Fight Club filming locations
Film locations: Los Angeles
Fight Club location: Marla’s digs: Hotel Bristol (now gone), West Eighth Street, downtown Los Angeles
As in Se7en, David Fincher turns the normally sunny environs of Los Angeles into a dank, grim nightmare for this blacker-than-pitch adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk’s satirical novel, nominally set in ‘Wilmington, Delaware’.
The luxurious ‘Pearson Towers’ condo, in which unnamed narrator Ed Norton indulges his IKEA nesting instinct (slogan: ‘A Place to be Somebody’) is Promenade Towers, 123 South Figueroa Street, between First and Second Streets, downtown Los Angeles.
Fight Club location: Ed Norton’s ‘Pearson Towers’ condo: Promenade Towers, South Figueroa Street, downtown Los Angeles
When it’s blown to bits, he moves into he dismal squat of anarchic Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt). There’s nothing to see: the house on ‘Paper Street’ (a Wilmington address) was nothing more than a temporary set constructed down in the San Pedro harbour area of Los Angeles, and the nearby ‘Lou’s Tavern’ – though a real bar – has since been demolished.
The film, coincidentally, shares a couple of locations with the 1953 War of the Worlds. First is the ‘St Francis of Assisi Religious Center’, where Norton’s support group evenings are disrupted by the chain-smoking Marla Singer (Helena Bonham-Carter), which is St Brendan’s Church, Third Street at Van Ness Avenue, south of Hollywood.
Fight Club location: something in the mushroom soup: Millennium Biltmore, 506 South Grand Avenue, downtown Los Angeles
The restaurant of the ‘luxurious Pressman Hotel’, where Durden did something unspeakable to the cream of mushroom soup, is the Emerald Ballroom of the familiar Millennium Biltmore Hotel, 506 South Grand Avenue, a hotel seen in dozens of films including Ghostbusters, Beverly Hills Cop, The Bodyguard, Speed, Daredevil and many more. Look out for a glimpse of Tyler Durden in the same location, among the hotel staff on the corporate video welcoming Norton to his hotel room. The hotel’s soup is fine, by the way.
Also downtown Los Angeles, but slightly less classy, Marla’s digs was the (now closed) Bristol Hotel, 423 West Eighth Street. During filming, cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth was hospitalised after being hit on the head by a beer-bottle flung down by a disgruntled resident. Trust me, you wouldn’t have wanted to stay there.
Fight Club location: starting a fight: South Flower Street, downtown Los Angeles
During the ‘homework assignment’, to start a fight with a complete stranger, you’ll probably recognise the forecourt with the geometric metal sculptures as 444 South Flower Street at Fifth Street, downtown: the ‘bank’ robbed by Robert De Niro’s crew in Heat.
The computer store blown up by Durden’s Project Mayhem space monkeys is on the corner of the 500 block of Sixth Street at South Olive Street, southwest of Pershing Square, downtown Los Angeles.
The old Clifton’s Silver Spoon Cafeteria, 515 West Seventh Street, downtown Los Angeles, which had closed in 1998, became the restaurant in which a confused Norton, warns Marla to get out of town.
Fight Club location: The exterior of ‘Clifton’s’: West Eighth Street, downtown Los Angeles
The exterior, where he puts her on the bus, is faked at 325 West Eighth Street, not far from the Bristol. This is the downtown section of street down which Gene Barry seems constantly to be running in – once again – the 1953 War of the Worlds.
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Fight Club, 1999
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visit the film locations
Los Angeles: Flights: Los Angeles International Airport (LAX)
Millennium Biltmore Hotel, 506 South Grand Avenue at Pershing Square, downtown (tel: 213.624.1011)
Trivia
See more of David Fincher’s dark view of Los Angeles in Se7en. And more of Fight Club’s locations in 1953’s The War of the Worlds