Hollywood Forever Cemetery

Films are projected across Hollywood Forever’s mausoleum wall while the audience sits out on the cemetery lawns. Cinespia’s outdoor screenings have become a long-running Los Angeles summer tradition, and the setting is the point: you are watching cinema in the resting place of the industry that made so much of it.

The same grounds host Los Angeles’s major annual Día de los Muertos festival, a large ticketed cultural event held each autumn. It is not a borrowed backdrop or a themed venue; the festival takes place among historic graves, mausoleums and memorial architecture in a cemetery founded in 1899 and listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Come outside event nights, too, and the place has its own gravity. Rudolph Valentino, Judy Garland and Cecil B. DeMille are among the figures buried here, and guided walking tours or the printed walking guide help connect names on screen to specific graves. For the big screenings and Día de los Muertos, plan ahead: these events can draw thousands.