Perhaps the crowning touch of the project is the restoration of Keaton's screening room/entertainment room. It was here that Keaton played pool and showed films, presumably even some of the very ones he edited in the outdoor potting shed. There was an air of drama to these showings. When it was time for the movie, the projectionist turned a crank that raised the room's lights and a built-in screen, somewhat like a pocket door, slid across the big arched window at the room's end. The Masons replaced the screen with a conventional aluminum one that hung from the ceiling, but Bercsi found the original nailed shut behind a wall panel. "We motorized it and installed state-of-the-art equipment, turning this into a home media room," Bedrosian says.

The two-year restoration, is Bercsi's and Bedrosian's most extensive project. "I've been in the business of buying and selling houses for years," Bercsi says. "This project is the culmination of all my years in the business."

Some say there may be one final plot twist to Keaton's Italian villa. "There was supposed to be a pipe organ in the foyer under the stairs, but it was never installed," says Victoria Sainte-Claire, an amateur house historian and designer of the Keaton Society web site. "That area was enclosed by Hutton. I came across an interview with Keaton in which he says that he was hiding films under the stairs." Bercsi, too, has heard that story, and says there's no surprise ending. "I've looked over every inch of this house, and there are no films here."

Keaton, who died in 1966, never built another house, and he ended his days living in a new ranch-style house in a comfortable neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley's Woodland Hills.