The Hollywoodland Revue

Los Angeles in 1948 was selling dreams by the square foot. The war was over. Veterans were home. Hillsides were being carved into subdivisions. Real estate advertisements offered sunshine and citrus trees. Buy a house and you could look out toward tomorrow. If you had a decent job and a little bit of moxie, you could own a piece of the future. Gladys Eugenia Kern believed in the future.

If Hollywood has always sold itself as sunshine and reinvention, Scott Michaels has made a career out of documenting the shadows—the places where glamour curdled into scandal, where a final address replaced a marquee name, and where the city’s relentless appetite for myth often obscured what actually happened. Part historian, part storyteller, part showman with a librarian’s instinct for details, Michaels is best known as the founder and guiding voice of Dearly Departed Tours, the long-running Los Angeles excursion that treats “tragic history” not as cheap shock, but as a strange, revealing map of how fame and mortality intersect in this town.

Hollywood’s theaters serve up a rich and varied slate this weekend, from a boldly reimagined literary classic to animated family fun and star-studded crime thrillers. Whether you’re planning a Valentine’s outing, a solo night at the cinema, or a genre chase through horror and sci-fi, there’s plenty to choose from as new films arrive nationwide on Friday, Feb. 13.

Actor Bud Cort, whose tousled good looks and un-self-conscious style made him one of the most recognizable faces of 1970s films died on February 11, in Connecticut. He was seventy-seven. Cort died after a lengthy illness. His career showcased his talents on stage and screen, highlighting his career-long transformation from child actor to one of America's most interesting character actors.

James Van Der Beek, the actor who became a defining face of late-1990s television as Dawson Leery on Dawson’s Creek and later reinvented his public image through sharp, self-mocking comedy and steady character work, has died at 48 following a journey with colorectal cancer, according to an announcement by his wife, Kimberly. Born James David Van Der Beek on March 8, 1977, in Cheshire, Connecticut, he gravitated toward performance early, eventually landing the lead role in Dawson’s Creek—a breakthrough that helped define The WB’s era of teen drama and made him, almost overnight, a pop-cultural reference point for a generation.

Long before Hollywood acknowledged Black filmmakers as artists, Oscar Micheaux had already written, financed, produced, directed, and distributed more feature films than nearly any of his white contemporaries. Working outside the studio system—and often in open defiance of it—Micheaux became the most prolific and influential African American filmmaker of the early twentieth century, a fierce individualist whose work laid the foundation for what would later be called independent Black cinema.

Oscar. The Academy Award. By any name, it inspires the same hush of reverence. For those fortunate enough to receive one—deserved or not—it represents the brass ring of Hollywood achievement, the ultimate benediction bestowed by one’s peers. Such was the moment for Margaret O’Brien, an eight-year-old girl widely regarded then—and now—as one of the most gifted child performers in screen history.

Jacob Stern arrived in Southern California with the kind of ambition that didn’t bother to introduce itself—it simply started buying the future. Born on September 20, 1859, in Saxony, Germany, to Marcus and Rosetta (Goodman) Stern, he spent his early years in the workmanlike world of family labor, helping on the farm and learning young, that land was never just dirt. Land was leverage. In 1884 he crossed the Atlantic, landing first in New York before moving on to Cleveland, where he worked for a wholesale clothing firm—practical employment that taught him the rhythms of commerce, supply, demand, and the quiet power of being the person who could provide what other people needed.

Few ironies exist in Hollywood culture like the experiences of prestige films that open weekend to discover that moviegoers have vastly misunderstood the product they are seeing. Paul Thomas Anderson's latest epic, One Battle After Another (2025), has experienced something few films achieve today: widespread critical acclaim — it's as richly ambitious and vital as any movie this year, angry, witty, and brimming with technical wizardry—while failing to find a wide audience who either didn't come out to see it, or weren't quite sure what it was they were coming to see.

By the late 1960s, Hollywood had become something of a self-devouring empire. The studio system was gone, the old-guard moguls were dead or retired, and their stars were being plundered—mercifully or sadistically, by cineastes—by a brash new generation weaned on television, exploitation films and irony. Born out of that awkward renaissance was Savage Intruder, aka Hollywood Horror House, a cheap independent feature that would provide legendary actress Miriam Hopkins with her last appearance in a feature film and became one of the oddest Hollywood endings ever.

At the end of a quiet cul-de-sac in Brentwood, on 12305 Fifth Helena Drive, sits a modest Spanish Colonial-style hacienda that has become the improbable epicenter of a bitter legal battle over heritage, ownership, and the culture of preservation in Los Angeles. Built in 1929, the 2,900-square-foot adobe-style home entered Hollywood lore when Marilyn Monroe bought it in February 1962 — the only residence the actress ever owned — a purchase she financed after her third marriage and where, six months later, she was discovered dead of a barbiturate overdose in her bedroom at age 36. Around the doorstep sits a tile reading “Cursum Perficio” — “The journey ends here” — a poignant message that has become eerily resonant through decades of debate over the house’s fate.

In Hollywood's darkest days--the uncertain, telegram-filled years of World War II when movie scripts were rewritten to suit patriotic needs--there was one Hollywood hot spot where glamour took a back seat to thankfulness. Tucked away on a corner just south of Sunset at 1451 Cahuenga Boulevard, behind an unassuming facade that hinted at nothing grand inside, the Hollywood Canteen swung open its doors and redefined celebrity volunteerism. The Canteen wasn't exactly a nightclub, nor was it the invention of Hollywood studios, although at times it sure acted like one. For three years, from 1942 to 1945, it became a bastion of equality and mutual sacrifice as movie stars waited tables, scrubbed pots and danced with servicemen and women who were about to ship out to fight in World War II.