Castle of Enchantment is a new short film set in the remnants of Milt Hopkins’ now demolished Los Angeles art environment. The film explores the site’s emotional legacy of an artist’s creation, blurring the lines between fact and fiction.
On Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles, just blocks from the backlots of Paramount Studios, sits a now empty lot where the ruins of gardens, pools, and bridges just barely hint at the fabled creation that once stood there.
Every castle has its legend, and this one began with a vow. On a romantic vacation that Milton and Josie Hopkins took to Florida in the 1940s, Josie was struck by the elaborate coastal mansions of Sarasota, and remarked “Why don’t you build me a beautiful home, Milton?” to which he replied, “My dear, when we get back to Los Angeles I’ll build you the most beautiful house you’ve ever seen.”
Milton Hopkins works on the turret of his Castle. Photo: Los Angeles Examiner, USC Libraries Special Collections.
A few months later, after returning to their bungalow home on Melrose Avenue, Josie found Milton up on the roof. When she asked what he was doing, he shouted down “Well, I’m getting things started. I’m going to build you a real castle.”
After eight years of construction, repurposing materials salvaged from houses torn down to build the nearby Hollywood Freeway, Milt transformed their humble home into his Castle of Enchantment for Josie. Built between 1949 - 1957, he made towers, gables, and cupolas on top of the bungalow structure. A reporter for The Signal writes, “On the grounds around the palatial edifice he constructed a suspension bridge, ornate fences, steps and walkways, fifteen waterfalls, a swimming pool and an Italian marble fountain.” When asked where he learned to build a castle, Milt said, “It’s not something you learn. You just go ahead and do it.” (The Signal, 1971)
Tourists arrive by bus for Milt’s guided tour of the Castle. Photo: Eddie Rocco, King Features Syndicate
As the grandeur of the Castle and gardens became known, Milt began to attract local fanfare that soon grew into national coverage in newspapers, television, and radio, drawing busloads of sightseers almost daily for tours of the Castle grounds. While Milt relished the attention, all the public exposure took a toll on Josie’s health. The Hopkins’ decided to sell the property only a year or two after completion, bought a trailer, and decided to travel the country in search of a more peaceful place to settle.
Newspaper clipping of story on the Castle with portrait of Milt and Josie, via Esotouric.
“I just wanted to build the most beautiful thing I could imagine, to make my sweetheart’s dream come true,” said Milton.
After Milt and Josie’s departure, that original sense of wonder persisted. As the neighborhood grew and changed, the Castle evolved into a private residence offering daycare in the fairy tower, a Hollywood party house once frequented by Andy Warhol and associates, a Thai restaurant called The Siamese Castle, a French restaurant called La Bastille, and the Ko Kung Club, a Korean restaurant sometimes called “Old Palace.”
Seymour Rosen, photographer, preservationist, and founder of SPACES, first photographed the Castle in 1969 – a little over a decade after the Hopkins’ set off for the road. Rosen later included an image of the Castle of Enchantment in his 1979 monograph about California art environments and other regional creative expressions, In Celebration of Ourselves.
[Visit the Castle of Enchantment SPACES page here.]
Although the tale of the Castle has faded from public memory in more recent years, after finally being demolished around 2013, the site has a rich legacy of drawing people in, and continues to pique the interest of local people and artists.
(L) The terraced gardens at the Castle of Enchantment. (R) Plaque denoting the maker of the Castle, Milt Hopkins, and garden statues made by [Alex Korens Konya], the Castle’s owner after the Hopkins. Photos: Seymour Rosen, 1976.
Castle of Enchantment, a 2026 short film by Weston Lyon and Karolina Lavergne, engages Milton’s art environment in a bold meditation on the creative legacy of an artist’s original vision, as well as the ephemeral process of memory and material in the years that follow. After attending a screening of the film, I had the opportunity to interview Weston and Karolina, Los Angeles–based artists who met while studying film and photography at ArtCenter College of Design. Their work centers on documentary practices that blur the line between fiction and nonfiction, often examining the stories and mythologies of Los Angeles.
In the first act, we follow mysterious researchers digging through library archives in search of a clearer picture of Milt and Josie’s story. This leads us back to the Castle grounds in the second act, where present day artist Sterling Wells submerges himself in rainwater to paint a plein air landscape of the Castle from the perspective of its trash-filled pool. Sterling’s painting of the Castle invites us to look at what kinds of places we’ve deemed worthy of care and upkeep, and what we leave to decay or languish. In the third act, a poem read by the ghost of Josie, played by actor Joyce Sindel, explores what the filmmakers call the “emotional legacy” of the site, bringing the woman the castle was built for into focus through a haunted dream logic. This redirected focus unsettles the myth of the singular artist, particularly in vernacular art environments like the Castle, acknowledging that they are shaped by their contexts, and often conceptually or physically developed in collaboration with their family, neighborhood, and community.
Film still of Sterling Wells setting up his plein air watercolor in the Castle's abandoned pool. Image: Courtesy Weston Lyon & Karolina Lavergne, from Castle of Enchantment.
Castle of Enchantment unfolds as a reflection on the cycle of art-making and the afterlives of creative work. The film itself becomes part of that cycle—a conversation across time about reuse, reinvention, and the layered worlds artists build from what came before. Milt Hopkins constructed the Castle from salvaged materials, transforming fragments into fantasy. That environment inspired Sterling Wells’ portrait of the Castle, which in turn drew filmmakers Weston Lyon and Karolina Lavergne into dialogue with both works. In this way, the film traces a lineage of artistic world-building—each gesture responding to and reanimating the last, as if even the ghost of Josie lingers in the act of remaking.
The completed landscape by Sterling Wells. The Castle of Enchantment (Melrose Hill), 2024, watercolor on paper. Photo: Nik Massey
Like a rogue historical marker, the film invites us to consider how, in the face of an increasingly challenging economy, we might practice preservation and memorialization in creative ways that do not rely solely on financial capital or formal conservation efforts. Much like the scrappiness of Milton’s own dream to convert his humble house into a Castle – while we may not always have the resources to conserve or restore something to an artist's original vision, we can still work together to interpret and memorialize the richness of their artistic legacy in new and dynamic ways.
Though only remnants of the elaborate garden remain, Castle of Enchantment asks us to consider the memory of both the art environment and its maker from fresh vantage points. It reminds us that absence, too, can be a site of interpretation.
Photograph of the Castle of Enchantment in 1956. Photo: Los Angeles Times.
In the interview excerpts below, the filmmakers reflect on their process, their relationship to the Castle, and the questions that shaped the film.
How do you describe the film to someone who's never heard about it?
Weston: I describe it as the blurring of a kind of a fictionalization of a very real thing. One of my friends recently used this word palimpsest, and I thought that that was kind of sharp. This rewriting of the way a thing was – like the erasure and rewriting of history. I think there's a lot of that, quite literally, in the film.
Karolina: So there's three acts: The first one is archival, and there's two characters who are looking into the archive of the Castle. And the second act is focusing on a painter, Sterling Wells, who is at the site of the castle that you see earlier in the archival photos, but in a different way – through the eyes of the painter. And then the third act is the ghost of Josie Hopkins returning to the castle site to rebuild it in accordance to her vision of the space and to maintain, or to bring it back into the present.
Something that we talked about a lot in the making of it, and also with Sterling, is that in a way, it's about the process of being artists. Being an artist, or what that means, and the preservation or lack thereof, that artists face when it comes to their work. So, Sterling's making a painting, and then the castle is another art piece, and then the film itself is another work.
Weston: Our aim was also to bring every element of the story of building the castle to life in the film except for Milt. Milt is the one thing missing…and by doing that, that almost augments him even more so as a figure in the story. He's like the absent piece.
Karolina: The negative space.
The film takes a close look at the painter Sterling Wells’ artistic response to the Castle. Can you tell me a little about Sterling and what drew you in about his work and process?
Weston: How this all started was Karolina and I wanted to do something with our friend, Sterling, the painter. We've always been really fascinated with his process and the stories that develop around the making of his work.
The production is as captivating as the thing that he actually makes, most of the time. We didn't know exactly what kind of project we wanted to do with him, but we were just sort of open, kept our antennas out. We get this text from him in early 2024, and he says, “I'm going to this location – maybe you guys want to join me tomorrow?,” and adds a link to this Esotouric article that was written about the Castle property and what was, at the time, this crazy commercial real estate move where they were going to take a historic apartment building that was a couple miles north, and they were actually going to lift it up onto a trailer and relocate it onto the now vacant 4857 lot [where the Castle was]. So, they put in a permit for this and everything. By the time we went down there we had cleared our day and started filming with Sterling.
Karolina: Well, an important aspect of his practice that we find really interesting is that when he goes to sites, he's responding to the history of landscape painting in general, which often covers very idealistic, large scale spaces, but his landscape practice zooms in on often very overlooked places in L.A., and places that are falling apart or in disrepair. And so, I think, his response to the Castle brings that same specific perspective that he has. So to me, that's always been really incredible to focus on things in L.A. that people just overlook, and to give attention and a sort of reverence and respect to a space that is not given that under other circumstances, and the Castle is kind of in that situation as well.
Weston: So, we go down there and we find this incredibly dirty and discombobulated lot, that's got the remnants of this amazing vernacular home. Sterling tends to paint in bodies of water, and the pool became this thing of interest to him.
Karolina: And it was right after an atmospheric river storm. So, the pool was full of rainwater. And it was a race against time because as the water evaporated, he would have no more water to paint with. He was there every single day for a week or so. And we came as often as we could.
Advertisement for The Siamese Castle, a Thai restaurant that inhabited the Castle in the 1980s after Hopkins’ had left, via Esotouric.
Archival research related to the Castle was central to the film’s storytelling. Can you tell me about that process, what you found, and some of the highlights about the Castle’s long history?
Karolina: It all kind of started with that first Esotouric article that Sterling sent us as a launching point. And then a relative of Milt and Josie’s, brought up [the television program] Ralph Story’s Los Angeles, and that it was once featured. First, we were trying to find that episode. The process involved reaching out to various institutions with different archives, and trying to access material, and running up against things that no longer exist, because they weren't preserved, or things that exist but were inaccessible.
We found all of the scripts for Ralph Story’s show are at the Los Angeles Central Library, but then we couldn't find the episode. So, it was this process of searching and things unfolding. It was a mystery. Running up against walls and making decisions of should we then not go down this path or should we kind of make up what we wish was there? Which became one of the structures in the filmmaking process and the editing process; this blurring between what is actually history, and then what does it mean to tell history and where's the line between enchantment, magical thinking, and actual fact?
Weston: I think the summation of the whole archival process really helped inform a lot of that blurring, and really telling us that's where the film needed to go. There was an intense research period after we did about a week of filming with Sterling at the site. I went to the Central Library a number of times, we went to the University of Southern California. We went to UCLA, the Film & TV Archive there. We had another producer working with us who dug up a bunch of stuff, including material at UC Santa Barbara, because the attention on the Castle was national.
By the late 2000s, the Castle of Enchantment had fallen into disarray, and much of the site was demolished in the 2010s. How did you approach making art about a place that is largely in ruins?
Karolina: Well, the ruins are very rich material, despite them being ruins, so it never felt like there was a shortage of direction to go to. And really, it gave us more space for more opportunities to imagine things, and I think if the Castle had been still standing, the film would have gone a totally different direction. So really, it being in ruins is a key aspect.
Weston: That's funny to think about; if we had made this film, or gone and filmed, and the house was there. That would have been a totally different experience. I think ruination brings about a lot of questions. It's very fertile for the imagination, but it brings about a lot of questions about politics and policy, and the use of land. I mean, L.A. is constantly in the intersection of questions about land use.
And thinking about that area, there was a big part of the project where we were connecting it to the development of Western [Ave], which has all these blue chip galleries now. So, there was a lot of thinking about the Castle being adjacent to this area that is not quite Koreatown, and it's not quite…it's kind of this liminal zone. The only thing to really protect that area is the Historic Melrose Hill [Historic Overlay Preservation Zone] that's on the same block, but, like, one parcel zone above the Castle.
Karolina: It being in ruins is also something that speaks to the nature of L.A. and so much of L.A. has to do with Hollywood, where things are facades, referencing other things. It’s all sets. And the castle was also kind of that way; it was built in that same style. So, I think it being in ruins is a key aspect of it existing in L.A., as opposed to somewhere else in the country.
Filmmakers Karolina Lavergne and Weston Lyon directing actor Joyce Sindel on her performance of the ghost of Josie Hopkins. Photo: Jenny Haare, Producer.
Your research uncovered Josie’s discontent with living inside of what became a popular roadside attraction. Can you talk about why you revived the ghost of Josie instead of the maker, Milton?
Weston: A few years ago I was reading these Japanese ghost stories that were the source material for this film Kwaidan. A lot of it talked about how what drives this fantastic realm is a discontent. You know, the stirring of something that was never resolved.
So, that's when we started thinking about, well, what if the haunting of this site, for the character, was just this action that just repeats every night? Josie just does it again and again and again...and through that we can not only continue to tell a story about how the thing was actually built, but then also to kind of give her flesh and bone. And to make that leap from, you know, documentation, photography, into somebody who's actually been cast and is moving about our present world.
Jenn: And then she kind of makes the site in her own image, or her ghost renews it according to her own vision.
Karolina: Yeah. Because the thing about Josie, too, is – Milt built this for her, but it was his dream, his idea of what she would want. And in the archival material, she doesn't have a lot of agency or presence or personality. Milt gets to speak and express himself through the making. So yeah, we kind of wanted to tell the history in a different way – from her perspective – and give her more autonomy.
It seems like you all have done a lot of thinking about the need for documentation, advocacy, and preservation of vernacular, historic, and cultural sites of interest through this project. Can you speak to that?
Weston: I mean, it's hard when you don't have capital, and you don't have political pull. You don't have the means to, I guess, play ball with the market. I think it's difficult to protect things or try to imagine how a space can be, more in a community sense and landmark sense. So, I don't know. In a weird way, we've just filmed our half hour statement on that.
Karolina: Yeah, I do kind of think that there are the big official ways you can preserve something, but then also as artists, this is how we preserve things--like, this film is the preservation effort that we are capable of. And I think it's just as valid and as strong a statement as any.
Going forward, what is your hope for the public memory of the Castle of Enchantment?
Weston: Well, we wanted it to be a park. At the very least, it should be a community garden. You know, they can even parcel out 4853. Keep 4857, turn it into a garden. Let a lot of that existing landscaping become the beds and, like, do something that's going to be a little more impactful than just putting up a Popeyes or something.
Karolina: Especially because it is such a pedestrian neighborhood, it would really be used.
Jennifer Joy Jameson Merchant is a public folklorist and independent consultant specializing in documenting, sustaining, and interpreting cultural heritage—from living traditions to the built environment. Follow along @joyamerica.
Post your comment
Comments
No one has commented on this page yet.