Mountain View Cemetery is located in the shadow of the San Gabriel Mountains just west of Pasadena. It is hardly the flashiest graveyard in the greater Los Angeles area. While Hollywood Forever and Forest Lawn are well-known final resting places for Walt Disney, Judy Garland, Clark Gable, and Dorothy Dandridge, and host everything from movie screenings to haunted tours, Mountain View is more focused on local Civil War ghosts and the ashes of original TV Superman George Reeves. Forest Lawn is home to Jean Harlow’s marble mausoleum, as well as Hollywood Forever, a (perfect) statue of Johnny Ramone. Mountain View features a blog that is meticulously maintained.
However, that is not the only thing it possesses. This Altadena cemetery’s most unique secondary revenue source is smack dab between two plots containing genuine human remains: “an empty grave we have that’s secured with steel so actors can go inside,” according to Mountain View’s office and operations manager, Luis Treto.
One of the most wonderful and irritating aspects of Los Angeles is that no one appears to know that discussing an important aspect of their business would create a sinkhole in the typical person’s head. I spent much of my life believing that every funeral scene was shot on a studio lot that has been in operation since the silent period. Most producers, however, prefer on-site authenticity, whether it means converting a local park or employing the nearest cemetery willing to work with the location budget (see Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s improvement from a parking-lot graveyard to a genuine one in Pico-Union). If you, like me, thought filming campy sequences in the middle of a field of corpses was unethical, well, here’s your chance.
Outside of my personal encounters with death, all of my beliefs about death came from… well, movies. Many of them were aimed directly at me. The Grave is still grossly underappreciated. But, like with any excellent character actor, you’ll never hear the Grave mention it.
