The Nice Guys | 2016
- Locations |
- Los Angeles, California;
- Atlanta, Georgia
- DIRECTOR |
- Shane Black
Shane Black's comedy thriller is set in 1977 Los Angeles but the production was based in Atlanta, Georgia, which is becoming a real film hub these days. Find out which is which in our locations guide.
Freelance enforcer Jackson Healy (Russell Crowe) is obliged to team up with tricksy but basically harmless PI Holland March (Ryan Gosling) to investigate the mysterious death of a porn star, in the process uncovering a complicated conspiracy.
Healy demonstrates his heavy-handed methods when a man who's been dating an underage girl answers the door to get a smack in the face from him. This is the real LA, at 3975 Kenway Avenue in View Park-Windsor Hills. Southeast of Culver City, this is a primarily African-American neighbourhood and quite wealthy, which is why it's been home to so many celebs, including Regina King, Nancy Wilson and Meghan Markle, now the Duchess of Sussex. The real houses of Ray Charles and Ike & Tina Turner were featured in the biopics Ray and What's Love Got To Do With It?
March is meanwhile hired to track down a mysterious woman called Amelia (Margaret Qualley). The porno house at which he makes enquiries is supposed to be on 'Hollywood Boulevard' – the cross-street sign reads ‘Cherokee Ave’, but it’s actually Downtown Atlanta. located at 103 Peachtree SW at MLK Jr Drive SW. This is most definitely not the sleazy district as portrayed in the film and 103 is a perfectly respectable perfume store – which has since been significantly remodelled.
Paths cross when Healy's next assignment is to tell March – forcefully – to stop looking for Amelia. March's house, where he lives with precocious young daughter Holly (Angourie Rice) is 4255 Enoro Drive off Stocker Street in View Park-Windsor Hills, only a minute or two away from the house where the guy got punched .
When Healy himself gets roughed up by a couple of heavies bearing the same message to stay away from Amelia, he needs to team up with March to find out what the hell is going on.
The 'Sunset Star Lanes', the bowling alley where he finds March and his daughter, sounds like it should be in Hollywood but it's east of LA in Covina. The distinctive 1950s Googie-style form was Covina Bowl, 1060 West San Bernardino Road. Don’t expect to get a game there. Opened in 1956, the alley finally closed its doors in 2017. Fortunately it’s been saved from demolition – the building and towering sign now incorporated into new housing, the clumsily-named Covina Bowl by Trumark Homes.
Discovering Amelia to be an environmental activist, the pair look for her at a 'clean air' demo outside the Los Angeles City Hall entrance on West 1st Street at Spring Street, Downtown. In the background, you might recognise City Hall Park’s Memorial Fountain, the spot where Roddy Piper hears the dire warning from the blind preacher in John Carpenter's They Live.
A bit of CGI takes the Sunset Strip at Horn Avenue, by what used to be the Tower Records store, back a few decades, and a billboard here gives them the name of porno producer Sid Shattuck.
They head off to crash one of his debauched parties, driving through the East Gate entrance to the posh enclave of Bel-Air on Sunset Boulevard at West Beverly Glen Boulevard. It's easy to believe that Shattuck's boiled-egg-spaceship home is one of LA's wackily futuristic estates, particularly since it appears to command panoramic views across the city.
In fact, this is Atlanta. It's 5335 Northside Drive NW, built in 2003 for producer (records not porn) Dallas Austin, and for a while occupied by Justin Bieber. The 7,000-square-foot pad is everything you could imagine — mirrored ceilings and a room entirely coated in carpet (ceiling and all). Certainly sounds more Los Angeles than Atlanta – but there you go.
After major and complex developments at the party, March and Healy are taken to see Amelia's mother (Kim Basinger), a prosecutor whose office is in the John Ferraro Building, 111 North Hope Street, which houses the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power in Downtown LA's Civic Center district. With its water-filled moat, you might recognise this as one of the dreamscapes where Leonardo DiCaprio and Elliot Page stroll in Christopher Nolan's Inception.
A scribbled note next leads Healy and March to the 'Burbank Airport Western Hotel' where they hastily flee what looks like bloody carnage on the penthouse floor. There is no such hotel, though this is Burbank – it's the Hotel Burbank, 150 East Angeleno Boulevard – but what we see is its rear entrance on East Tujunga Avenue.
At the root of the whole conspiracy is the existence of a film purporting to be porno but which contains an expose of a high-level cover-up of pollution from the auto industry, due to be given an unofficial surprise showing at the opening of the 'LA Auto Show'.
The huge complex used for the show, with its exterior lifts, where the climax plays out, is the Hilton Atlanta & Towers, 255 Courtland Street Northeast, Atlanta.
Following a slightly downbeat resolution, the 'Mexican restaurant' opposite the Comedy Club on Sunset, where Healy and March ponders their possible future as 'The Nice Guys' agency, was the former House of Blues with a little set-dressing. Standing at 8430 Sunset Boulevard, it opened in 1994, it closed in 2015 and replaced by the Pendry West Hollywood.
