At Hollywood Forever Cemetery by sunset, when the gates are closed and sunlight streams down its peaceful pathways, celebrities sleep amongst legends from film, television, music, theater and more. Right there with them should be the memory of Homer Alba. Homer died on May 14, 2025, at age 79. He served Hollywood Forever as Senior Vice President for 38 years, then Vice President Emeritus. After his retirement, Homer continued to contribute in any way possible. He loved Hollywood Forever beyond words.

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 is filled with celebrated faces, but its most faithful custodians are often those who never sought the spotlight at all—the patient, obsessive, quietly brilliant detectives who notice what everyone else walks past. John Bengtson was one of those rare figures. A business lawyer by profession and a film historian by vocation, Bengtson became, over the course of more than two decades, one of the great interpreters of silent-era Los Angeles: the man who could freeze a single frame of a comedy short, read the angle of sunlight on a wall or the geometry of a fire escape, and tell you exactly where the camera once stood—sometimes down to the very doorway—nearly a century after the fact.

In an age when the internet often rewards noise over nuance, filmmaker Arthur Dark has carved out a quiet, reverent corner of the digital world—one where memory, artistry, and history converge among marble angels and manicured lawns. As the creator and host of Hollywood Graveyard, Dark has transformed the simple act of visiting cemeteries into a remarkably cinematic experience, preserving the legacy of the world’s greatest entertainers by guiding viewers through the final resting places of the people who shaped our culture. His “Famous Grave Tour” videos have become a modern ritual of remembrance, a way for audiences to reconnect with the stars they know and love while discovering forgotten performers who once illuminated Hollywood’s golden stage.

The death of writer and editor, Mark Masek, announced on social media in the quiet aftermath of New Year’s Eve, closes a chapter in Hollywood history that few outside a devoted circle ever fully understood—but many relied upon. Masek was not a celebrity in the conventional sense, yet for decades he served as one of the most trusted custodians of Hollywood’s afterlife, a writer and historian whose work preserved the final resting places of film and television figures who might otherwise have slipped into anonymity.

When the silent era continues to speak across a century, it does so not only through flickering nitrate frames and restored orchestral scores, but through the devotion of those who refused to let its voices fade. Among the most respected and deeply loved of those guardians was Donna Hill, an author, collector, and preeminent authority on Rudolph Valentino, whose death in San Francisco on December 27, 2024, marked a profound loss to classic film scholarship and the global silent-film community.

Adam the Woo made going somewhere into a kind of companionship for more than a decade. He didn’t just document places: he accompanied you in them. Rope-drop theme parks, Main Street courthouse squares, roadside curiosities, abandoned movie sets: his camera lent the familiar the thrill of newly-found and the strange the comfort of the familiar. When news arrived that Williams had died at 51, the loss felt like the kind with the particular weight reserved for people who quietly insinuate themselves into your life.

In the world of Hollywood history, where legends are built and forgotten with equal speed, Cari Beauchamp was the rare chronicler who refused to let the voices of the past go silent. Author, historian, journalist, and investigator, she spent her life uncovering the untold stories of the women who helped shape the dream factory — writers, producers, editors, and creators who had once been erased from the credits they helped write.

MONTECITO - The world’s most curious, and kindest, Hollywood chronicler has died. Writer, broadcaster and film historian Richard Lamparski, best known for his Whatever Became of…? books, has died at the age of 93. Friends of the author announced his passing on social media, although it is not yet known when he passed away.