Graveyard shift

IT’S not so much that Gina Gershon enjoys going to funerals in Hollywood. But the veteran character actress, an indie movie stalwart perhaps best known for her tough-talking femme fatale roles in “Showgirls” and “Bound,” discovered that something unusual happens when Angeleno entertainment industry-ites gather to pay respects to the dearly departed.

Call it transcendence -- or perhaps what people in the biz refer to as “character development.”

“When you go to funerals here, it’s one of the few times people are actually who they are,” Gershon, 44, says on a cloudless spring afternoon, strolling the grounds of Hollywood Forever Cemetery. “It’s not the slick facade; they’re not trying to get something. They’re more soulful, more human. Vulnerable.”

Of course, it’s nearly impossible not to wax philosophical about Tinseltown’s underlying humanity while touring a site that’s arguably its most hallowed ground. Hollywood Forever, established in 1899, is the final resting place for tens of dozens of deceased celebrities. And among those with memorial markers are generations of movie royalty (Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Sr., Hattie McDaniel, Jayne Mansfield), silent-screen superstars (Rudolph Valentino, Cecil B. DeMille), mobsters (Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel) and even the odd punk-rock icon (Johnny Ramone). Abutted to the south by the Paramount Studios back lot, the leafy cemetery is a riot of baroque headstones and gleaming mausoleums sprawled across 62 acres of industrial Hollywood.

And for Gershon -- a multi-hyphenate creative type whose young-adult novel “Camp Creepy Time” (her first book, co-written with her brother Dann) came out earlier this month -- the memorial park is all about the kind of historical permanence she finds Los Angeles in woefully short supply of.

“It’s forever,” she says of the cemetery. “In such a transitory city where the billboards change each week -- where the history is wiped off the land and off people’s faces -- it’s one of the few places that has a sense of history.”

But also, as evidenced by Hollywood Forever’s embrace by the local hipster intelligentsia, the place has become indisputably now.

Screen gems

In the new millennium, this once-bankrupt graveyard has turned into a multimedia community center that regularly draws thousands of visitors to its cultural events. Although the notion of a functioning cemetery-as-hangout might seem anathema at first blush, with several initiatives in the offing, Hollywood Forever’s primary focus appears to be establishing new continuums between the living and the dead.

“When you walk on the grounds here, you go through a mind shift,” says Jay Boileau, executive vice president of Forever West, which owns and operates Hollywood Forever. “You look at life differently. That, in itself, is a cultural resource. And you have all of these stories, the ritual, the remembrance. You can look at it as a collective artwork. So it’s a logical place for there to be gatherings and cultural events.”

Exhibit A: Cinespia, a 6-year-old revival screening series that shows movies alfresco against a mausoleum wall at Hollywood Forever each Saturday through the summer. (A new season begins Saturday with a screening of Robert Altman’s scabrous 1992 movie studio satire, “The Player.”)

Drawing crowds of up to 2,700, Cinespia can be a curious spectacle. Picnic basket-toting cineastes pass by the grave markers at dusk, settling on the grass behind a crypt to pop bottles of wine and watch classic movies -- many featuring people buried nearby.

“You take these movies out of the stuffy ambience of an art house and make it a social event, it’ll draw more people into seeing films they might not ordinarily check out,” says John Wyatt, Cinespia’s founder and organizer. “Most people today don’t even think about a time before Bruce Willis. For me, it’s about the excitement of showing a John Huston movie a stone’s throw from where he’s buried.”

Sweets to the sweet

But movies are just the start of this emerging pop-culture destination. Last year, platinum-selling nu-metal rock band Korn threw a star-studded private party at the graveyard’s Cathedral Mausoleum to announce its “See You on the Other Side” world tour. In October, more than 20,000 visitors thronged the cemetery’s seventh annual Dia de los Muertos, a Mexican cultural fiesta billed as the “nation’s largest and most authentic Day of the Dead celebration.” Earlier this month, the canceled show “7th Heaven” held its wrap party (complete with “eulogy”) for cast and crew at the cemetery.

And on June 22, Hollywood Forever will embark on its newest cultural offering: a co-production with Tall Blonde Productions, Shakespeare in the Cemetery, will begin staging performances of “Hamlet” on Fridays and Sundays at the Fairbanks Reflecting Pool, running through late July.

According to Katharine Brandt, Tall Blonde’s co-founder, the production will include a number of cemetery-specific tweaks on the boilerplate outdoor-theater formula. Actors in period costume will interact with the audience, and Hollywood Forever officials have OKd the digging of an actual grave for the female lead, Ophelia. In an eerily serendipitous case of art imitating life imitating art -- or is it death imitating art? -- the words “Good night, sweet prince, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest” are engraved on the Fairbanks mausoleum, a line uttered by Horatio when [spoiler alert] Hamlet dies.

“Shakespeare, people tend to stay away from because of the language,” Brandt says. “So we thought, ‘How can we make this fresh? How can we come at it from a different angle?’ An audience sitting in a cemetery, having that energy and feeling it surrounding you while you watch a play that ponders mortality -- it’s the perfect melding of two worlds.”

“I believe some of the same stuff that led to the success of Cinespia will apply,” says Boileau. “We’re hoping to create an institution.” (Enactments of the Bard’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” start in early August.)

Room to rock

Further trumping the notion that there are no second acts for American graveyards, executives at Hollywood Forever have contracted a famous designer to renovate an ornate event hall in the cemetery’s administrative building. Things are still up in the air, but the space has been re-imagined variously as a private members club or -- audible gasp! -- a nightclub.

Built in 1929 to hold gatherings for a subset of the Masons called the Order of the Eastern Star but unused for more than half a century after being abandoned by the secretive society in 1951, “the lodge” boasts towering wood-beamed ceilings, a giant fireplace and glittering chandeliers.

Now, Boileau has contracted Brad Dunning, who is better known as all-around Man of Taste Tom Ford’s interior designer, to refurbish the space as a venue.

“I don’t want to say ‘club,’ ” Boileau says. “But there might be private parties or some sort of weekly gathering. Our owner-operators are working with the families of the people buried here. We want to be sensitive, to make them a part of what goes on.

“Part of our business plan to save a bankrupt cemetery was to make it a cultural center. To bring people back by hosting a variety of events.”

As it happens, life after death is also something of a metaphorical reality for Gershon these days -- one she pauses to consider while admiring Ramones guitarist Johnny Ramone’s memorial marker, a life-size sculpture of the leather-jacketed punk rocker captured in mid-solo.

After more than two decades of journeyman appearances in canceled TV series, critically hailed indie movies that failed to land distribution and being typecast as what she describes as “this totally tough, killer lesbian rocker-art whore motorcycle chick,” Gershon turned her attention to her passion projects: music and writing.

Now her new self-produced CD, “In Search of Cleo,” which conjures the sultry atmospherics of Patsy Cline and a mordant, streetwise worldview all Gershon’s own, is looking at a digital-only release in the coming months.

More important career-wise, Steven Spielberg personally called the actress to option the movie rights for her “Camp Creepy Time” book. Plotted around eccentric 13-year-old Einstein P. Fleet, the young-adult novel is a fantasy-mystery set in a summer camp that turns out to be an alien-run human smuggling ring. It’s set to be adapted for the screen by Oscar-nominated writer Richard LaGravenese.

Oh, and there are Gershon’s recurring TV roles: as an antagonistic fashion mogul diva on “Ugly Betty” (one episode airing tonight) and as a hotblooded Hasidic Jew (with whom Larry David’s character almost has an affair) on “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” set to resume airing in September.

Gershon sees something of a parallel between her recent uptick in productivity and the cemetery’s rise, fall and recent return from the brink of oblivion.

“It was once really thriving, but then during the ‘70s and ‘80s it was falling apart,” she says. “People were coming here to take the bodies out. Then the new guys bought it [in the late ‘90s] and totally turned it around. That’s so symbolic of Hollywood. Your career can be completely dead, and the next day you have a resurrection.”

chris.lee@latimes.com

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A quite lively summer season

Cinespia kicks off Saturday with a screening of Robert Altman’s “The Player,” followed May 26 by Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 psychological thriller “Vertigo.” The 1946 Rita Hayworth classic film noir “Gilda” will be screened on June 2, followed by Hal Ashby’s May-December romantic comedy, “Harold and Maude,” on June 9. Tickets cost $10 (the proceeds go toward cemetery restoration). For the developing schedule, go to www.cinespia.org.

On Wednesday, Hollywood Forever will celebrate Douglas Fairbanks’ 124th birthday with a free screening of one of the screen giant’s most beloved silent films, “The Gaucho” (1927). Festivities are set to begin at 7 p.m. on the Fairbanks Lawn, which overlooks the scenic crypt where both the actor and his equally famous son, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., are interred. Birthday cake and punch will be served. A live, original score created especially for the event will be performed by its composer, jazz-flamenco guitarist Robert Earl Longley.

Shakespeare in the Cemetery’s staging of “Hamlet” will run on Friday and Sunday nights from June 22 through July 15. Then, in August, the company will mount “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” on those nights through the end of the summer. Tickets: $20; shakespeareinthecemetery.com.

Hollywood Forever Cemetery is located at 6000 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood, CA 90038 (at Gower). (323) 469-1181; Info: www.hollywoodforever.com.

-- Chris Lee