The Good Place
Disneyland is advertised as "the happiest place on Earth." Forest Lawn was pitched as "the happiest cemetery." The parallels between theme park and memorial park are more than skin deep, and that is the unlikely thesis of a new show at the Forest Lawn Museum, "California Visionaries: The Lives and Legacies of Walt Disney and Hubert Eaton." It turns out that animation mogul Disney and cemetery tycoon Eaton had a lot in common. They were raised in small-town Missouri within 100 miles of each other. Each moved to L.A. to found an institution that has come to epitomize the middlebrow populism and capitalist pixie dust of the city at mid century. Disney and Eaton came to be friends; they died within three months of each other. Disney was honorary pallbearer at Eaton's funeral and soon after was laid to rest himself—at Forest Lawn, naturally. Still of Walt Disney's The Skeleton Dance , 1929 One of the earliest objects in the show is a film, Disney'...
