It is one of the oldest maxims in show business: death is the ultimate career move. With a thriving sightseeing company in the heart of Hollywood, Scott Michaels is busy trying to prove that the saying is equally applicable to the tourist trade.
Begun this year, Michaels' rubbernecking 'Dearly Departed: The Tragical History Tour' around Los Angeles is a must for anyone interested in the seedy side of the entertainment world's spiritual capital.
'It's a tour for people who like reading salacious, tabloidy kind of news,' says Michaels. 'And let's face it, most people do like reading that stuff - they just don't like to admit it. My tour is for those people who do.'
Michaels previously ran a similarly themed tour operation, Grave Line Tours, before moving to England in 1996, where, thanks mainly to his boyfriend, up-and-coming celebrity Graham Norton, he regularly rubbed shoulders with London's glitterati. Grave Line returned from the afterlife as Dearly Departed in January this year and has grown steadily, owing its success to painstaking attention to detail.
If you were to imagine a guided tour that combined the meticulous research of a Lonely Planet travel book with the dark humour of a James Ellroy novel, you would probably come up with something similar to Michaels' entertaining and often very funny three-hour odyssey around LA.
It's all there: the diner where James Dean tucked into his last meal and the garage where he collected the Porsche he was driving when he died; the crime scene of the 1969 Manson family murders; the soon-to-be demolished hotel in which Robert Kennedy was shot dead.
