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.
