When F.W. Samuelson and a partner named Lombard founded Hollywood Cemetery in 1899, the movie industry did not yet exist. But by 1920, Paramount Pictures and RKO had purchased large portions of the original grounds, shrinking the cemetery to make room for soundstages. Today Paramount's studio walls form the cemetery's southern boundary, close enough that visitors can sometimes hear filming through the fence. In 1986, a thousand plot owners sued after discovering that cemetery owner Jules Roth had allowed Paramount employees to park among the graves while the studio's parking structure was under construction. The dead in Hollywood have never been allowed much peace.

Jules Roth was a convicted felon and millionaire who bought a controlling stake in the cemetery in 1939. His parents were buried there. Over the following decades, Roth treated the operation as a personal piggy bank, siphoning funds that should have maintained the grounds. By the 1980s, the California Cemetery Board fielded constant complaints: vandalism, neglected lawns, crumbling mausoleums. The heirs of makeup magnate Max Factor, interred in the Beth Olam Mausoleum in 1938, moved his remains to Culver City after water damage discolored the walls. Roth sold off cemetery frontage for strip malls. When the 1994 Northridge earthquake damaged crypts, he could not afford repairs. The only revenue came from charging bereaved families five hundred dollars to exhume their loved ones for relocation.

Hattie McDaniel became the first African American to win an Academy Award for her role as Mammy in Gone with the Wind. She expressed a wish to be interred at Hollywood Memorial Park, but when she died in 1952, the cemetery remained segregated. Owner Jules Roth refused her. The grounds did not desegregate until 1959, seven years after McDaniel's death. She was buried instead at Rosedale Cemetery. In 1999, the cemetery's new owners dedicated a cenotaph in her honor at a prime lakeside location, a belated acknowledgment that segregation had denied her a place she had earned.

When Tyler and Brent Cassity purchased the cemetery after Roth's death in 1998, they discovered the endowment care fund was missing nine million dollars. They invested heavily in restoration anyway, reopening the long-shuttered crematory in 2002. George Harrison was cremated there in 2001, just before the official reopening. The Cassitys transformed the grounds into a cultural venue: outdoor movie screenings, concerts, Day of the Dead celebrations. The Flaming Lips performed a two-night stand in 2011 billed Everyone You Know Someday Will Die. Gary Numan recorded a live album there in 2013. In 2025, a new hundred-foot mausoleum called Gower Court opened, a vertical monument where two of five floors sold out before construction finished. The cemetery has become a place where the living gather as much as the dead rest.