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.

First National Pictures was not set up as a movie studio but as a form of rebellion. In the 1910s Adolph Zukor managed to make Paramount one of the most powerful players in the motion-picture industry. Among the tactics he used was 'block booking.' This meant that cinema owners who wanted to show a popular film starring someone like Mary Pickford also had to agree to show a set of less desirable films. The exhibitors became more and more resentful about being told which films they had to show, but since stars such as Pickford attracted large audiences, refusing Zukor could have been a bad business move. In the end, some theatre owners decided that they had had enough.

On August 23, 1926, Hollywood suffered the loss of its first genuine superstar. Thousands of sorrowful fans gathered on the streets outside New York's Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel. Some women collapsed, men scaled the cars in order to get a better view, and the police had great difficulty in managing the growing crowd. Reporters were sent by the newspapers to report on the event as though it were a national emergency. The man who had died was not a president, a military hero, or an industrial giant. He was an actor. Yet no film star had previously aroused such devotion, and maybe no silent-screen idol has ever held a position so prominent in the public mind. A hundred years after his death, Rudolph Valentino is still one of Hollywood's most lasting legends—a man whose fame was so great that it contributed to the formation of the modern idea of movie stardom.

Before Batman became a television sensation, before Tim Burton restored his gothic grandeur, and long before the character became one of the most profitable properties in modern film history, he first stepped onto the screen in a wartime Columbia serial. Released in 1943, Batman was a 15-chapter cliffhanger starring Lewis Wilson as Batman and Bruce Wayne, with Douglas Croft as Robin and Dick Grayson. It was cheaply made, briskly paced, politically charged, and at times startlingly crude by modern standards, yet it remains historically indispensable: this was the first live-action appearance of Batman, Robin, Alfred, and several elements that would help shape the character’s screen mythology.

During a recent visit with family in Pennsylvania, I discovered—almost by accident—that I was only thirty minutes from the cemetery where Night of the Living Dead was filmed. One afternoon, my nephew Hunter offered to drive me there, and together we set out to see the location firsthand. After arriving along the quiet road, we watched the film’s opening sequence on my iPad to orient ourselves. As the scene began to play, a strange realization set in—we were already there, parked directly in front of the very tombstones and landmarks immortalized on screen. It was one of those rare moments when past and present aligned so precisely that it felt less like coincidence than inevitability.

Few Hollywood tales have been told—or mis-told—quite as often as the story of Lana Turner’s discovery. For years, legend had it that a soda jerk at Schwab’s Drug Store spotted the eighteen-year-old beauty behind the counter and called her fame to the screen. It’s a great story, too irresistible to researchers for inclusion in just about any account of Turner’s career. The trouble is, it just isn’t true. Nearly as dramatic was what happened a few blocks away at an infinitely less glamorous and famous establishment called Top’s Café on Sunset Boulevard.

For generations it has been one of America's most identifiable residences. A humble ranch nestled on a quiet street in Studio City; it's been known to millions of television viewers around the country as the home of TV's most notorious blended family. Now the house made iconic by The Brady Bunch has been officially deemed a Los Angeles landmark. In early March 2026, the Los Angeles City Council unanimously voted to recognize the home as a Historic-Cultural Monument, ensuring its preservation as an integral piece of pop-culture history.

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.

When I recently wrote about John Mayer preserving the Chaplin Studios name, a reader’s sharp-eyed comment raised an intriguing question: was the historic studio itself once physically moved to accommodate the widening of La Brea Avenue? I knew the street had been expanded, but I hadn’t realized that Chaplin’s studio had quite literally been lifted and shifted to make way for progress—until I looked into it. What I discovered was one of those quietly astonishing Hollywood stories that sounds apocryphal until the records confirm it, and it’s a tale worth telling in full.

Opposite the Hollywood Bowl, in an unpromising clump of tour buses and parking-lot traffic, is a small wooden building whose importance far outweighs its scale. These days it's a museum, known as the Hollywood Heritage Museum, but for many years it was known as the Lasky–DeMille Barn. It's one of the few places in Los Angeles where legend and geography match exactly, with a precision that's not metaphorical or made retroactive. It's the place where Hollywood, as a working motion-picture industry, first began to come into being, in a sustained, organized way, and take a more or less permanent shape.

One of Hollywood’s most storied creative addresses has reclaimed its original identity. Musician John Mayer and director McG have officially renamed the former Jim Henson Studios on La Brea Avenue back to Chaplin Studios, restoring the name first given to the property by Charlie Chaplin when he built the studio in 1917. The move follows their recent acquisition of the historic lot for a reported $44–60 million and signals a deliberate effort to reconnect the property with its earliest—and most influential—chapter.

Santa Claus made his first trip to the screen as he has always made his first trip to the world: in silence, without announcement or record, and with no name. The year was 1898 and the motion picture was still such a marvel that the movies themselves still hadn’t mastered the art of remembering their players. So when an early British film, simply titled Santa Claus, offered the public’s first glimpse of Christmas on film, there was no record of the man in the film, nor the man behind the film.