Los Angeles ? It’s not so much that Gina Gershon enjoys going to funerals in Hollywood. But the veteran character actress, an indie-movie stalwart perhaps best known for her tough-talking femme fatale roles in “Showgirls” and “Bound,” discovered that something unusual happens when Angeleno entertainment-industry types gather to pay respects to the dearly departed.

Actress Gina Gershon feeds swans near Johnny Ramone's memorial headstone. Gershon appreciates the cemetery's sense

Call it transcendence – or perhaps what people in the biz refer to as “character development.”

“When you go to funerals here, it’s one of the few times people are actually who they are,” Gershon, 44, says on a cloudless spring afternoon, strolling the grounds of Hollywood Forever Cemetery. “It’s not the slick facade; they’re not trying to get something. They’re more soulful, more human. Vulnerable.”

Of course, it’s nearly impossible not to wax philosophical about Tinseltown’s underlying humanity while touring a site that’s arguably its most hallowed ground. Hollywood Forever, established in 1899, is the final resting place for tens of dozens of deceased celebrities. And among those with memorial markers are generations of movie royalty (Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Sr., Hattie McDaniel, Jayne Mansfield), silent-screen superstars (Rudolph Valentino, Cecil B. DeMille), mobsters (Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel) and even the odd punk-rock icon (Johnny Ramone). Abutted to the south by the Paramount Studios back lot, the leafy cemetery is a riot of baroque headstones and gleaming mausoleums sprawled across 62 acres of industrial Hollywood.

For Gershon, the memorial park is all about the kind of historical permanence she finds in woefully short supply in Los Angeles.

“It’s forever,” she says of the cemetery. “In such a transitory city where the billboards change each week – where the history is wiped off the land and off people’s faces – it’s one of the few places that has a sense of history.”

But also, as evidenced by Hollywood Forever’s embrace by the local hipster intelligentsia, the place has become indisputably now.

‘Mind shift’

In the new millennium, this once-bankrupt graveyard has turned into a multimedia community center that regularly draws thousands of visitors to its cultural events. Although the notion of a functioning cemetery-as-hangout might seem anathema at first blush, with several initiatives in the offing, Hollywood Forever’s primary focus appears to be establishing new continuums between the living and the dead.

“When you walk on the grounds here, you go through a mind shift,” says Jay Boileau, executive vice president of Forever West, which owns and operates Hollywood Forever. “You look at life differently. That, in itself, is a cultural resource. And you have all of these stories, the ritual, the remembrance. You can look at it as a collective artwork. So it’s a logical place for there to be gatherings and cultural events.”

Events

Exhibit A: Cinespia, a six-year-old revival screening series that shows movies alfresco against a mausoleum wall at Hollywood Forever each Saturday through the summer. (A new season began this month with a screening of Robert Altman’s scabrous 1992 movie-studio satire “The Player.”)

Drawing crowds of up to 2,700, Cinespia can be a curious spectacle. Picnic basket-toting cineastes pass by the grave markers at dusk, settling on the grass behind a crypt to pop bottles of wine and watch classic movies – many featuring people buried nearby.

“You take these movies out of the stuffy ambience of an art house and make it a social event, it’ll draw more people into seeing films they might not ordinarily check out,” says John Wyatt, Cinespia’s founder and organizer. “Most people today don’t even think about a time before Bruce Willis. For me, it’s about the excitement of showing a John Huston movie a stone’s throw from where he’s buried.”

June 22, Hollywood Forever will embark on its newest cultural offering: a co-production with Tall Blonde Productions, Shakespeare in the Cemetery, will begin staging performances of “Hamlet” on Fridays and Sundays at the Fairbanks Reflecting Pool, running through late July.

According to Katharine Brandt, Tall Blonde’s co-founder, the production will include a number of cemetery-specific tweaks on the boilerplate outdoor-theater formula. Actors in period costume will interact with the audience, and Hollywood Forever officials have greenlighted the digging of an actual grave for the female lead, Ophelia. In an eerily serendipitous case of art imitating life imitating art – or is it death imitating art? – the words “Good night, sweet prince, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest” are engraved on the Fairbanks mausoleum, a line uttered by Horatio when (spoiler alert) Hamlet dies.