HOLLYWOOD -- Morticians can thank the popularity of HBO's Six Feet Under for giving their industry a quirky TV profile, but consumer technology is also redefining the once-staid business by adding a whole new "product" line -- the digital memorial.
Forever Enterprises, a fast-growing new brand in mortuary services, is perhaps the most media-savvy purveyor of this developing form. The upstart company owns cemeteries in California, Missouri and Kansas, as well as a plot of Web space. The latter being where thousands of people are not so much buried as dynamically archived in the form of professionally produced digital movies.
At Forever, they call these movies "Life Stories," multimedia presentations intended to capture the living essence of a person though a documentary-style compilation of family snapshots, video footage, favorite songs and personal references.
"For most people, the only permanent memorial is a name and date etched in stone," reads a line of promo text on the website. "Forever Life Stories fill in the dash between the birth date and death date."
Besides giving friends and family a way to remember loved ones, they offer a lively counterpoint to the display of an open casket when shown on plasma screens before or during actual funerals.
Forever has a team of sensitivity-trained videographers who meet with families after a death to gather footage. A finished video might feature such moments as a pair of still-vital grandparents happily addressing their future ancestors.
Of course, there's no reason to wait until you're dead to get started.
Scott Everett Berger, who is 35 and in good health, began his own memorial-in-progress after a family member died.
His wacky personality seems anything but morbid in the film, where he mugs for the camera and tells funny stories about his life.
It's this kind of continuing relationship with the living that Forever hopes to establish with its customers, who pay between $395 and $4,000 for their stories -- and those of their loved ones -- preserved for posterity.
While online memorials have long existed in cyberspace, the multimedia format used by Forever Enterprises is the recent creation of Tyler Cassity, the company's owner. A thirty-something entrepreneur, he became interested in the idea of creating memorials for the dead at age 13 when he found an audiotape of his deceased grandmother and was profoundly moved.
"Tyler realized that audio tape meant more than a headstone ever could," said Jay Boileau, Forever's vice president of technology.
Cassity's original idea was to develop a model for creating video memorials that he would sell to mortuaries, but there were few takers.
So in 1998, he bought his own cemetery, Hollywood Memorial Park, a 64-acre tract located near Paramount Studios in Tinseltown.
The cemetery, which he renamed Hollywood Forever, holds the remains of entertainment legends like Rudolph Valentino and Mama Cass.
Its Spanish-style front offices contain a cavernous, ornately designed room that once served as a Masonic lodge. The space has been converted into a bustling digital studio that produces up to 80 short, final cut pro-edited films a week.
"I find it fascinating working with this material," said Boileau, who views the online memorials that he creates as an important resource not just for the families of the dead, but also for outsiders. "Looking at this archive is a collective memory; I see it as a profound sociological research tool."
