A few weeks ago we drove from Phoenix to San Francisco. I don’t know if you’ve ever done that drive before, but I have and it is one of the most boring drives ever. It is just unchanging desert for the first 5 hours, and then you get to L.A., and you’re like great we’re here. But you’re not there, and you still have about 6 hours left in the car.
So this time to break it up, we left early Saturday morning, hung out in L.A. for the day, and then drove the rest of the way on Sunday to break it up. Once I knew we were going to be staying, I immediately, as is my habit, checked the Cinespia website. I’ve been wanting to go to a movie at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery for years, but they only do it during the summer, and only on certain weekends, so even though I’d been actively checking every time we went to L.A., we had never made it.
I was so excited because they were showing a movie that night, and it was Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, which is really everything you’d want in a movie you’d watch in a cemetery. I bought tickets right away, they were $12 each, so not bad, and I also bought the parking pass, which is $10. You park in the Paramount Pictures lot about half a mile away, but I definitely recommend getting the pass, because otherwise parking is kind of a nightmare.
I definitely recommend getting there early as well, we got there at about 6:30 for an 8:30 movie, and there were already people lined up almost around the block. Definitely bring snacks, people had amazing picnic spreads, and I saw more than one person balancing a stack of pizzas in line. You can bring low lawn chairs, there is a lawn chair section, but we just brought blankets and pillows to make a little nest.
We saw a few people with tarps, and we were like, those people are doing too much. But then the ground was kind of wet, and our blanket got kind of wet, and we realized that those people were geniuses, who had obviously been there before.
The movie itself was great, we had a really good spot, and could see and hear perfectly fine. It was such a fun summer activity because everyone was there with a group of friends to hang out and drink wine and watch a great film, and the weather was perfect.
We decided to sneak out a little early because there were a lot of people there and we didn’t want to get stuck behind everyone, but once we were away from the crowd we realized we were alone. In a graveyard. In the pitch black of night. And we were lost. They don’t light up the rest of the cemetery, and they don’t really have signs or anything, but I knew there was a back way to get out that lets you out closer to the Paramount parking lot, so we were scrambling around in the dark trying to find it. It was basically terrifying, but we made it out alive (obviously).
All in all, it was everything I thought it was going to be, and if you are going to be in the L.A. area in the summer, definitely check it out, at least once. Also, if you haven’t seen it, watch Vertigo. Because Jimmy Stewart.
