STORY AND PHOTOS BY KAREN BOSSICK

Naomi McDougall Jones was flabbergasted when her husband Stephen McDougall Graham led her into Hammond Castle, a medieval castle constructed in the late 1920s and filled with Roman, medieval and Renaissance artifacts, including a skull said to belong to one of Columbus’ crew members.

The castle, which sits on a rocky cliff overlooking the harbor of Gloucester, Mass., served as the home, laboratory and museum of John Hays Hammond Jr., a prolific but eccentric inventor who pioneered the idea for TV’s remote control and engineered his indoor pool so it could be drained and filled with sea water at the flip of a switch.

“Stephen grew up close to the castle and it was one of his favorite places to go as a kid. When we started dating, he took me there and I thought, ‘How is it nobody has made a movie about this guy!? What an incredible character!” recounted McDougall Jones.

But, having been a longtime advocate for more women’s roles in Hollywood, McDougall Jones wasn’t about to make a movie about “a great old dead white man.”

So, she began writing a story about a young woman who is fast seeing her hopes of movie stardom slip away. She has a chance encounter with Hammond, and he quickly assesses that he can use her to achieve the fame that seems to have eluded him in death. She, in turn, thinks he might hold the key to her own aspirations, not realizing the terrible cost involved.

“The joke is that almost nobody outside of a two-mile perimeter of the castle knows who this guy is, even though he was so obsessed with making sure that people remember who he is that he created this museum as a legacy to himself,” said McDougall Jones. “So, I use that and set it in the present day and focus on a woman who is wrestling with the question of whether or not to become a mother. The cost of motherhood to women, the complexity of it--that’s a topic I don’t think has been adequately explored.”

McDougall Jones and the Liberty Theatre Company staged three showings of her script as a radio play this past week. The shows sold out so quickly that they made a radio play recording available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vDmm1YJgeo.

It’ll be like listening to an old-fashioned radio play, McDougall Jones promised.

“I’m so excited that the project that brought me here and now I bring it back to the community in this much more fully realized version. The biggest part of what I do in my filmmaking career is not that visible to the community so it’s nice to be able to share this with them,” she said.

McDougall Jones, who wrote the first draft of “Hammond Castle” six years ago, refined it while serving as the first writer-in-residence at the Hemingway House in Ketchum in Fall 2019. During that time, she and her husband fell in love with Sun Valley, relocating here a year later.

Her play has a supernatural aspect to it inspired by the many experiments that Hammond conducted at his castle, including telepathic experiments with a well-known psychic of his time. It was also inspired by the seances he held at the castle and the many celebrities he entertained, including Ethel and Lionel Barrymore, John D. Rockefeller, Cole Porter and Nikola Tesla.

This past week McDougall Jones and Matt Musgrove took their places on stage as the down-on-her-luck actress and John Hays Hammond. Others standing behind the radio microphones included Karen Nelsen, Rachel Aanestad, Andrew Alburger, David Janeski, Claudia McCain, Joel Vilinsky and Aly Wepplo.

Veronica Moonhill, an L.A.-based film and theater director, directed the performance. Foley artist Lara Dale, who has worked on such movies as “Expendables 3” and “Twilight Eclipse,” used crinkled paper and plastic to create sound effects, while Scott Steiner, a Brooklyn-based sound designer, who has worked on such movies as “George & Tammy” about Tammy Wynette and George Jones, engineered the sound.

McDougall Jones plans to head East this fall where she has gotten permission to shoot the movie version in Hammond Castle. Moonhill will direct the film, which is being produced by reGEN Media, the first and only indigenous-owned and female led regenerative media studio; McDougall Jones will star in it.

“I spent three years wooing them, convincing them, to let me shoot it there,” she said. “It was just three years ago that we staged the play reading of the story--my first introduction here to local actors like Joel Vilinsky, Andrew Alburger and Denise Simone--at The Community Library. I’ve done 60 drafts of the script since so it’s changed a lot since then. It’s come a long way for sure, and I couldn’t be more excited to take it to the next step.”

DID YOU KNOW?

Naomi McDougall Jones is starting to write a book based on experiences she had with Ernest Hemingway while staying in the Hemingway House. Stay tuned.