SOCIAL CLIMES
EVENING OF HIGH SPIRITS

Los Angeles Times 
By Gina Piccalo, Times Staff Writer
August 24, 2003

...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 it was explained, 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."

calendarlive.com: Evening of high spirits
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