L.A. Story | 1991
Mick Jackson's amiable romantic satire is set in a determinedly cosy, whitebread Los Angeles.
TV station ‘KYOY’, where Harris Telemacher (Steve Martin) works as a wacky weatherman, is KCET, 4401 Sunset Boulevard. Although now devoted to television, it used to be Allied Artists film studio, and before that, Monogram Pictures. You can see the building – posing as a hospital – in Don Siegel’s original Invasion of the Body Snatchers, which was also filmed here.
His home is 1206 North Orange Grove Avenue, just north of Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood. About a mile further west, also just off Santa Monica Boulevard, is the quirkily arty apartment block of his girlfriend Trudi (Marilu Henner), at 884 Palm Avenue.
‘L’Idiot’ restaurant, with fearsome maitre d’ Patrick Stewart, was the old Ambassador Hotel, 3400 Wilshire Boulevard, a frequent movie location, now – shamefully – demolished. The hotel closed in 1989, living on as a much-used movie location until finally succumbing to the wrecker's ball in 2006. It played host to countless films over the years, including Oliver Stone’s The Doors, Devil In A Blue Dress, True Romance, S.W.A.T., Rocky, Se7en and, of course, becoming the 'Taft Hotel' in The Graduate. The hotel's kitchen was the site of the assassination of Robert Kennedy in 1968 (fittingly, Emilio Estevez's Bobby was the last film to have scenes filmed at the hotel).
Downtown is the 'Fourth Reich Bank of Hamburg', which is the familiar old Bank of America building at 650 South Spring Street, another veteran location, seen in another Steve Martin vehicle, All of Me, as well as John Schlesinger’s Marathon Man, Jim Carrey comedy The Mask, Christopher Nolan's The Prestige, Spider-Man 2 and, best of all, David Fincher’s Se7en.
Two of LA's major art galleries are featured. The gallery through which Telemacher rollerskates is the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Boulevard, midtown Los Angeles (site of the cameo-studded charity bash in Robert Altman’s rather less benign satire The Player). The largest art museum in the western US, LACMA stands alongside the fascinating La Brea Tar Pits & Museum, featured in Bad Influence and Last Action Hero.
The other gallery, where Telemacher offers his critique of abstract art, is the Museum of Contemporary Art, 250 South Grand Avenue at West 3rd Street, in the heart of Downtown LA.
Roland Mackey (Richard E Grant) grabs a bite to eat at the Tail’o’the Pup, in the days when it stood at 329 San Vicente Boulevard at Beverly Boulevard, midtown – the fast-food stand in the shape of a giant hot-dog, featured in Brian de Palma’s Body Double. As with the Ambassador, this famed landmark has also (early 2006) disappeared. There are plans for it to reopen at a new location.
The old-style ‘full service’ garage is the Gilmore Service Station, Auto Repair & Snack Shop, 859 Highland Avenue at Willoughby in Hollywood.
