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.

This series, The Women Who Built Hollywood Before the Movies, looks back at the remarkable women who helped shape Hollywood when it was still a quiet community of orchards, ranches, homes, and dusty roads. Long before the studios, movie palaces, premieres, and stars made Hollywood famous around the world, women were already helping build the institutions, businesses, and civic life that gave the town its identity. Among the most important was a young woman from Ohio named Daeida Hartell, who would help give the emerging community not only its name, but much of the character that defined its earliest years.

To generations of moviegoers, Carl Switzer would forever be “Alfalfa,” the freckle-faced, cowlick-haired boy whose off-key serenades and hopeless devotion to Darla made him one of the most recognizable members of Hal Roach’s Our Gang comedies. By 1958, however, the little boy on the screen was thirty years old, his days of childhood stardom long behind him. Acting jobs had become sporadic, and Switzer supplemented his income as a bartender, dog trainer and professional hunting guide. Then, on a January night in Studio City, someone apparently tried to kill him.

October begins with two very different national releases competing for moviegoers: one is an ambitious, deliberately provocative satire built around Tom Cruise in one of the strangest roles of his career; the other is a glossy psychological thriller adapted from a bestselling Colleen Hoover novel. Neither arrives with unanimous critical support, which may actually make this weekend more interesting. Both are the kind of movies audiences may need to judge for themselves.

For more than a decade, six enormous faces from Hollywood's golden past looked down upon the traffic and pedestrians of Hollywood Boulevard. Marilyn Monroe, Humphrey Bogart, Fred Astaire, Bette Davis, James Dean and Clark Gable stood shoulder to shoulder, larger than life, transforming an otherwise ordinary wall into a colorful monument to the movies. Then, in a matter of seconds on the morning of January 17, 1994, they were gone.

I don’t know how I feel about Heartstopper coming back, knowing it’s the end. Netflix's Heartstopper showed us all that there are good love stories on television. Based on Alice Oseman's graphic novels, the series centered on the relationship between Charlie Spring and Nick Nelson, along with the many friends around them. With Heartstopper Forever on Netflix, we finally see the end of these storylines. Some characters will be cut short because it's in film format, but the rest should be able to hold on.

Few American murder cases have proved as durable on film and television as the story of Lizzie Borden. On the morning of August 4, 1892, Andrew Borden and his second wife, Abby, were found brutally murdered inside their home at 92 Second Street in Fall River, Massachusetts. Andrew’s thirty-two-year-old daughter Lizzie was eventually arrested, tried, and acquitted. No one else was ever convicted. That unanswered question—did Lizzie do it?—has given filmmakers more than a century of room to speculate.

Stretching across Hollywood Forever Cemetery’s northwestern flank are long, quiet halls that most guests will likely never visit. It’s easy to overlook them, as they sit alongside the Cathedral Mausoleum and the lake, staring out over monuments and celebrity graves visited by thousands every year. Yet the Corridor Mausoleums are some of the cemetery’s uniquely atmospheric holdovers from an earlier era. When they opened nearly a century ago, their builders imagined them as part of a dramatic overhaul of Hollywood Cemetery and its burial practices. They might even have changed the way Americans approached death itself.