Once upon a time, Katharine Hepburn lived in an estate at 1330 Angelo Drive in Beverly Hills. Known as “Misty Mountain,” the abode was down the road and across the serpentine, secluded street from her pal Frances Marion's equally majestic pad, “Enchanted Hill,” at 1441 Angelo Drive.
That rich Hollywood history is at the center of a new micro-budget feature currently shooting around the corner in Bel Air, at the Beverly Glen Blvd. home of writer-director Graham H. Green. Tentatively titled Katharine Hepburn Project, the comedy-drama is all about a UCLA film archivist (Jacqueline Sherrard) and her boyfriend (John Omohundro) getting wrapped up in the idea of tracking down Hepburn's long lost cigarette case, a possibly enchanted object lingering on the Angelo Drive property.
“This film actually started because I wanted to make another movie, but I didn’t want to raise money or do any of the things that make filmmaking grueling,” Green tells FilmStew via telephone. “So I decided I would write a movie I could shoot largely in my guesthouse, with my own gear.”
“My first thought was something very producible: a bad guy checks into an Airbnb and threatens the owners,” he continues, noting that he does indeed, in real life, rent the guesthouse out on Airbnb. “Then I thought, the world really doesn’t need another story about bad people doing bad things to each other.”
“Over the years, I had learned that Katharine Hepburn used to live just up the hill, and may have hidden something on the property. The guesthouse became the neighborhood, the neighborhood led into old Hollywood, and suddenly this deliberately tiny production became a story about Hepburn, lost history, imagination, love and the strange way the past contains the magic that can transform our future.”
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| Green's Beverly Glen guesthouse (photo by Chiuling Chen) |
When Green spoke with FilmStew, it was on the heels of his latest rehearsal session with his stars Sherrard and Omohundro on a Saturday afternoon. It's not every indie feature that takes the time to rehearse, but in Green's case, he has been carefully sprinkling in such sessions across production.
He's currently about a third of the way through shooting and plans to complete principal photography by the end of the year. Along with the guesthouse, locations also include Green's main house, a park and some sort of stand-in for the old Prohibition-era tunnels once used in his neighborhood to smuggle booze up to the big houses. Cinematography duties for Katharine Hepburn Project are being handled by Green's longtime pal Dave Scardina, who most recently was a second unit director and DP on the Netflix series Clickbait.
“I reached out to The Kate [in Connecticut] and they sent me an actual hand-drawn map done by Hepburn of Misty Mountain, that we're using in the film,” Green reveals. “She actually drew a little map of where she hid the cigarette case.”
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| Green, covering the Oscars in his CNN days |
Green, who worked from 2001 to 2019 in Atlanta and then Los Angeles as a lighting director for CNN, got going in the feature film game with the 1999 low-budget effort The Man Who Spoke to Himself. He also came close to a much bigger Hollywood project.
“I had sold a screenplay at the time to Joe Pytka, who did Space Jam and tons of commercials,” he recalls. “And they almost made that film, but they never did. It was a like a straight-up horror film, called Road Kill. It was super fun and I always wanted to do it, but it's a big budget movie with lots of special effects. You can't do it on no budget.”
Green's other previous film, 2008's The Torturer, was tinkered with and re-released in 2025 as Force Drift. Starring the late Nichelle Nichols and inspired by Green's brushes with U.S. intelligence folk while working at CNN, the new version is a Director's Cut featuring Dolby Atmos sound.
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| Hepburn Project stars Sherrard, Omohundro (photo by Chiuling Chen) |
Born in Rhode Island, Green moved to Massachusetts when he was 12 and later spent time in both Colorado and Georgia before finally relocating to California. In a sign of the times, the one-time Frances Marion estate is no more, razed by the late Paul Allen before the massive vacant land was eventually sold to former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, while Rupert Murdoch took possession of the old Hepburn address and passed it on to son James in 2015.
Green is aiming to have a film festival cut of Katharine Hepburn Project ready by the spring of 2027. Just in time, it turns out, for the 120th anniversary of the actress's birth (May 12th). In between, there will no doubt be time for a few more contemplative and knowing hikes up Angelo Drive.
In another nod to Green's neighborhood, he found both of his actors not through casting but rather via his neighborhood Starbucks, located in a small shopping plaza at the top of Beverly Glen and Mulholland. "The movie is really dialogue-heavy, so there's a lot of stuff for them to remember," Green shares. "But my two lead actors are just so good. They're terrific together, in what is basically a love story."
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