Los Angeles for Film Fans: San Fernando Valley 5
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Sticking with Steven Spielberg locations, about a mile to the west, just south of the 118 (Ronald Reagan Freeway), it’s on the tree-lined stretch of White Oak Avenue between Tribune Street and San Fernando Mission Boulevard that the bicycles take to the air during the chase in ET. We’ll come to Elliot’s house later, way to the east.
The Travel Inn, 7254 Foothill Boulevard, at Hillhaven Avenue in Tujunga, is the ‘Discount Inn’, the motel in which amnesiac Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce) holes up in Christopher Nolan’s ingenious Memento. Slightly less memorably, Will Smith also stays here in icky 2008 drama Seven Pounds.
Just a little to the north, it’s on the 7500 block of Foothill that the ‘Emery Animal Hospital’, where John Connor (now in the person of Nick Stahl) tries to get drugs, was built for Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines.
Keep travelling north on Foothill, until it joins Summitrose Street and turns to the west, for more of Memento.
Leonard plays cat-and-mouse, or mouse-and-cat (“ OK. So what am I doing? I’m chasing this guy. No. He’s chasing me...”), with Dodd around the motor homes of Monte Vista Mobile Estates, 8100 Foothill Boulevard, Sunland.
Directly across the boulevard, Hatti-Kay Coiffures, in the Edward I Zwern Building, 8119 Foothill Boulevard at Mather, became ‘Emma’s Tattoo’, where Leonard gets “Fact No. 6: car license SG13 7IU” inked onto his body.
East on Summitrose will take you past Verdugo Hills High School, 10625 Plainview Avenue (itself a bit of a screen veteran, seen in Heathers, The Craft, one eight seven and River’s Edge) to Tujunga.
Northeast, at the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, is where you’ll find Elliot’s house from ET at 7121 Lonzo Drive. The neighbourhood scenes for the film were shot way to the west, but Spielberg wanted a more dramatic backdrop for the house itself. Drew Barrymore (very) briefly returns to this house for a quick in-joke in Charlie’s Angels.
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