Frenchtown Confidential

Sometimes, people just disappear. It's much less common in the digital age. It would have been relatively easy to vanish without a trace...

When you hear "Hollywood" and "makeup" in the same sentence, who do you think of? Max Factor, whose building now houses ...

Joseph Louis Giroux was a Montrealer by birth, but finished his schooling in Illinois and started his mining career in Utah. Accompanying hi...

You probably already know Musso and Frank Grill, Hollywood's oldest restaurant (one of greater LA's oldest restaurants, period), is ...

Once upon a time in Montmartre, a renowned Impressionist painter married a young dressmaker. They had three sons, all of them creative. Th...

One of the most frustrating things about digging through Los Angeles history is finding out something with character, charm, historical sig...

I spend God only knows how many hours poring over old books, old city directories, and very old newspapers in search of clues about the forg...

(Huge thanks to Santa Paula historian Mitch Stone for his help in researching this entry. Merci, Mitch!) Any serious film buff knows who G...

The film and television industry owes an immeasurable debt to French innovators. The very first motion-picture camera was invented by a...

Back in the day, Hollywood and West Hollywood were mostly farmland and well outside of Los Angeles proper. Today, nothing remains of the f...