True Romance | 1993
Tony Scott’s film of Quentin Tarantino’s script shamelessly rips off the musical style and flat narrative voiceover of Terrence Malick’s Badlands. Well, if you’re going to steal, steal from the best.
The movie opens in Detroit, and indeed this is where you’ll find Clifford Worley’s (Dennis Hopper) trailer park, on the Detroit River.
Clifford works at the Packard Plant, East Grand Boulevard at Mount Elliott, and the cop station is at 1300 Beaubien Street at Clinton Street, just northeast of downtown Detroit.
Clarence Worley (Christian Slater) and Alabama Whitman (Patricia Arquette) marry at the Wayne County Building, 600 Randolph Street – more recently, the site of the disrupted hearing in Zack Snyder's Batman V Superman: Dawn Of Justice.
But the Sonny Chiba Street Fighter triple bill, where Clarence and Alabama first meet, is in Los Angeles, at the beautifully-restored Vista Theater, 4473 Sunset Drive, Hollywood, which stood in for the interior of Pasadena’s Rialto for Scream 2, and Santa Monica’s Aero Theater for Get Shorty, as well as being seen in Christopher Guest’s underrated The Big Picture (1989).
The exterior of the theatre is Spanish Revival, but its 1922 construction coincided with the hysteria surrounding the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb, and the interior is wonderfully kitschy Egyptian.
Also in Los Angeles is the diner, where the couple eat pie afterwards: the Fifties-style Rae’s Restaurant, 2901 Pico Boulevard, at the corner of 29th Street in Santa Monica, seen also in the Eddie Murphy-Steve Martin satire Bowfinger, in 2004’s spoofy version of Starsky And Hutch, Win a Date With Tad Hamilton! and in Lords of Dogtown.
Other locations include mansions in Pasadena; Hollywood bungalows; downtown Los Angeles; the beach at Malibu and the desert at Palmdale. The construction site is alongside the landing strips of Los Angeles International Airport .
The roller-coaster is the Viper, at Six Flags Magic Mountain, Magic Mountain Parkway, off I-5, Valencia, north of Los Angeles.
Movie producer Lee Donowitz’s lavish ‘Beverly Ambassador’ suite filmed in the old (now demolished) Ambassador Hotel, which stood at 3400 Wilshire Boulevard, midtown Los Angeles (seen in many, many films including appearing as the ‘Taft Hotel’ in The Graduate).
The fabulously kitsch motel, where Clarence and Alabama hide out, is The Safari Inn, 1911 Olive Boulevard, near Buena Vista, just north of the Disney Studios in Burbank – though the leopardskin interior isn’t for real. You can also see the Safari in Ron Howard’s Apollo 13.
There was also filming at the Athenaeum, the dining club of the California Institute of Technology, at 551 South Hill Avenue in Pasadena, previously seen in the original Beverly Hills Cop.
