Project 27

In the haze of mid-1960s Los Angeles, where surfboards meet protest signs and the Cold War hums beneath the California sun, war vet and private investigator Mike Tiernan gets pulled into a case that starts simple but spirals fast. Blackballed from the NYPD for refusing to play dirty, and rejected by the LAPD, Tiernan lives a quiet, lonely life in Venice Beach — until a mysterious intelligence officer recruits him to surveil a film school dropout named Jim Morrison. The subject seems harmless at first. A quiet, strange kid with a poetic streak and a Navy admiral for a father. But Morrison moves in curious circles — strange meetings in the desert, hidden film reels, whispered talk of Lookout Mountain, a top-secret government film lab in the hills. And the deeper Tiernan digs, the more disturbing the patterns become. The kid isn’t just rebelling — he’s orbiting something dark and deliberate. Tiernan’s surveillance reveals a network of cryptic characters: rogue scientists, hippie provocateurs, intelligence operatives, and missing girls. Morrison, it turns out, may have filmed something he wasn’t supposed to — something tied to a classified black operation connected to Admiral Morrison and the Gulf of Tonkin incident. Tiernan’s search for answers collides with a haunting case from his past: a runaway girl he once failed to find. That girl, Gwen, seems to be tangled in the same net as Morrison and his crew. Tiernan’s investigation pulls him into underground parties, desert hallucinations, and eerie communes that blur the line between art and psychological warfare. Through it all, his only allies are Sophie, his sharp-witted assistant, and a growing suspicion that he’s the last sane man in a world being quietly manipulated from behind the camera. The conspiracy he unravels isn’t just about one kid or one reel of film — it’s about media control, the manufacture of culture, and the quiet war being fought on American soil through art, fear, and illusion. The action converges at a bizarre commune in Laurel Canyon — an acid-drenched nexus of freaks, handlers, and government castoffs. Tiernan must infiltrate the commune to rescue Sophie and expose what’s really going on, all while facing down his own guilt, wartime trauma, and the seductive power of forgetting. A gripping, sun-drenched thriller that plays like a love letter to paranoid cinema. Drawing from real Cold War history, urban myth, and pop culture legends, it explores the birth of the counterculture through a noir lens — asking who really shaped the minds of a generation, and at what cost. PROJECT 27 blends noir thriller with counterculture conspiracy, tying real historical figures — particularly Jim Morrison — into a fictional web of government surveillance and cultural manipulation. The concept is bold, layered, and timely, echoing the spirit of 'Chinatown,' 'JFK,' and 'The Parallax View' while carving out its own mystique. PROJECT 27 The blue bus... is calling us.