“The Hangover” Gas Station

The Grim Cheaper and I spent last week in Las Vegas on a business/pleasure trip (hence the lack of recent blog posts).  While there, we were lucky enough to stay at Caesars Palace (post on that location coming soon!) and found ourselves constantly quoting lines from The Hangover.  So one evening we decided to watch the 2009 flick and I have to say it was pretty epic to be viewing it while in a room at the very hotel where filming had taken place.  One location that I wondered about while watching was the “gas n gulp” station that the boys – Phil (Bradley Cooper), Stu (Ed Helms), Alan (Zach Galifianakis) and Doug (Justin Bartha) –  stopped at on the way to Las Vegas.  I figured it was most likely located in the Palmdale area (where many of the desert driving scenes were shot), but The Worldwide Guide to Movie Locations clued me into the fact that the station was actually the Jean Fuel West Shell in Jean, Nevada, just east of the California border.  So we dropped by to stalk it on our return trip home.

Jean Fuel West Shell only appeared once in The Hangover, in the rather brief, but hilarious scene in which Alan admonished an old man for looking at his car and Stu tried to defend the actions of his girlfriend who cheated on him with a Carnival Cruise Line bell hop sailor pilot waiter bartender.

The station’s signage was changed to read “gas n gulp” for the shoot.

The fact that filming took place at a Shell, though, was still fairly obvious due to the yellow and red coloring of the station’s carport roof.

Other than the change in signage, the site looks much the same in person as it did onscreen.

Some filming also took place inside the Shell’s food mart.

The super nice woman working behind the counter informed me that the interior was changed a bit for the shoot.  In real life, the cashier stand is located in the center of the store.

But for the filming of The Hangover, a fake cashier stand was built near the store’s south windows, in the area pictured in the photograph below.

The camera then cheated to the right so that the real cashier stand was not visible behind the actors.

On a side-note – One Hangover location that I will not be stalking, sadly, is the home where Mike Tyson – and his tiger – lived.  While I did find the address of that humongous dwelling – 22634 La Quilla Drive in Chatsworth – it is located inside of a gated community and is therefore unstalkable.

For more stalking fun, follow me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Los Angeles magazine online.

Until next time, Happy Stalking!

Stalk It: Jean Fuel West Shell, aka the gas n gulp from The Hangover, is located at 1 Goodsprings Road in Jean, Nevada.

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