Evening of high spirits

It was cooler inside the cemetery than one might expect after a scorching day, and guests rubbed their bare arms as they followed a series of smoking torches past flower-strewn graves.

Night blanketed Maple Avenue, the path to the evening’s open-air movie screening, but photographs of the dead etched into the headstones were still visible, a reminder of the graveyard’s occupants. Klezmer music echoed hauntingly from somewhere ahead.

Past the Garden of Exodus, the resting place of Carl “Alfalfa” Switzer and the sarcophagi of Douglas Fairbanks Sr. and Jr., a wide open lawn came into view, warmed by candlelight and conversation. A DJ mixed the klezmer with electronica and jazz. Saturday night contentment settled in.

Melissa Feinberg sipped wine on a blanket crowded with food and friends and considered her surroundings. “It’s a great place to have a really decadent picnic,” she said. The proximity of the graves did nothing to dampen her spirit. “These people are probably more at peace than we are,” Feinberg added.

A few hundred gathered for the Aug. 16 screening of the 1937 Yiddish film “The Dybbuk,” the first in a series of events hosted by Avada, a group that aims to bring Yiddish culture to the under-40 set. Yet as unique as the evening was, it was just another Saturday night at Hollywood Forever Cemetery, which has fast become the hip alternative to studios, local theaters or hotels for movie screenings, readings, corporate events, even weddings.

Brothers Tyler and Brent Cassity started hosting events at the cemetery in 1999, a year after they bought it, to help rejuvenate its image -- or as spokesman Joe Sehee explains, to teach people to “befriend their mortality.”

The cemetery was built in 1899, before the boom of the film industry, when fruit orchards and ranches dominated. Over the years, it became the resting place of dozens of Hollywood’s founders, from Cecil B. DeMille and Griffith J. Griffith to Rudolph Valentino and Daeida Wilcox Beveridge, the woman who gave Hollywood Boulevard its name.

While Valentino’s death had been honored every Aug. 23 for decades, the Cassitys added Valentino films to the celebration and began hosting poetry readings, one-man shows and parties to celebrate the Day of the Dead and the Summer Solstice on the lawn next to the Fairbanks memorial (where no bodies are buried).

“I try to make sure that all of our events are acts of memory, expressions of the past,” Tyler Cassity says. “I think that’s what a cemetery is for. It’s the institution in society that’s supposed to make people remember.”

After attending one of the Valentino events, Jack Wyatt brought his film series Cinespia to the cemetery. Now, twice each month in the summer, film buffs tote their blankets and coolers through the graveyard for a campy Saturday night spent watching films from the ‘30s, ‘40s and ‘50s.

Jack Merrill saw the cemetery as a historically significant site perfect for his Urban Empire Theater, a nonprofit film and theater production company. At Hollywood Forever, the company’s actors have read film scripts made famous by folks buried there, such as “The Thin Man” and “It Happened One Night.” Again, the high camp factor is a draw. “These early scripts read like plays, and the language is hysterical,” Merrill says.

Then there are those who are inspired to deeper thoughts. Deborah “Bee” Uytiepl, Tyler Cassity’s assistant, and her husband, Gary McRae, a former Scotland Yard homicide detective, chose to have their wedding reception on the lawn next to the Fairbanks memorial. To them, the place is a sanctuary where they can reflect on the importance of living life fully.

“It’s really not unusual for either of us,” Uytiepl says. “We’ve spent a lot of time talking about death.... Death reminds us of our mortality, and mortality reminds us what’s important and meaningful in life.”

While the graves do inspire philosophical ponderings, Cassity says the real draw is nature. “It’s 62 acres of grass and trees and lakes in the middle of all this asphalt,” he says, “and people need someplace to go to be a community.”