The set was one of the silent era’s most extravagant. A thousand laborers needed a month to turn a half million feet of lumber into a facsimile of an Egyptian town. Gates to the pharaoh’s city were 10 stories tall and decorated in bas-reliefs. Twenty-one plaster sphinxes, five tons each, lined the avenue. DeMille who’d already spent $1.4 million on the production, noted in his autobiography that he’d left the props rather than haul them back to Hollywood. Older area residents are skeptical. They say pieces were hauled away years ago. If so, Brosnan’s project may be more like Capone’s vault than Tut’s tomb.
