Exhibit about Film Locations at CLUI Los Angeles
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The empty and familiar-looking
Graystone Mansion in Beverly Hills, likely the “most-filmed
mansion in the world,” one of numerous real sets
featured in the On Locations exhibit at the CLUI Los Angeles
exhibit hall.
CLUI Photo.
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On display this Spring at the CLUI exhibit hall
in Los Angeles was the exhibit On Locations: Places as Sets
in the Landscape of Los Angeles. The exhibit (open April
7 to May 27, 2001) featured images, text and a multimedia display
about the film location industry, and particularly, how places
within the public realm can be transformed, physically and contextually,
by the moving-image industries of film, television, and advertising.
CLUI director Matthew Coolidge presented a slide show and lecture
about the project to a full house at the opening reception,
and an interactive computer display, designed by CLUI project
manager Erik Knutzen, was installed as part of the exhibit.
The identity of Los Angeles has always been composed
of a blend of film myth and historical myth, and their alleged
counterparts in reality. Some say that all of Los Angeles is
a film set, and indeed it is hard to drive across the city without
spotting one of those distinctive-looking production trucks,
or those day-glo production signs that point the way to active
locations and base camps, like some kind of cryptic treasure
hunt. Within the spectrum of facades, streetscapes, and structures
that are used as locations are certain spaces that vividly embody,
physically and theoretically, this paradox of place, and express,
subtly or otherwise, the intriguing dynamic between "real" and
"cinematic" space. These were the structures and sites that
were sought out, explored, and explained in the exhibition.
Some buildings possess a history of great significance
to the City, a history which can be modified by repeated recontextualization
through films. Buildings that are particulary illustrative of
this phenomena include the Herald Examiner building, where William
Randolph Hearst ran the notorious newspaper that helped form
Los Angelesª politics and image, an ornate, historic building,
designed by Julia Morgan (who went on to build Hearstªs Castle
at San Simeon, later portrayed cinematically in Orson Wellesª
Citizen Kane). The Herald Examiner building, located near
downtown, looks from the outside like an unused hulk. It is
still owned by the Hearst Corporation, though it is not open
to the public. It is used instead as a film location.
Several other architectural icons and landmarks
in the city are used primarily or exclusively as locations,
including the 600-room Ambassador Hotel, once an elegant resort
that hosted politicians, celebrities, and the Academy Awards
ceremonies, and is now a crumbling hulk on Wilshire Boulevard,
open only to film and television production. Used for over 100
productions per year, the Ambassador can represent different
kinds of places, but is often used for that run-down, dated
hotel look. One hallway, for example, still has the 70s Las
Vegas hotel wallpaper applied to it for the shooting of Fear
and Loathing in Las Vegas, and a couple of rooms were used
to represent a Cleveland hotel of a similar vintage for Almost
Famous.
The archtypal mansion in film may be the Graystone
mansion in Beverly Hills. Though owned by the city, and located
in a park, the mansion is not open to the public. It is used
only for special events, and as a film location, and is probably
the most-filmed mansion in the world. It is popular also because
it is a rare case of an authentic-looking old world English
mansion, unlike so many of the Mediterranean mansions in the
hills above Los Angeles, and its history is as gothic
as any of the scary films that are shot there.
The 55 room gray limestone structure was built
in 1928, and was second only to Hearst Castle at the time in
regional opulence. It was built by Edward Doheny, who amassed
a fortune as the first to discover oil in the Los Angeles basin,
and who was later involved in the Teapot Dome Scandal, where
he gave $100,000 to the Secretary of the Interior and received
favored oil leases at the federally-owned Elk Hills Naval Petroleum
Reserve in nearby Kern County.
Graystone was a gift to his only son, and the
heir to his fortune, but a few months after moving in with his
wife and children, Edward Jr. and his male secretary were found
shot in the head in a guestroom, in an apparent murder suicide.
Edward Jr.ªs widow lived there until 1955, when she sold Graystone
to a Chicago business man who never moved in. It was during
this initial period of disuse that the film industry started
using the mansion, and for the next ten years, at least 40 productions
were shot there.
In 1965, Graystone and its remaining acreage was
bought by the City of Beverly Hills for $1.3 million, in order
to build a reservoir on the grounds. The building continued
to be used for filming, and was leased to the American Film
Institute from 1969 to 1980. It is now empty and used for an
occasional event, but is primarily used as a film location.
Base camp for the film production trucks and caterers is on
a large parking lot above the mansion, built by the City. Underneath
the asphalt is the buried reservoir that serves the City of
Beverly Hills as a drinking water supply.
Among the productions shot at Graystone are
All of Me, Death Becomes Her, Guilty by Suspicion,
The Phantom, Ghost Busters II, and Murder She Wrote.
Filming in active prisons is generally not permitted
for obvious reasons, and as a result, prison sets are built
in soundstages, back lots, and inside other locations. A few
prisons in Los Angeles are currently closed, and are regular
filming locations. The Sybil Brand Institute, at the County
Sheriffªs complex in City Terrace, east of downtown, was the
primary Los Angeles County correctional facility for women before
it closed in 1997. Though still managed by the sheriffªs department,
it is now used exclusively for filming.
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Portions of the Sybil Brand Institute
are familiar from films shot there. This visiting area
has appeared in several films.
CLUI photo.
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Built in 1963, Sybil Brand was a minimum to maximum
security facility, with a design capacity of 900, and a peak
occupancy of 2,800. It once housed Susan Atkins (whose confessions
to a cellmate at the prison led to the arrest of Charles Manson
and family), and Susan McDougall of Whitewater scandal fame.
When Sybil Brand closed, inmates were transferred to the new
Twin Towers complex. The County may renovate the building and
open it again as a prison, but in the meantime it offers modern
looking prison rooms including cafeterias, hallways, recreation
areas, visiting areas, infirmaries, and cells from solitary
confinement to dormitories. As it was a womenªs prison, the
interior walls have a pink color, which is usually painted over
for filming.
Productions film here at a rate of two or three
per month. The film Blow, about cocaine dealers, recently
spent five weeks shooting all over the prison. Other productions
include Arrest and Trial, Gangland, X-Files, and Americaªs
Most Wanted.
Though older and more run down, the City of Los
Angeles jail in Lincoln Heights is also closed, and is used
regularly as a film location, appearing in NYPD Blue, Unsolved
Mysteries, and other film and television projects.
The classic diner makes frequent appearances in
film and television. Often these diners are studio sets or functioning
restaurants. Johnieªs Broiler in Downey, for example, is often
used (The Game, Short Cuts, Reality Bites), and the Hawthorne
Grill in Hawthorne was used for Pulp Fiction, before
it was torn down. There is even at least one property company
in Los Angeles that offers a lunch counter interior set mounted
on a truck, that can be delivered to any shooting location.
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The landmark Johnie’s Coffee Shop,
featured prominently in the film Miracle Mile, is now
open only as a filming location.
CLUI photo.
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One of the most visible of the classic diners
in Los Angeles is Johnieªs Coffee Shop, located in the heart
of the Miracle Mile corridor of Wilshire Boulevard. The restaurant
was featured prominently in the 1988 film Miracle Mile,
most of which was filmed on this same stretch of Wilshire. In
the film, the lead character spends a lot of time in Johnieªs
and takes a phone call at a pay phone outside that indicates
that a nuclear armageddon is 75 minutes away. The phone booth
and the spinning clock sign, which effectively counts the minutes
to the destruction of Los Angeles, were props.
Johnieªs has been used in many television shows,
music videos, and ads. It also appears briefly in another film
about cataclysm and Los Angeles, the 1997 film Volcano,
where a barricade was constructed across Wilshire Boulevard
to keep the molten lava from flowing westward (Johnieªs is spared,
though the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Petersenªs Automotive
Museum across the street are destroyed in the film).
Johnieªs was built by the googie architecture
firm of Armet and Davis in 1955. It ceased serving food in late
2000, and the current owners have no plans to use it as a restaurant,
intending instead to continue to rent it exclusively as a restaurant
film location.
With the change in banking from the full-service
branch to ATMs and electronic banking, many bank buildings have
closed, and several of these are used only as film locations.
The Security National Bank on Hollywood Boulevard was built
in 1920 by the architectural firm of John and Donald Parkinson,
creators of such Los Angeles landmarks as Union Station, Bullocks
Wilshire, and the Pacific Coast Stock Exchange.
It was one of the principal banks used by Hollywood,
for financing films (including those of Cecil B. DeMille), and
for maintaining personal fortunes (Howard Hughes, Charlie Chaplin,
and W. C. Fields are said to have had accounts at this bank).
Though the upstairs offices are in use (primarily by entertainment
industry professionals) the bank on the ground floor is vacant
and has been used for numerous advertising shoots, and was one
of the principal locations for the television show Arrest
and Trial.
The Bank of America building, downtown at 7th
and Spring, was the Los Angeles headquarters for the bank from
1930 to 1972. The upstairs offices are now used by the Los Angeles
Department of Engineering, while the grand bank lobby, with
vaulted ceilings, has been vacant since 1988, and has been used
in numerous films, including Traffic, Blow, and Seven.
The bank vault on the main floor, as well as the walls behind
the counters, are set dressings left from filming.
Aging relics of a bygone era of the film industry
in Los Angeles are visible on just a few blocks of downtown,
where along Broadway, twelve large and ornate movie palaces
sit in various states of reuse and disuse. In the 1930ªs these
elaborate theaters hosted the premieres and galas of that eraªs
Hollywood. Today, instead of screening films, many of the old
Broadway theaters are now used in the creation of films.
The Los Angeles Theater is probably the most-filmed
of them, hosting productions for 170 days last year. It was
the last of the great baroque movie palaces built along Broadway,
constructed during the depression at a cost of over $1 million,
and finished in time to host the premiere of Charlie Chaplinªs
City Lights in 1931. It finally closed as a movie theater
in 1994, and has been used as a location since 1995, after a
partial restoration by its new owners.
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Opened for the premiere of Charlie
Chaplin’s City Lights, the Los Angeles Theater
rarely screens films anymore. Instead it is rented out
for $10,000 per day as a film location. The backdrop on
stage (where the movie screen used to be) is left over
from the filming of Milos Forman’s Man on the
Moon.
CLUI photo.
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The Los Angeles Theater usually plays a theater
in the productions which are shot there, or is used for its
elegant lobby and reception areas. At the beginning of End
of Days, for example, the lobby can be seen serving as the
interior of the Vatican. Other films that have used the theater
include Batman Forever, Alien Nation, Houdini, and Escape
from LA. For Man on the Moon, the Milos Forman film
starring Jim Carrey as Andy Kaufman, the Los Angeles Theater
played Carnegie Hall. The backdrop from this film remains above
the stage at the Los Angeles Theater, in the space that was
once occupied by a movie screen.
Other sites discussed in the exhibit at the CLUI
include empty office buildings downtown that are used exclusively
for filming; a suburban office park built by Lockheed as a secret
military technology center, and which has been used since as
a television stand-in for the CIA and FBI; industrial sites,
like those that are blown up for Schwartzenegger movies; entire
hospitals that are now exclusively sets; as well as train stations,
airports, and iconic desert gas station/motel/cafÉs on public
roads that are, in actual fact, standing sets.
The subject of film locations has a special
resonance with the CLUI exhibit space, which is located across
from Main Street, Culver City, a town whose official motto is
"The Heart of Screenland." A few blocks away from the CLUI is
the walled compound of Sonyªs main studio, home of Columbia
and Tristar pictures, and ground zero for TV shows like Married
With Children and Jeopardy. Main Street, Culver City
(in addition to being known as the shortest Main Street in America,
as it is one block long, and is actually shorter than that because
itªs bisected by the LA/Culver City line), can be seen in the
background of early Hollywood films, many of which were shot
on location on this "typical downtown street."
