Mac Rating: 5.00 | Votes: 1 | Date: 03/07/2026 00:52:00

Los Angeles watches movies with its buried movie stars, and it started with eighty people and a Hitchcock print. Cinespia at Hollywood Forever Cemetery, 6000 Santa Monica Boulevard, held its first screening on 20 July 2002, when 27-year-old film-club founder John Wyatt projected Strangers on a Train against the west wall of the Cathedral Mausoleum - the building holding Rudolph Valentino's crypt - for members of his Italian film club and word-of-mouth guests. Wyatt had spotted the potential of the cemetery's great open Fairbanks Lawn, named for the adjacent crypt of Douglas Fairbanks Sr. and Jr., while visiting a friend who worked there; the cemetery, then mid-restoration and seeking cultural life, agreed to try one show. The crowd cheered at the end credits, and an institution was born. The formula has barely changed while the scale exploded: every Saturday (and some Sundays) from May through September, up to 3,500 people carry blankets, picnics, candles and wine deep into the hundred-year-old cemetery - the resting place of Valentino, Judy Garland, Mickey Rooney, Cecil B. DeMille, Johnny Ramone and Chris Cornell - for classic and cult films from the 1930s through the 1990s, digitally projected on the mausoleum wall with the Paramount backlot over the fence. DJs including Cut Chemist, Peanut Butter Wolf and the Gaslamp Killer spin before and after, themed photo booths match each film, and no graves lie beneath the picnic lawn itself. The programming mixes canon and camp - Hitchcock to Fast Times at Ridgemont High, The Silence of the Lambs to The Muppet Movie - with special events like the Breaking Bad finale screening, and the series has shown more than 500 films to roughly a million attendees across 25 seasons, expanding to venues like the Rose Bowl, Los Angeles State Historic Park and downtown's historic movie palaces in the off-season. Tickets sell out fast all summer, the age skews all-comers, and the experience remains singular even by Los Angeles standards - the film industry's company town gathering after dark to watch its own history, in the place where much of that history is buried.