Welcome to Hollywood Graveyard, where I set out to answer all of your questions
about Hollywood Graveyard. Exactly one year ago we made our debut.
Ah, we were so young and naive then...
a little less gray too.
Since then our little channel has grown mightily,
thanks to all of you. So I thought it would be fun to mark this
momentous occasion with a little Q&A.
You provided the Qs, I've got the As,
so let's begin.
This is by far the most frequently asked question.
Many people are often surprised to see that even some
big-name stars resting graves that are unmarked.
There are several reasons why this might be, but first it should be
noted that when you buy a grave it doesn't automatically come marked.
It's up to the family to ensure the grave is marked. Sometimes the family or the
individual themselves decides they just don't want to marked for one reason or
another, be it privacy or indifference. For some people being memorialized just
isn't a high priority, or is seen as a waste of money. Money is another reason
why a grave may be unmarked. Dying is not cheap, and just because someone was once
a big star does not necessarily mean they died wealthy.
Another reason may be they just haven't gotten around to it yet.
It can take time to get a grave marked.
And in the case of some traditions - for example Jewish traditions -
the grave is only temporarily marked until one year after death.
Unfortunately this can lead to graves being permanently temporarily marked if no
one's around a year later to ensure a marker is placed. Whatever the reason it
can be sad to see a grave unmarked and sometimes fans will come along years
later and facilitate the marking of the grave, as was the case with Florence
Lawrence and Judith Barsi. Maybe we should pool our resources and
get some of these graves marked. What do you think?
Famous grave hunting has been a pastime of
archaeologists, historians, and fans for ages.
From Howard Carter discovering the tomb of King Tut, to Indiana Jones.
"And the tomb of Sir Richard?"
"Found it."
So I stand on the shoulders of many who have gone before, and credit where credit
is due, I've had a lot of resources to mine in
order to define these sites and to make these videos.
From books, to websites like
find-a-grave, seeing stars, Wikipedia, IMDB, and other forums.
So, if you've ever contributed to these sites I thank you.
But even with all these resources
finding these graves can still be quite difficult and a little intimidating.
I wanted to find a way to make it easier and less intimidating,
so that brings us to our next question...
That's a long story so get comfortable.
Are you comfortable?
Will, are you comfortable? Okay.
So it actually all began with this book that
I've been shamelessly plugging on here for the past few months.
Even though Zombie Junior was only recently published,
I actually started writing it ten years ago while I was still back in Utah.
In order to get into the proper mindset
of a boy who rises from his grave each night, I would often go up to
the Salt Lake City Cemetery, which is a big beautiful old cemetery in Salt Lake City,
and I would actually write there. Well while there I would stumble onto
graves of famous individuals. Not famous by Hollywood standards but certainly by
Utah folklore standards. And this was fascinating to me, to be able to connect
with these individuals from my past in such a personal way. And it also occurred
to me that each of these graves had a story to tell.
Fast forward several years later and I found myself
moving out to LA to attend graduate school at USC.
When I first arrived in LA I wanted to do all the typical Hollywood things.
But seeing a star's name on the sidewalk didn't really interest me much.
I wanted to visit the stars themselves.
So I started to research where some of these stars were buried.
The first ones I sought out were Walt Disney and Mel Blanc.
Yes, I'm a grown man who loves cartoons.
I then sought out Marilyn Monroe.
Her grave really touched me. She was such a big star, and at the same time such a
tragic figure, it was very moving to be able to stand right there at her crypt,
decked in flowers and covered with lipstick.
Over time I sought out more and more stars, and something really quite special
happened as I did. In seeking out stars that I knew, I would be introduced to new
ones along the way that I'd never heard of. I'd heard of George Burns but I never
knew he did a sitcom in the 50s with his wife Gracie, which has since become one
of my favorite sitcoms.
I knew Jack Lemmon, and found a couple
spaces away a man named Billy Wilder, who directed what are now two of my favorite films:
Sunset Boulevard, and Some Like It Hot.
His epitaph cleverly reflects one of
the greatest final film lines in movie history, from some Like It Hot, which
features Jack Lemmon and Joe E. Brown, who is at Forest Lawn Glendale.
"Oh you don't understand Osgood!
I'm a man."
"Well, nobody's perfect!"
I was being introduced to new entertainers, new music, new movies, new
television shows that in a million years I never would have discovered.
It was like unearthing a treasure trove of entertainment
I also learned through my wanderings that tombstone tourism is a real thing,
and I frequently found myself giving directions to people in the cemeteries
who were looking for their favorite stars. So I sought out ways to share
these experiences with others, to make it easier and more accessible not only to
find their favorite stars but to meet some new ones along the way.
My first attempt was to create an app.
It would be like an interactive map app with the
geolocations of the graves, and little blurbs about them.
But that fell through.
Too much overhead, too expensive to develop.
So then I tried to build a website
where people could download a virtual map to their favorite stars.
But that fell through too... too difficult to get any traction behind it.
Side note though: links to those maps are included in the descriptions of the videos.
Anyway, frustrated I kind of gave up on the idea and shelved it.
A year or two later I'm hanging out with my buddy Giuseppe who I'd met at USC,
and we were on the subject of apps
and all these crazy app ideas that were making billions of dollars.
Well Giuseppe starts sharing some app ideas he said and he said,
I kid you not, "an app that shows you where famous people are buried."
I was so floored I just about drove my Honda right off the road.
I couldn't believe it.
I said, "Giuseppe, I actually tried to make
that exact app not long ago.
Needless to say he was surprised as I was.
And so we got to chatting about it, I told him I had all the data points, but
wasn't sure how to effectively execute on it.
Well, around this time Giuseppe,
who's a phenomenal composer, had purchased a small cinema camera and had
started delving into cinematography as well. And I, perhaps a little late to the
game, had just begun to discover YouTube. Oh I'd known about YouTube for years but
I figured it was just somewhere people posted videos of their cats.
But I began to discover very high quality entertaining themed content on YouTube,
and a light went off: video tours!
I pitched the idea to juice FA and he was in.
So we began to conceptualize how we would do it:
he would shoot it, and I would host it, very Travel Channel-like.
So we set off to a cemetery to shoot some test footage
and this is what we came up with.
You like that? Well this little test run taught us a few things.
First and foremost it's not me that I do not belong in front of the camera.
This... this is not easy for me.
Not only do I hate being on camera, but in this context it
didn't really work anyway.
I didn't want to be the star of the show, I wanted
those we were visiting to be the stars of the show.
And it also proved to be far
too difficult logistically to shoot that way anyway. And frankly in a cemetery
where there are people mourning, it wasn't exactly inconspicuous.
So, back to the drawing board, I decided a first-person perspective was the ideal format.
So I took on the role of cameraman, and Giuseppe the role of composer.
But one thing this test run did help to establish was the tone.
We didn't want these videos to be melancholy, morbid, morose, macabre,
or any other word that starts with M.
We wanted them to be upbeat, celebrations of life,
entertaining, just like the individuals themselves were entertaining,
while still being respectful of course.
And thus Hollywood graveyard was born...
whew!
Shortly after Hollywood graveyard launched Giuseppe actually moved back to
Europe to pursue a PhD in music. So soon he'll be Dr. Giuseppe.
But he's with us in musical spirit every time we hear one of his tunes in our tours
like this one...
and this one...
and let's not forget this one...
That's my favorite.
Hopefully we'll get him back someday,
and I keep bugging him to put out a soundtrack of the music for you guys...
Giuseppe!
Absolutely. We still have a lot of ground to cover here in LA, but
the world is a big place and there are famous graves everywhere.
Thanks to the generous donations of our Patreon supporters
we're hoping to make it up to New York this spring or summer.
And maybe someday we'll make it out to Europe, where
stars like Jim Morrison, Audrey Hepburn, and Charlie Chaplin are buried.
Yes I can. Cue the b-roll.
The most common and familiar type of grave is, well, the grave,
ground interment. It's a hole dug in the ground in which the casket or coffin is placed.
It's usually about 36 inches wide and the depth can vary from 4 to 8 feet,
deeper graves offering double occupancy for companions.
Once the location of the
grave is carefully measured out the gravest cut, clearing the topsoil, then
the soil is excavated. It's common practice nowadays to line the grave with
the concrete burial vault to protect the casket and prevent the ground above from
caving in. Once the casket is placed in the vault
it's sealed, then the soil returns to fill the grave, and a headstone is placed.
Some have pointed out in our videos that the graves appear too close together to
contain caskets. Well, they're very efficient with the space.
As you can see here, adjacent burial vaults are flush
side-to-side and head to foot.
Sometimes, though, graves do contain urns with cremated remains,
especially when space is an issue and the graves are much smaller, as is the
case at Westwood.
Next is the crypt, which is an above-ground vault for entombment.
"It's called a crypt, and how are you not getting how great this is?
We're four down from Bugsy Seigel."
"No. I'm not going in to any wall, I'm going in the ground!"
These are basically the same as the burial vaults but above-ground, usually in the
walls of mausoleums indoors, or along the walls of garden crypts outside.
After the funeral the casket is placed into the vault.
Once the casket is in place, the vault is completely sealed in concrete, thusly,
then covered in a nice marble faceplate, thusly.
Crypts come in single occupancy
like Marilyn's, and companion crypts, which house two caskets,
like George and Gracie.
A sarcophagus is essentially a standalone, often multiple occupancy
crypt, partially above and below ground, and usually ornately decorated.
A niche, or niche, is basically a tiny crypt which houses the cremated remains placed in an urn.
A room of niches is called a columbarium.
Sometimes a niche can have a glass front
for displaying the urn and often pictures or personal effects of the individual.
Finally there's the Cenotaph, which is a grave that doesn't
actually contain human remains, often placed as a monument or memorial marker.
"He's still up at the cemetery. He's been there four hours now!"
It takes a long time actually. As you've noticed these aren't just
point-and-shoot vlogs, they're fully produced short documentaries.
Between researching the cemeteries, researching the individuals, finding the graves,
filming, gathering the media, editing, recording the voiceover,
it's several weeks worth of work.
Several factors go into choosing who to feature in our videos.
First and foremost, were they famous? Stars like Marilyn Monroe and
Clark Gable are obvious, but we like to include lesser-known individuals,
and those that work behind the camera as well.
People you may not know by name, but whose work you're probably familiar with.
Another important factor is whether or not I can actually find or access their graves.
Absolutely. As many of you have pointed out we don't always get to everyone the
first time around, so from time to time we'll go back and revisit cemeteries
that we've already visited to pick up stars we may have missed, and to visit
some who may have passed since.
Bear in mind however though that we won't visit stars who have recently passed.
We like to give families and create to grieve before we include them in our tours.
We have lots of plans for themed specials, like sports stars, military,
Hollywood crime, etc. So if you have any ideas for themes you'd like to see,
don't hesitate to share them with us.
Boy, there are probably two that rank highest on my list:
Edgar Allan Poe in Baltimore,
and Rod Serling in New York.
Two greater wordsmiths there never were.
Some stars decide to be cremated and have their ashes scattered.
While this is very personal and respectable choice,
it does make me a little sad to know that there
are stars that I'll never be able to visit, like Cary Grant, Jean Arthur,
Vincent Price, Robin Williams, among others.
I never reveal the next tour in advance,
unless you're a Patreon supporter.
42.
Favorite cemetery is probably Forest Lawn Glendale.
Given the number of stars that are to see and just
the grandeur and majesty of the place, it's beautiful.
"I see dead people."
Sadly. no.
And given the amount of time I spend in cemeteries,
I'm a little disappointed.
Well, not a ghost, but the strangest thing I've ever seen it was actually a very
unique grave offering. Sitting atop one of the flat markers at Forest Lawn I
once saw an entire Denny's breakfast: pancakes, scrambled eggs, hash browns,
the works, even a cup of coffee.
He or she must really have loved their Denny's.
And when I came back an hour later,
the food had been eaten but the plate was still there.
I'm just kidding about that last part, but can you imagine?
Here are a few of my favorites from the past year.
As long as I can.
But once LA and New York are covered I'll probably scale back the output.
Once every two weeks is a tremendous pace to keep up, especially
since these videos are made on my own time and on my own dime.
But, thanks to the generous donations of my Patreon supporters
I've been able to keep it up, so again a big thank you to all of you.
"I'm not gonna be buried in a grave. When I'm dead just throw me in the trash."
I honestly have no idea, but I hope you'll come visit me.
That's all the time we have for today.
If I didn't get to your question I'll try to answer it in the comments.
Thank you all for your support, and here's to
another great year of Hollywood Graveyard.
Kinda looks like there's a ghost behind you.
Ooo, a ghost?
- I mean, just the light looks like it. - I know.