The Hollywoodland Revue

In the late summer of 1928, as Hollywood studios raced to wire their stages and retrain their stars for sound, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer authorized a project that ran counter to almost every instinct guiding the industry’s transition to talking pictures. The film was Hallelujah—a rural Southern drama with an all-Black cast, heavy musical content, extensive location shooting, and a director willing to gamble his own salary to get it made. In trade terms alone, it was a high-risk production at the worst possible moment to take one.

Time, fame, and money have always traveled lightly in Hollywood, and few lives illustrate that cruel arithmetic more poignantly than that of Pierre Collings, a gifted screenwriter who reached the industry’s highest summit only to disappear almost immediately into obscurity and poverty.

Hollywood is filled with celebrated faces, but its most faithful custodians are often those who never sought the spotlight at all—the patient, obsessive, quietly brilliant detectives who notice what everyone else walks past. John Bengtson was one of those rare figures. A business lawyer by profession and a film historian by vocation, Bengtson became, over the course of more than two decades, one of the great interpreters of silent-era Los Angeles: the man who could freeze a single frame of a comedy short, read the angle of sunlight on a wall or the geometry of a fire escape, and tell you exactly where the camera once stood—sometimes down to the very doorway—nearly a century after the fact.

Viola Davis’s greatness has never been the kind you can mistake for luck. It’s the kind forged—scene by scene—out of craft, nerve, and a lived understanding of what it means to be underestimated and still walk into the room as if you own it. Born August 11, 1965, in St. Matthews, South Carolina, Davis spent her earliest years straddling two Americas: the rural South of her family’s roots and, soon after, the hard-edged reality of Central Falls, Rhode Island, where poverty wasn’t a talking point but a daily condition. She has spoken plainly about growing up in severe deprivation—about the indignities and dangers of it, about the way hunger and instability mark a child—and those experiences did not simply “inspire” her later work. They sharpened it. They gave her an instrument most actors spend a lifetime trying to approximate: truth that cannot be faked.

Grady Demond Wilson, who played Lamont Sanford, the responsible son and often-patient straight man in the long-running sitcom Sanford and Son, died on January 30, 2026, at his home in Palm Springs. He was 79. His son Demond Wilson Jr. said Wilson died from complications due to cancer.

Clara Blandick spent most of her life on the edges of celebrity. Her face was among the most familiar in American films. Born Clara Blanchard Dickey on June 4, 1876, she had a long, career-obsessed life as a stage, film, and character actress, the kind of performer Hollywood needed and little acknowledged. She is, for generations, Aunt Em in The Wizard of Oz, stern but loving Kansas aunt whose quiet presence grounds Dorothy’s homesickness. Clara Blandick’s actual story – particularly its end – was far from Technicolor comfort.

The death of Catherine O’Hara, confirmed today at the age of seventy-one, closes the curtain on one of the most quietly influential and deeply beloved careers in modern screen comedy. For more than five decades, O’Hara inhabited characters with a precision so exacting and a humanity so generous that she reshaped how comedy could look, sound, and feel—especially for women whose wit did not require apology or softening.

Americans like to think our national arguments are original. Every generation likes to believe it is living through uniquely calamitous times, utterly disconnected from what has gone before. Few debates are more stubbornly cyclical -- or more willfully misunderstood -- than the struggle between religion and government. The battle over church and state didn't suddenly erupt in the twenty-first century. It wasn't created by modern secularists, or contemporary "culture warriors," or even activist judges. It's as old as the republic itself -- and it was intentionally written into the nation's political DNA by people who had seen firsthand what happens when faith and power sit together on a throne.

For only a handful of entertainers can their biography feel so synonymous with the century that gave rise to them. Mel Brooks may be one of those entertainers. Mel Brooks: The 99-Year-Old Man, the wide-ranging two-part documentary from directors Judd Apatow and Michael Bonfiglio exists not only as a career-spanning retrospective but as a time capsule of sorts; one fortunate to catch its subject with the quickness still in his step and his comedic wit fully intact, anxiously aware of his fortune at having lived this long. Streaming on HBO Max, the film chronicles Brooks’s life from his Brooklyn childhood in 1926 to the edge of his hundredth birthday, which he reaches at the end of June, and does so with a mix of reverence, invention, and affectionate chaos that feels wholly appropriate.

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Just another tick of time in a city built on marble and memory, one of Hollywood Forever's most understated memorials arrived on Memorial Day, 1930. Located just outside of the Corridor Mausoleums and rising from a pair of Mediterranean Revival arches, the Edward J. Connelly Tower Clock makes no showy entrance. It simply reminds visitors, in measured restraint, that every road eventually leads past the same time.

A few days ago, Hollywood found itself confronting an uncomfortable collision between modern celebrity marketing and historic preservation when Sydney Sweeney was revealed to have climbed the Hollywood Sign and draped it with bras as part of a promotional stunt. The action—carried out without permission—immediately ignited outrage, legal scrutiny, and a broader debate over who gets to use one of Los Angeles’s most protected and symbolic landmarks.