget and behind schedule, forcing DeMille seek help from Italian-American banker A.P. Giannini. The final price tag for the film, which premiered at Grauman's Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood on Dec. 4, 1923, was $1.4 million. 
 
 Fortunately, "The Ten Commandments" grossed more than $4 million, Birchard said, making it one of the most successful films of the silent era. Thanks to the movie, "There was a market again for large-scale roadshow productions that would run in a single theater for months on end," he said. 
 
 DeMille would go on to make three more Biblical epics -- 1927's "The King of Kings," 1932's "The Sign of the Cross" and 1949's "Samson and Delilah" -- before revisiting the story of Moses in his final film, 1956's "The Ten Commandments." "(That story) certainly serves to almost bookend his career," said Richard Adkins, Hollywood Heritage vice president and collections manager of the Hollywood Heritage Museum. 
 
 Brosnan first encountered the legend of "The Ten Commandments" in 1982 while living in Los Angeles with a fellow New York University graduate. 
 
 "One night -- I seem to recall there was some beer involved -- he told me this crazy story about Cecil B. DeMille burying sphinxes in the middle of California," Brosnan recalled. "We thought, 'What a great idea for a documentary film. We'll find it, dig it up, film it, interview some of the people who worked on it.'" 
 
 He contacted the owners of Far Western Tavern in Guadalupe, who arranged for a friend to show him the site in June 1983. "There were acres of faux bas relief Egyptian statuary sticking up out of the sand," Brosnan said, much of it uncovered by a stormy El Niño winter. 
 
 "And that was when I realized he buried more than sphinxes, he buried the whole set." 
 
 So why did DeMille choose to bulldoze his set, rather than truck it back to Los Angeles? 
 
 "I think there were two things were going on," Brosnan said, starting with DeMille's pledge to leave the site as he'd found it. "Hauling away all that statuary would have been very expensive ... so I think he pulled a fast one and buried it." 
 
 In addition, he said, "(DeMille) knew that if he left it standing ... the very next day somebody would be there filming a quickie on his set and they'd be on the streets with it in a few weeks. He was protecting his patent by taking it down." 
 
 Either way, Brosnan was determined to unearth the filmmaker's secrets. In 1990, he and archeologist John Parker led an archeological survey of the site using ground-penetrating radar. 
 
 "We expected to go back the following year" to dig, Brosnan recalled. By the time they sorted out permit issues with Santa Barbara County's Planning and Development Department, however, two years had passed and funding had dried up. 
 
 "The project died," he said. "At that point, Parker and I pretty much gave up on it.... We went on with our lives." 
 
 Over the next two decades, Brosnan earned his license in clinical psychology, married and started a family. But interest in "The Ten Commandments" refused to wane. 
 
 "What happened was something we hadn't counted on: Reporters kept calling.This had become an evergreen story," Brosnan said. In March 2010, a couple days after the Los Angeles Times ran an article about the project, he got a call from a woman in Austin, Texas, who offered to help fund the $175,000 excavation. 
 
 "One business day before we were going to start work (in September 2011), (Planning and Development) decided they made a mistake and they killed the project," Brosnan said. "We had to start from scratch." 
 
 In October 2012, Brosnan returned to the dunes with an archeological team from Applied EarthWorks, Inc., in San Luis Obispo. "To finally see things coming out of the sand ... was great," said the filmmaker, noting that most were in "very good shape." 
 
 Once those artifacts are cleaned, dried and coated with a special casing that allows them to be exhibited under glass, they'll take their place at the Dunes Center, one of the excavation's longtime supporters. Already featured in the "Lost City of DeMille" exhibit are faux Egyptian coins, scraps of wooden furniture and pieces of plaster sphinxes, as well as cough syrup bottles, tobacco tins and photos taken on the set by ethnologist and photographer Edward S. Curtis. 
 
 The rest of the "Ten Commandments" movie set and tent city remains shielded from treasure hunters, vandals and the elements by a blanket of sand. 
 
 The still-buried artifacts also enjoy the protection of a threatened bird species, the western snowy plover. In addition to driftwood and seaweed, "They've decided that movie set artifacts also make a good home," Jenzen said, which means the site is off-limits during nesting season, March through late September. 
 
 According to Brosnan, the "Ten Commandments" artifacts represent some of the rarest relics of the silent film era. "There's almost nothing (left), and that's part of the tragedy," he said, noting that an estimated 90 percent of silent films are lost. "Imagine if we had lost half of everything Hemingway wrote. We would recognize it as a huge cultural loss. We have that cultural loss with our movie history." 
 
 Now, at least, the legacy of "The Ten Commandments" will live on. 
 
 
 
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 Top image: Guadalupe stood in ancient Egypt in Cecil B. DeMille's 1923 Biblical epic "The Ten Commandments." Courtesy of the Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes Center.
– After months of painstaking work in the sands of California, archaeologists have managed to restore a sphinx and other relics from a lost age—1920s Hollywood. The sphinx, one of 21 used in Cecil B. DeMille's 1923 movie The Ten Commandments, has been restored after it was excavated from California's Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes. DeMille left an enormous set buried there, but what the San Luis Obispo Tribune calls the "Lost City of DeMille" started to be uncovered as sands shifted in the 1990s. The relic goes on display at a nearby cultural center today, and LiveScience notes that in humid conditions, working with the plaster sphinx archaeologists call Nora wasn't easy and she's not quite as good as new: There's a bullet hole in her stomach, as well as graffiti reading "May 1930," and her head—along with the rest of her top half—is still in the sands. Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes Center Executive Director Doug Jenzen tells the Tribune that after the first sphinx they tried to remove crumbled, they spotted what looked like a "giant white buffalo wing" sticking out of the sand and found Nora. He notes that other artifacts on display, including tobacco tins and "cough syrup" bottles that probably held bootleg liquor, show that a lot of people had a "pretty good time" making the silent film. Also on display: a blackened piece of toast from the film camp. "It's definitely not edible anymore," Jenzen says. The 10.5-foot-long sphinx body, the toast, and a sphinx head found during a previous excavation will be unveiled at a 1920s-themed party tonight, reports the Lompoc Record. (Relics from a much earlier age were torched during a Burning Man festival in Israel.)