On the morning of November 11, 1922 (four years to the day after the armistice had ended the fighting of the First World War) a rather solemn gathering took place on the grounds of Hollywood High School. Students, teachers, veterans and members of the community were all there for a ceremony which was very simple in its nature and extremely meaningful. A tree was to be planted in memory of the local men who had died in the war, a living memorial to be there for the future. The original tree is apparently gone now but the bronze plaque which was there on that November morning of 1922 is still there, a quiet reminder of a very obscure piece of Hollywood history.

Donnie Dunagan, the former child actor who provided the voice of the young deer in Walt Disney's classic Bambi (1942) and went on to have a very distinguished career as a US Marine, died on November 4, 2026, at the age of 92. Cause of death was lung cancer (according to film historian Tom Weaver). His life was a remarkable one, taking him from the soundstages of Hollywood (where he shared them with Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi) to the battlefields of Vietnam where the gentle voice of Disney's most famous fawn was a closely held secret.

Some films seem to get better with age, and The Women (1939) is definitely one of them. It's got some of the best dialogue ever written, absolutely spectacular costumes and a brilliant collection of characters (scheming, gossiping and at times quite likeable) which has made it a film that classic film fans have just loved for nearly ninety years. As actress and film historian Illeana Douglas shows in her new book Jungle Red! The Making of MGM's The Women the business end of the film was sometimes just as good as the film itself.

In a profession where friendships can fade as quickly as applause, the bond between Sir Patrick Stewart and Sir Ian McKellen stood out. For more than fifty years, their lives crossed paths on stage, on film sets, and in a truly remarkable friendship. They laughed, teased, hugged in public, sometimes kissed for the cameras, and never worried about what others thought. Though they were two of the United Kingdom's most respected actors, together they could act like mischievous schoolboys.

How many readers remember Tiny Naylor’s Drive-In? Motorists coming up to the northwest corner of Sunset and La Brea used to have one of Hollywood's most unique sights. There was a vast winged roof under which cars would gather around a restaurant that was brilliantly lit. Carhops in uniform would come out and serve you your meal. You could eat in your car, movie stars would come in and have their meal in their car, the teens would drive past hoping to see a celebrity and the hungry night owls would know they could have a meal at any time of the night. That was Tiny Naylor's Restaurant and Drive-In at 7101 Sunset Boulevard. It was one of the landmarks of Hollywood, as much a part of the Hollywood scene as the studios, the theatres and the nightclubs.

There was something about James Stewart that was always reassuring. No matter what he was playing, whether it was the idealistic Jefferson Smith, the desperately in love George Bailey or one of Hitchcock's rather troubled leading men, you knew you were in the hands of a man of genuine integrity. He was a decorated WWII veteran, and his war experience had a massive impact on his life. This weekend there's a new film which looks at that other side of one of Hollywood's most treasured stars.

October 6, 2026, saw another major event in Hollywood's long and often messy history as Paramount Skydance completed its $110 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery. The new entity will be called Skydance and will be run by David Ellison (son of Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison). For the investors it's a golden opportunity to build a very serious competitor in an industry that's increasingly being run by streaming and tech companies. For us folk who are genuinely interested in the history of Hollywood though, it's a bit of a worry. The future of Paramount and Warner Bros. (the two studios that essentially created the motion picture industry) is now very much in doubt.

Hollywood is absolutely masterful at filming its own history while the places where that history took place disappear. Mansions get torn down; larger developments replace apartment buildings and the streets themselves are pretty much unrecognizable. Yet at 1851 North Ivar Avenue, looking out over Franklin Avenue, one of Hollywood's most distinctive residential properties has survived for nearly one hundred years. Chateau Alto Nido with its red tile roof, pale stucco walls, arched openings and wrought iron balconies is a very real physical manifestation of the astonishing transformation of the area during the early days of the talking picture.

Some films tell a story. Others are attempts to bring an entire world back to life, to give voice to people whose lives and loves were buried by history. La Bola Negra (The Black Ball) is the remarkable new Spanish drama from the Javis (Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi) and it's one of the latter. It's a three-generation film and it's an ambitious, visually magnificent piece of work which looks at illicit love, political repression and the secrets that families carry with them long after the people who made them are all gone. It's just over 160 minutes in length and at times it genuinely feels like it's going to buckle under its own ambitions. There's something quite touching about a film which is quite so determined to remember what history has tried to bury.

Long before the Pierce name became synonymous with funeral homes and cemeteries throughout Southern California, there was James Washington Pierce, a New York farmer and blacksmith who came west late in life and lived just long enough to see his sons establish what would become one of Los Angeles’s great undertaking dynasties. Today he rests quietly at Hollywood Forever Cemetery, his modest grave giving little indication that his descendants would play an important role in the way generations of Angelenos were laid to rest.

For ten years after Harry Houdini died, his widow waited for the impossible. Beatrice “Bess” Houdini did not mean that figuratively. She quite literally waited for a message from the dead. Few stories from old Hollywood combine love, loss, show business and the supernatural as perfectly as hers. After Houdini died in 1926, Bess held onto the hope that the man who had escaped from handcuffs, prison cells, straitjackets and locked trunks might somehow accomplish one final feat: escaping death itself.

Less than a year before the Manson Family murders shocked Los Angeles on Cielo Drive, another brutal celebrity crime involving two brothers unfolded on the opposite side of the Hollywood Hills. On October 30, 1968, silent-screen idol Ramon Novarro was murdered in his Laurel Canyon home, decades after Hollywood had moved on from the era of stardom he once personified. In the 1920s, Novarro had been one of MGM’s most popular romantic leads, celebrated for his beauty, charm, and versatility in roles ranging from princes and soldiers to swashbucklers and lovers, most famously as Judah Ben-Hur. Yet in the years that followed, the violence of his death too often overshadowed the remarkable career and life that had come before it.