Hollywood Forever Cemetery

Thanks to Ronald Reagan, Los Angeles will have a grand new monument to punk rock. On Friday, the fans and famous friends of the late Johnny Ramone will gather at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery to dedicate a bronze statue that depicts him clawing away at his Mosrite guitar. Who was it exactly who decided that a gritty New York rock outlaw is best memorialized atop a masonry pedestal beside a pond? That would be Ramone himself.

Lions of literature and war heroes get grand memorials, but rock stars usually get scruffier send-offs -- consider the years of vandalism inflicted on Jim Morrison's grave in Paris or the fact that Kurt Cobain is celebrated in his hometown by a papier-mache statue in a muffler shop. Johnny Ramone wanted better, and on Friday the underground rock hero got it.

Hollywood Memorial Park, the final resting place of such legendary Hollywood denizens as Rudolph Valentino, Douglas Fairbanks, Cecil B. DeMille, Peter Lorre and Tyrone Power, fell into bankruptcy in the 1990s, losing its license in 1994. Families were disinterring their loved ones and moving them to operational cemeteries. Then in 1998, Tyler Cassity, a movie-star-handsome 31-year-old from Kansas City, Mo., bought the 62-acre property on Santa Monica Boulevard for $375,000.

When the members of new band Divine Fits, best described as an indie-rock supergroup (even if it sounds silly), first hooked up, they had a common goal.  “We basically wanted to write songs together, make an album, and go and play those songs live,” guitarist-singer Dan Boeckner said in a recent interview with Pitchfork. “We wanted to start a band.”  Featuring Boeckner, best known for his work with Wolf Parade and Handsome Furs, singer and guitarist Britt Daniel of the band Spoon, and New Bomb Turks drummer Sam Brown, the group hit its goal as it concluded its month-long Los Angeles residency Tuesday night at the gorgeous, acoustically rich Masonic Temple at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery.

A private memorial for director Tony Scott will be held Friday at the Hollywood Forever cemetery in Los Angeles, according to a knowledgeable person not authorized to discuss the matter publicly. The small ceremony for friends and family of the director of "True Romance" and "Enemy of the State" who committed suicide Sunday will be followed by a public remembrance after Labor Day. Hollywood Forever, on Santa Monica Boulevard, is the final resting place for many actors and filmmakers, including Rudolph Valentino, Hattie McDaniel, Cecil B. DeMille, Douglas Fairbanks, Jayne Mansfield and Tyrone Power.

When it comes to outdoor summer movie screenings, Cinespia at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery has been Los Angeles' go-to experience for more than a decade. But there's plenty of room for more screenings in this company town, and now Street Food Cinema has stepped up with an alternative take involving a movie on the lawn near the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, a big gathering of food trucks, and live music and audience games to get the evening started. Seeing movies under the stars just got a little easier, and maybe a little more interactive.

Hope Sandoval prefers the darkness. It's how she feels comfortable onstage, with the lights down low, freeing the singer from the distraction of all those strangers watching from the audience. "I just hide and sing," she explains. Sometimes, she hides a little too well. After a September performance in San Francisco, four fans demanded a refund because they couldn't see her, as if unconvinced that Sandoval had been there at all. "It's so ridiculous," she says, more puzzled than annoyed.

As hundreds of mourners gathered at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery on Saturday, Joanna Ramos' grieving mother fought back tears and said she would always remember her 10-year-old daughter as a "good and happy little girl who dreamed of being a singer and a star. " "What happened to Joanna could happen to anybody," Cecilia Villanueva, 41, said before the service. "Parents need to be careful and try to watch over their children, even when they are at school with friends. " Relatives, friends and strangers assembled at the cemetery's chapel for a funeral service to honor the fifth-grader, who died after a fight with a classmate near their elementary school in Long Beach.

The 25 best L.A. films of the last 25 years "Los ANGELES isn't a real city," people have said, "it just plays one on camera." It was a clever line once upon a time, but all that has changed. Los Angeles is the most complicated community in America -- make no mistake, it is a community -- and over the last 25 years, it has been both celebrated and savaged on the big screen with amazing efficacy. Damaged souls and flawless weather, canyon love and beach city menace, homeboys and credit card girls, freeways and fedoras, power lines and palm trees . . . again and again, moviegoers all over the world have sat in the dark and stared up at our Los Angeles, even if it was one populated by corrupt cops or a jabbering cartoon rabbit.

Although it seems like Hal Holbrook has owned the role of Mark Twain for decades, another actor has staked a theatrical claim to the white-haired novelist and wit. Val Kilmer has been working on "Citizen Twain," a solo play in which he plays the writer, for the past several years and presented a workshop version at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery last year. Kilmer -- who has starred in "Top Gun," "The Doors," "Heat" and "Batman Forever" -- will take his Twain play on the road for a short tour starting in April.