Hollywood Forever Cemetery - History

History

The cemetery, the first in Hollywood, was founded in 1899 on 100 acres (0.40 km2) as “Hollywood Memorial Park Cemetery” by developer Isaac Lankershim and his son-in-law, Isaac Van Nuys. The cemetery sold off large tracts to Paramount Studios, which, with RKO Studios, bought 40 acres (160,000 m2) by 1920. Part of the land was set aside for the Beth Olam Cemetery, a dedicated Jewish burial ground, where people from Hollywood’s Jewish community are buried.

In 1939, Jules Roth, a convicted felon, bought the cemetery. He used the money from the cemetery's operations to pay for luxuries and let the cemetery fall into disrepair, also closing it to most racial minorities, e.g. forbidding actress Hattie McDaniel to be buried there. To settle tax bills, he sold two beautiful lawns which ran east and west along Santa Monica Boulevard. These lawns became strip malls which now house an auto-parts store and a laundromat. He never repaired the roofs or earthquake damage to crypts and left the endowment care fund, meant to take care of the cemetery till the end of time, missing about $9 million, according to the current owner. He never connected the property to city water, using only the water from an onsite well for watering, which left the property in a constant state of rotating drought. By 1997, Roth was bankrupt. He died on 4 January 1998. The state of California had revoked the cemetery's license to sell its remaining plots.

On the verge of closure in the bankruptcy proceeding, Tyler and Brent Cassity of the Missouri funeral home family purchased the now 62-acre (250,000 m2) property in 1998 for $375,000. They renamed it “Hollywood Forever” and started restoring, refurbishing and adding to it, investing millions in revitalizing the grounds, offering documentaries about the deceased that are to be played in perpetuity on kiosks and are posted on the Web, and organizing tours to draw visitors.

Since 2002, films have been screened at the cemetery at a gathering called Cinespia on weekends during the summer, drawing an average of 3,000 people who come with beach chairs, blankets and food to sit on the Fairbanks Lawn and view the films, which are projected onto the white marble west wall of the Cathedral Mausoleum.

Music events take place in the cemetery as well. On June 12, 2009, Scottish rock band Glasvegas played a special stripped-down performance. On June 14 and 15, 2011, The Flaming Lips played at the cemetery in a two-night gig billed "Everyone You Know Someday Will Die," a lyric from their 2002 single "Do You Realize??"