Cemeteries

Summer in Southern California has long been the stuff of song — hot days, warm nights, sunshine, bare skin and cruising. For a growing number of Angelenos, it has also come to mean seeing movies outside. Anchored by the Cinespia screenings at Hollywood Forever Cemetery, watching movies al fresco can now be done at plenty of places other than an old-fashioned drive-in. (Though there are still a few of those as well.) This is the 10th season of Cinespia at Hollywood Forever, the final resting place of such Tinseltown notables as Douglas Fairbanks, Rudolph Valentino and Marion Davies.

Rosemary Brown is standing over the grave of her son at Arlington National Cemetery when someone catches her eye. It's a boy in khaki shorts and muddy shoes, juggling a clunky camera and the Motorola Xoom he got for his 17th birthday five days earlier. "May I ask what you're doing?" Brown inquires. The boy begins to peck at the Xoom tablet, and in seconds the image that Brown has come all the way from Cartwright, Okla., to see fills the screen. It's the white marble headstone of Army Special Forces Staff Sgt. Jason L. Brown, killed by small-arms fire in Afghanistan three years ago this day. Her face brightens.

The owners of Hollywood Forever Cemetery say they are interested in buying Glendale's troubled Grand View Memorial Park, which fell into scandal in 2005 when investigators discovered that 4,000 people had been improperly buried. The sale of Grand View -- where public access has been limited for years since the facility fell into a state of disrepair -- is required under the terms of a $3.8-million settlement of a class-action lawsuit against the cemetery's operators. The lawsuit came in the wake of a 2005 state investigation that found the remains of 4,000 people who had not been properly buried.

As a combat medic in Vietnam with the Army's 1st Air Cavalry Division in 1968 and 1969, John A. Smith III risked his life repeatedly to rescue wounded comrades. He was wounded three times and awarded the Bronze Star for valor. After years of surgeries and rehabilitation, Smith moved from New York to San Diego in 1982 and took a job with the U.S. Post Office. He rarely talked of his combat experiences, but he routinely visited veterans in local hospitals, served as the announcer at the Veterans Day parade and volunteered at the California Veterans Home in Chula Vista.

Whenever he drives past the Los Angeles National Cemetery, Bill Hutton silently reflects on the thousands of precisely placed white grave markers and remembers his own close calls while serving in Vietnam. He also hears the noise from cars roaring by on the 405 Freeway just feet from Sepulveda Boulevard, which runs along the cemetery's west side. He finds it perplexing that transportation engineers have not planned a sound wall as part of the ongoing freeway-widening project. "National cemeteries are sacred to our vets who have given so much for our country," said Hutton, 63, of Thousand Oaks, the thrice-wounded national senior vice commander for the Military Order of the Purple Heart.

With a push from Los Angeles City Councilman Bill Rosendahl and a nudge from the city's Cultural Heritage Commission, a long-running dispute over a historic rancho-era cemetery in Pacific Palisades has been laid to rest. In a deal that will help preserve the little-known Pascual Marquez Family Cemetery, neighbors have agreed to sell a portion of the land in front of the burial ground at a greatly reduced price. The space will allow for landscaping and provide access to winding San Lorenzo Street.

Steven Hackel has spent most of the last two decades bringing old California into the modern age. He's an expert in the baptism, marriage and burial records from the days of Spanish and Mexican rule. With a team of colleagues at the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens, he's taken the information written down in the looping, 200-year-old handwriting of church scribes and created a computer database. So when Hackel heard this month about the discovery of dozens of bodies during a construction project on the site of Los Angeles' original cemetery, he started tapping on his keyboard.

The evening shadows have to fall just right. And the grave shouldn't be on a slope. In traditional Hmong culture, the burial site matters for eternity, to the living and the dead and the spirit world that connects them. So the old Hmong men ? once young soldiers in a CIA-backed "secret" war in the jungles of Laos ? light candles for Gen. Vang Pao, their leader in that war, and hope that he will be allowed to be buried in Arlington National Cemetery. They fought a war on behalf of the Americans and lost everything: their land, their way of life, their country and the lives of tens of thousands of their people.

Officials have halted some excavation on the site of a planned Mexican American cultural center after complaints about the removal of skeletal remains that have been unearthed there. Miguel Angel Corzo, the chief executive of La Plaza de Cultura y Artes, released a statement on Friday saying "We believe it is in the best interest of both La Plaza and the larger community to put this section of our project on hold. " Fragile bones from dozens of bodies have been found on the site since October, buried beneath the surface in an area planned as an outdoor space and garden.

Officials at the planned Mexican American cultural center La Plaza de Cultura y Artes,  which is being built near Olvera Street, scrambled to do damage control this week after news about excavated skeletal remains generated more and more criticism. The fragile bones of dozens of bodies had been found in the historic downtown spot,  buried beneath the site of a planned outdoor space and garden.   Native American groups,  archaeologists and the L.A. Archdiocese have voiced concerns over the removal of what may be the remains of the city's first cemetery.