Believe it or not, until this afternoon, I had never seen Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (1980). For more than four decades, I somehow managed to avoid one of the most celebrated horror films in movie history. Of course, I was familiar with its reputation and had seen occasional clips over the years, particularly the famous sequence in which Jack Nicholson smashes through a bathroom door and announces, “Here's Johnny!” But beyond that, I knew surprisingly little about the story. When the opportunity came to see it on the big screen at the American Cinematheque, I decided it was time to discover what all the excitement was about.

Long before Hollywood had studios, movie stars, or even its famous name, Mary Croswell Gower lived and worked on a broad tract of farmland in the Cahuenga Valley. Wheat and barley grew where soundstages would eventually rise, and the future Gower Street was little more than the edge of a family farm. Mary belonged to an earlier Hollywood, one that existed before Harvey and Daeida Wilcox laid out their subdivision, before Mary Sackett and Mary Penman Moll, and decades before the motion-picture industry discovered Southern California. Yet the land she and her family occupied would eventually become part of Hollywood's geographical heart.

Chuck Lorre has spent most of his life putting words in other people's mouths. For over thirty years his characters have been arguing, confessing, insulting, falling in love and delivering the one-liners to millions of viewers. In Sitcom: A Memoir he finally turns that same sharp, often biting voice on himself and charts the improbable journey that saw him go from struggling musician and television writer to one of the most successful comedy producers in the history of the medium.

Sir Guy Standing belonged to an acting dynasty long before Hollywood knew what to do with him. By the time American movie audiences began recognizing his stern, aristocratic face in the 1930s, he had already spent decades on the stage, served his country during the First World War, been knighted for that service, operated a business, married three times, raised a family, and established himself on both sides of the Atlantic. His Hollywood career occupied only the last few years of his life. Yet, it produced the performances for which he is most often remembered today—and one of those films would become entangled in a persistent myth about his sudden death.

Gail Russell was one of the most strikingly vulnerable screen presences of the 1940s and that vulnerability was her defining feature as well as her curse. Discovered by Paramount as a teenager she went on to have a string of successful films in the early 1940s including Henry Aldrich Gets Glamour, The Uninvited and Angel and the Badman, almost always playing the sensitive, fragile woman. She was a very distinctive actress in that respect. Behind the scenes though she was extremely shy and anxious and that anxiety developed into a severe alcoholism which in turn began to seriously damage her career. Her screen appearances became increasingly infrequent from the mid-50s, and her career was effectively over by that time. That was the background to the very sad final act.

Hollywood history is full of people whose names have been on the marquee at the theatre. Margaret Herrick wasn't one of them. She never acted in a film, she never directed one, and she never stood on the podium at the Oscars with a statuette in her hand. What she did was to take the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences from a fledgling trade body to a major international organization and in the process to create the bedrock of what is now one of the most important archives of motion picture history in the world. Today, of course, thousands of researchers will know her name as they go into the Margaret Herrick Library in Beverly Hills. The vast majority of them will have no idea what a remarkable woman she was.

Long before Hollywood and Highland became one of the world's most famous intersections, strawberry fields, farmhouses, dirt roads, and scattered ranches lay beneath the foothills. Among the people who watched that landscape change was Mary Penman Moll, a schoolteacher who became a landowner, developer, businesswoman and civic figure during the years when Hollywood was still becoming a town. Her name is not nearly as familiar today as those of Daeida Wilcox Beveridge or H. J. Whitley, but portions of the Hollywood she helped create remain underfoot every day.

To movie audiences of the 1930s and 1940s, Wallace Beery was one of Hollywood’s most dependable stars. He was big, rumpled, gravel-voiced and rough around the edges, the sort of actor who could play a washed-up boxer, a pirate, a sailor, a crook or a blustering old reprobate and still somehow win the audience over. MGM understood exactly how to use him. His characters were often crude, selfish or dangerous at first, but underneath there was usually a sentimental heart waiting to emerge. Offscreen, the picture was considerably less flattering.

Before Los Angeles had the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, before costumes and props were considered artifacts of popular culture worth saving, Harry Crocker had a brilliant idea. The tourists had already begun arriving in Hollywood in the 1920s, peeking through studio gates and milling around film premieres, dropping to their knees on Hollywood Boulevard to press their hands and feet into casts made by movie stars at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. Harry Crocker knew what they wanted. They wanted to get closer to the movies—to see something real from the otherwise magical world just beyond the gate. In the summer of 1928, Crocker decided to give it to them.

Hollywood Blvd was very much the look of a movie premiere tonight on October 13, 2026, with the crowd gathered outside the El Capitan Theatre under a marquee for the world premiere of Whalefall. The entrance was all blue/green sea imagery, there were barricades on the sidewalk, and the crowd was moving towards the old theatre as people stopped to watch. It was the perfect setting for a film whose whole premise is spectacle. Whalefall is a survival thriller about a young man being swallowed by a sperm whale and having to fight his way out before he runs out of oxygen.

R.J. Mitte was only 14 when he was cast as Walter White Jr. on Breaking Bad. The role that made him famous in the long term was far more significant than simply a successful TV job. Mitte (who had cerebral palsy) brought a realness to the part that was still pretty rare on American TV at the time. Over the next 20 years he became an actor, a producer, a model and a very vocal advocate for people with disabilities, using his platform to challenge the barriers that Hollywood often puts in the way of disabled performers. He died on October 12th, 2026, in Brownsville, Texas. He was 34.

The news surrounding Tom Cruise’s new film Digger has not been kind. Directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu, the dark, satirical comedy arrived with a massive budget, one of the world’s biggest stars, and the prestige of an Oscar-winning filmmaker. Yet its opening weekend was dismal: about $8 million in North America and $20 million worldwide, against a production budget reported at roughly $160 million to $180 million, plus an estimated $100 million in marketing. Reviews were sharply divided, audience reaction was weak, and the film earned a C+ CinemaScore. By almost any conventional measure, Digger has opened as a major financial disappointment. But box office is not the same thing as posterity.