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.

More than a hundred years after Andrew and Abby Borden were brutally murdered in their house in Fall River, almost every part of Lizzie Borden's life has been examined, explored in detail, and given a dramatic portrayal. The most interesting incident occurred many years after her acquittal in 1893, when she established a close friendship with Nance O’Neil, who was one of the most well-known actresses on the American stage. Even though this friendship only continued for a few years, it caused speculation at the time and has since become a major aspect of the debate about Lizzie's private life and sexuality.

Long before Hollywood mail arrived in sackfuls addressed to movie stars, fan clubs, and motion-picture studios, it was sorted inside a little wooden hotel at the corner of a dirt road. The woman behind that early postal counter was Mary Maria Sackett, a pioneer who arrived in Hollywood before there was much of a Hollywood at all and lived long enough to tell Groucho Marx about it on national television.

Moviegoers have plenty to choose from this week as Hollywood serves up a mixture of social drama, supernatural horror, Western adventure, crime thrillers, and independent films. The major releases arrive Friday, October 9, with several smaller productions and classic-film revivals rounding out the schedule. Whether you're looking for a contemporary story about the dangers of social media, a good old-fashioned Western, or a frightening experience appropriate for the Halloween season, there's something on the marquee.

Some memoirs are written about rock-and-roll celebrities. Some are written about the people who hung around them and learned how the game was played. I Am Johnny Stark: My Rock and Roll Memoir, by Giovanni and Anthony Sticco, falls under the latter. It tells how one man kept trying despite many disappointments. Published in 2026 by Hollywood Tower Productions, it tells the story of Johnny Stark, who faced hardship, poverty, and family issues while trying to make it in the music business.

Los Angeles is notoriously quick to reinvent itself. Buildings disappear, neighborhoods change, and people who once shaped the city can vanish from public memory surprisingly fast. For more than four decades, however, the Art Deco Society of Los Angeles has made it its business to remember—not only the architecture of the Art Deco era, but the artists, designers, filmmakers, civic leaders and personalities who gave Los Angeles much of its character.

Eva Marie Saint, the actress who won an Oscar and whose career spanned the prime years of live television and some of the most enduring films of the 1950s and 1960s, died on October 6, 2026, at her Los Angeles home at age 102. According to her representative, Jeff Sanderson, she died from natural causes while being surrounded by her family and friends. At the time of her death, Saint was one of the last remaining major stars from Hollywood's postwar period and the oldest living person to have won an Academy Award.

I have never forgotten seeing The Omen when it was released in the summer of 1976. I was in art school in Pittsburgh and went back to the theater several times. What stayed with me most was not simply the violence or the shocks, but the control Richard Donner brought to the film and the extraordinary music by Jerry Goldsmith. Even after you knew what was coming, The Omen remained unsettling. Fifty years later, it still does, because Donner resisted the temptation to make a conventional monster movie. He treated an implausible story with absolute seriousness, and that made it frightening.

There was never anything ordinary about Udo Kier. With his pale blue eyes, sculpted features and slightly dangerous air, he could enter a film for only a few minutes and somehow alter its temperature. Directors used him as a vampire, a sadist, a Nazi, a wealthy eccentric, a supernatural apparition and, late in life, a flamboyant retired hairdresser. He moved effortlessly between exploitation pictures, European art films and Hollywood blockbusters, accumulating more than 200 screen credits during a career that lasted nearly six decades. Yet behind the cultivated menace was a funny, sociable and remarkably unsentimental man who had survived a childhood of genuine hardship before spending his adult life creating characters audiences could not forget.