Hilton Pasadena from “The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training”

I always love it when a filming location sneaks up on me.  This past weekend, the Grim Cheaper and I headed to Pasadena to attend the closing party for my favorite store, Lula Mae.  (Yes, you read that right – Lula Mae, my happy place, is, sadly, shuttering later this month.  While I am devastated over the closure and will miss the shop and its owner, Marci, more than words can say, I couldn’t be happier for Marc as she embarks upon a new adventure in the Pacific Northwest.)  After checking in to the Hilton Pasadena upon arriving in Crown City, I decided to do some Googling to see if anything had been filmed on the premises and was thrilled to come across a Wikipedia mention of the hotel’s appearance in the 1977 comedy The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training.  Some further digging revealed that the property had played host to a couple of other productions, as well, throughout the years.  While I typically try to only book lodgings that have been featured onscreen for all of my travels, in this case, staying at a filming location was a happy accident!  So I decided I just had to blog about the place.

The Hilton Pasadena originally opened its doors in December 1970.

Since that time, the 13-story property has undergone numerous renovations, the most recent of which was completed in fall 2017.

So it goes without saying that the site looks quite a bit different today than it did in its early years, when it boasted 264 rooms, a 26,000-square-foot shopping arcade, a top-floor restaurant, a two-story lobby, and a dark wood and deep red color palate.

Currently the lodging features 296 rooms and suites, 28,494 square feet of meeting space (including downtown Pasadena’s largest ballroom!), an outdoor pool and hot tub, a health club, a business center, a pantry market, and a bright, open lobby.

The hotel also boasts an onsite restaurant, The Corner Craft Kitchen + Bar.

Hilton Pasadena is a gorgeous property and the GC and I thoroughly enjoyed our time there.

In The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training, the site masquerades as The Houston Hilton, where the Bears are put up while in town to play a charity game at the Astrodome.  The exterior of the property is only shown once in the movie and very briefly at that.

I am fairly certain that one of the hotel’s actual hallways and a couple of the rooms were also utilized in the film.

Thanks to the Remington Steele Shrine website, I discovered that the Hilton masks as the Brinkley Hotel, where Laura Holt (Stephanie Zimbalist) spies on her sister’s husband in order to determine if he’s having an affair during a dental convention, in the Season 2 episode of Remington Steele titled “Steele Sweet on You,” which aired in 1984.  Both the exterior . . .

. . . and interior of the site are used extensively in the episode.

Watching it, you really get a sense of how different the property looked during its early days.

It looks so different, in fact, that at first I wasn’t sure if Remington Steele had made use of the Hilton’s interior for the shoot or if the production had utilized another hotel.  Thankfully though, after scrutinizing the episode, I am able to say with certainty that it was, indeed, filmed inside the property.  As you can see below, in one scene, Remington Steele (Pierce Brosnan) walks by a lobby directory and a listing for “Harry Kamp Clothiers” is visible.  Some Googling led me to this 2009 Pasadena Now article which states that the clothing boutique was initially located in the lobby of the Pasadena Hilton.  Eureka!

The rooms . . .

. . . and hallway that appeared in the episode were not actual parts of the Hilton, but sets built at CBS Studio Center where the series was lensed.

Thanks to Geoff, from the 90210Locations website, I learned that in the Season 8 episode of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia titled “Frank’s Back in Business,” which aired in 2012, a Pasadena Hilton meeting room is the site of the Atwater Capital shareholders’ meeting.  Though the hotel’s ballrooms have since been remodeled, you can check out an old photograph of one of the event spaces in which the carpet matches what appeared in the episode here.

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Until next time, Happy Stalking!

Stalk It: Hilton Pasadena, from The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training, is located at 168 South Los Robles Avenue in Pasadena.  You can visit the hotel’s official website here.

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