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Elvis Presley’s Honeymoon Hideaway

While visiting my parents in the Coachella Valley last month, Mike, from MovieShotsLA, suggested that I do a re-stalk of the desert home where Elvis Presley and his new bride, Priscilla, spent their honeymoon in 1967. I had originally stalked and blogged about the property way back in March 2008, when my website was just a few months old, but because the post (which you can read here) was a mash-up of sorts about several Palm Springs-area celebrity vacation homes, Mike thought it would be a good idea to re-visit the location and dedicate a post solely to it. So I dragged the Grim Cheaper right on over there on our way out of town.

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The Elvis Honeymoon Hideaway, as it is commonly known, was designed in 1960 by architect William Krisel for real estate developer Robert Alexander, owner of the The Alexander Construction Company, who built the pad himself, at a cost of $300,000, for his wife, Helene. Together, Alexander and Krisel had constructed almost 2,000 homes in the Palm Springs-area, most notably in what came to be referred to as the “Alexander Tract”, which, according to a February 2009 Palm Springs Life article, historian Alan Hess called the “largest Modernist housing subdivision in the United States”.

The design of the house consists of four perfect circles built on three levels and incorporates many circular elements, including a 64-foot circular banquette couch that surrounds a circular fireplace and a circular-shaped kitchen that curves around a rounded stove. And, as you can see below, the pathway leading to the front door is made up of overlapping circular steps.

I absolutely LOVE the musical clefs on the home’s front gate, by the way.

And the rock outside which declares that Elvis honeymooned on the premises. As I’ve said countless times before on this blog, why don’t more owners of famous homes do this??? LOVE IT! But I digress.

When Look Magazine published an eight-page feature on the property called “The Way-Out Way of Life” in September 1962 (which you can take a look at here), “The House of Tomorrow”, as it was dubbed, became wildly famous, as did the Alexanders. Sadly, the couple, who were said to be the movers and shakers of the Palm Springs social scene at the time, were killed in a plane crash on November 14th, 1965. Elvis, who first heard about the dwelling from his manager, Colonel Tom Parker (who lived nearby at 1166 North Vista Vespero), ended up leasing the property a little less than a year later, on September 16th, 1966, at a rate of $21,000 per year. And while the singer and his then girlfriend, Priscilla Beaulieu, were set to be married on the grounds, when the media caught wind of the impending nuptials, plans were changed and the couple was whisked away to Las Vegas for an impromptu ceremony at the Aladdin Hotel on May 1st, 1967. That afternoon, the newlyweds returned to their Ladera Circle home, where Elvis famously carried Priscilla over the threshold. Lisa Marie was born exactly (like to the day!) nine months later, on February 1st, 1968, by which time the couple had moved into a ranch located in Memphis, Tennessee.

The two-bedroom, four-bath, 4,695-square-foot home, which was restored to its original glory in 1990, features a pool, an outdoor stage, a tennis court, a fruit orchard, a private garden, floor-to-ceiling windows, panoramic views of the Santa Rosa Mountains, and a honeymoon master suite (natch!). You can check out some fabulous interior photographs of the residence here. The dwelling is currently used as venue for weddings and private events, and – wait for it! – guided tours of the property are also given on a daily basis at a rate of $25 per person. How cool is that?

And the home is also a filming location! In the 1998 made-for-TV movie Poodle Springs, the exterior of the abode stood in for the residence where Philip Marlowe (James Caan) lived with his wife, Laura Parker-Marlowe (Dina Meyer – aka Beverly Hills, 90210’s Lucinda Nicholson).

The interior and backyard scenes were shot elsewhere, though – most likely at a home in Los Angeles.

And while the 1998 made-for-television movie Elvis and Me, which was based on Priscilla Presley’s 1985 book of the same name, supposedly filmed some scenes at the Honeymoon Hideaway, I scanned through it prior to writing this post and did not spot the house anywhere.

The Honeymoon Hideaway is also a popular spot for photo shoots and such stars as Jenny McCarthy, Elisabeth Shue and Jennifer Jason Leigh have all posed there for such noted lensmen as Mario Testino, Mark Seliger and Annie Leibovitz.

Be sure to “Like” IAMNOTASTALKER on Facebook here and “Friend” me on my personal page here. You can also check out the IAMNOTASTALKER About Me page here and you can follow me on Twitter at @IAMNOTASTALKER. And you can take a look at my latest post about one of my favorite to-go meals on my other blog, The Well-Heeled Diabetic, here.

Big THANK YOU to Mike, from MovieShotsLA, for suggesting that I write another post about this location!

Until next time, Happy Stalking!

Stalk It: The Elvis Honeymoon Hideaway is located at 1350 Ladera Circle in Palm Springs. You can visit the home’s official website here. Tours of the property, tickets for which can be purchased here, are given on a daily basis at a cost of $25 per person.

July 25, 2012
Angela Bennett’s House from “The Net”

Two weekends ago, while Mike, from MovieShotsLA, and I were driving around looking for a parking place in Venice Beach (NEVER an easy task!), we passed by the dwelling pictured above and he announced, “That’s the house where Sandra Bullock lived in The Net.” Well, as you can imagine, I was absolutely bowled over to learn this bit of information and asked him to pull the car over immediately so that we could properly stalk the place. And while I had not seen The Net in years, stalking the home had me absolutely itching to watch it again, so I popped in my DVD of it just as soon as I got home later that night. I was a bit worried that the flick might be outdated, being that technology has advanced so far from where it was back in 1995 when The Net was filmed, but I am very happy to report that it was still pertinent to today’s world and I was on the edge of my seat the whole time!

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In The Net, reclusive software engineer Angela Bennett (Sandra Bullock) lives in a tiny beach bungalow located at the fictional address of “407 Finley Avenue” in Venice, until her identity is stolen by ruthless computer hackers who want her dead.

Sadly, as you can see below, Angela’s house looks quite a bit different today than it did when The Net was filmed 17 years ago. There is now a large fence surrounding the property and completely blocking it from view, which is ironic being that Angela had her lattice fence removed at the end of the flick in an effort to become less reclusive.

The fence also has a sign printed on it which reads, “Please don’t step in or on planters”. I am not sure if that is a message directed toward those stalkers who attempt to sneak a better peek at the property or to random passersby in general, but I am guessing the former. Either way, I got a kick out of it.

In real life, the house, which was originally built in 1941, measures 2 bedrooms, 1 bath, and 1,076 square feet. According to fave website Zillow, the tiny property is currently worth an estimated $833,200! Welcome to California, folks!

I am fairly certain that the real life interior of the home was also used in the filming.

In the flick, after Angela Bennett (Sandra Bullock) realizes that her identity – and house! – has been stolen, she escapes out of her former home’s bathroom window and runs through a side fence and out onto the street toward the Venice Canals.

Be sure to “Like” IAMNOTASTALKER on Facebook here and “Friend” me on my personal page here. You can also check out the IAMNOTASTALKER About Me page here and you can follow me on Twitter at @IAMNOTASTALKER. And you can take a look at my latest post about one of my favorite to-go meals on my other blog, The Well-Heeled Diabetic, here.

Big THANK YOU to Mike, from MovieShotsLA, for telling me about this location!

Until next time, Happy Stalking!

Stalk It: Angela Bennett’s house from The Net is located at 407 28th Avenue in Venice. After Angela realizes that her home has been stolen from her, she runs out of the property’s side gate on Dell Avenue and heads north towards the Venice Canals.

July 24, 2012
A Day Off

I spent all day Friday running around and, unfortunately, did not have time to write a post for today, but I will be back tomorrow with a whole new location. I hope all of my fellow stalkers had a fabulous weekend! And in the meantime, check out this fabulous new blog I just discovered called Cupcakes and Cashmere. LOVE IT!

July 23, 2012
The Venice Beach Cotel – aka SanDeE*’s Apartment from “L.A. Story”

One location that I have been dying to track down ever since first moving to Southern California in 2000 was the apartment building where SanDeE* (my girl Sarah Jessica Parker) lived in the 1991 classic comedy L.A. Story. (And yes, that is the correct spelling of her name – as she says in the movie, “Big s, small a, small n, big d, small e, big e, and there’s a little star at the end”. LOL) I knew that the building was located somewhere in Venice, but because I do not know the area very well and rarely venture out there, I had a hard time tracking it down. So imagine my excitement when, a couple of years ago, I came across a blurb about the place in fave stalking book Hollywood Escapes: The Moviegoer’s Guide to Exploring Southern California’s Great Outdoors. As it turns out, SanDeE*’s apartment building is none other than the Venice Beach Cotel on Windward Avenue. And while I immediately added the address to my To-Stalk list, I was not able to get out there until this past Saturday afternoon when Mike, from MovieShotsLA, and I were doing some stalking in the area.

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Venice Beach actually has a very interesting history – one which involves the Cotel. The city was dreamed up by a wealthy tobacco heir/real estate developer named Abbot Kinney, who wanted to establish “The Venice of America” right here in Los Angeles. In the early 1900’s, he purchased some coastal acreage, most of it marshland, south of Santa Monica and proceeded to create a replica of the Italian city. The marshes were drained and transformed into eight miles of canals (a popular filming location, which I will be blogging about soon), complete with imported gondolas and singing gondoliers. A 1600-foot fishing pier was also constructed, along with carnival rides, a large beachside pool, and an indoor saltwater pool known as “The Venice Hot Saltwater Plunge”. The focal point of Kinney’s city, which was opened to the public in 1905 and was nicknamed “The Playland of the Pacific”, was Windward Avenue, a main street lined with beautiful neo-Italianate, columned buildings and sweeping archways as far as the eye could see. The buildings housed everything from luxury restaurants and shops to hotels, one of which was the ritzy St. Charles. Today, that site is known as the Venice Beach Cotel and it is the city’s oldest hotel.

Sadly, while St. Charles was once luxurious and upscale, it fell into decline, along with the rest of the city, shortly after Abbot Kinney’s death in 1920. And while Venice Beach has experienced a resurgence of sorts in recent years, the property is still a bit seedy. And what does the word “Cotel” mean, you ask? According to the hostel’s website, “The name Cotel comes from the prefix ‘co’, meaning getting together (people), which is what we are all about!”

The infamous mural that dominates the west side of the Cotel is named “Venice Reconstituted” and it was originally painted in 1989 by muralist Rip Cronk. It looks quite a bit different today than it did in L.A. Story, though, because in 2010, Cronk restored the huge painting, renamed it “Venice Kinesis”, added and deleted a few figures, and moved it up an entire story in a futile attempt to keep it out of reach of taggers.

There is also a 102-foot by 50-foot mural that covers the east side of the Venice Beach Cotel, but it, too, has been re-visioned. The piece was originally painted in the early 1900s by Terry Schoonhoven and was a view of what Windward Avenue looked like at the time. You can see a historic photograph of it here. Sadly, the work deteriorated and faded considerably over the years, so, in early 2012, artist Jonas Never covered over it with a new mural named “Touch of Venice” that was inspired by Touch of Evil, Orson Welles’ 1958 film which was shot in its entirety in the beachside city.

In L.A. Story, the Venice Beach Cotel is where SanDeE*, the dimwitted, colonic-loving girlfriend of wacky weatherman Harris K. Telemacher (Steve Martin), lived. The building and Rip Cronk’s mural popped up a few times in the flick.

I cannot tell you how absolutely devastated I was when I saw that SanDeE*’s front doorway had since been removed, as I had so wanted to reenact the image below.

As I later discovered, though, SanDeE*’s (and I cannot express what a pain in the a** it is to type that name out repeatedly! ) doorway was never actually there, but was a façade that was added solely for the movie. You can check out some pictures of the building from the same time period that L.A. Story was filmed here, here, and here, which show that the doorway never actually existed. BOO!

L.A. Story was hardly the first film to shoot at the Cotel. In 1958’s Touch of Evil, which as I mentioned above, was shot in its entirety in Venice, the building stood in for the Ritz Hotel in the fictional border town of Los Robles, where Susan Vargas (Janet Leigh) was threatened by drug kingpin “Uncle” Joe Grandi (Akim Tamiroff) while on her honeymoon.

As an homage to Touch of Evil, the Cotel doubled as The Ritz Hotel once again in the opening scene of the 2001 flick Double Take.

As you can see below, an exact replica of the “Ritz Hotel” sign from Touch of Evil was created for Double Take. So cool!

In 1968’s I Love You, Alice B. Toklas!, Harold (Peter Sellers) shops at what he calls a “hippy supermarket” set up in front of the Venice Beach Cotel.

In the opening scene of 1992’s White Men Can’t Jump, Billy Hoyle (Woody Harrelson) parks in front of the hotel and then throws his basketball up against Rip Cronk’s mural as he walks by.

In 1993’s Point of No Return, Maggie Hayward (Bridget Fonda) walks by the building upon first arriving in Venice.

Rip’s mural showed up very briefly in an establishing shot in 1992’s Venice/Venice . . .

. . . which starred a very young David Duchovny.

According to Hollywood Escapes, the Venice Beach Cotel is also visible in the 1983 remake of Breathless, but, unfortunately, I could not find any copies of it with which to make screen captures for this post.

And on a Sarah Jessica Parker side-note – My good friend Steffi, who lives in Switzerland and is even more Sex-and-the-City-obsessed than I am (if that’s possible), texted me the below picture yesterday. Um, LOVE IT, LOVE IT, LOVE IT!

Be sure to “Like” IAMNOTASTALKER on Facebook here and “Friend” me on my personal page here. You can also check out the IAMNOTASTALKER About Me page here and you can follow me on Twitter at @IAMNOTASTALKER. And don’t forget to take a look at my other blog, The Well-Heeled Diabetic, here.

Until next time, Happy Stalking!

Stalk It: The Venice Beach Cotel, aka SanDeE*’s apartment building from L.A. Story, is located at 25 Windward Avenue in Venice. You can visit the hostel’s official website here.

July 20, 2012
Pickwick Bowl from “Parks and Recreation”

While watching the Season 4 episode of Parks and Recreation titled “Bowling for Votes” back in June, I wondered aloud about at which bowling alley filming had taken place. The Grim Cheaper, who happened to hear me, looked up from his ever-present laptop and said, “That’s Pickwick Bowl – part of Pickwick Gardens – in Burbank.” Well, I just about fell right off my chair over the fact that he had recognized a filming location (that literally never happens!) and immediately grabbed my iPhone to look up photographs of the place to see if he was right. Sure enough, he was! Thanks, honey! So the two of us ran right out to stalk the alley – and do some bowling – just a few days later. And I have to say that we had an absolute blast while there!

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Pickwick Gardens, which, in its earliest incarnation, housed a trailer park and swimming pool, first opened in the 1940s and was known as Pickwick Swim Park. There are rumors that the place was named after the “Mr. Pickwick” character from Charles Dickens’ first novel, The Pickwick Papers. As legend has it, the complex’s original logo featured a cartoon representation of Mr. Pickwick and some Disney imagineers, who worked just down the street, created a replica of it – in the form of a ghost hanging from a chandelier – for the ballroom scene of Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion ride. Whether that is true or not remains to be seen, but it certainly makes for a good story. In the 1950s, the complex was sold to new owners who changed the name of the place to Pickwick Recreation Center and added an ice skating rink, a 781-space drive-in movie theatre (which has since closed), a restaurant named the Five Horseman Inn (which has also since closed), and a bowling alley. The Pickwick Pool was, sadly, filled in sometime during the 80s and the area transformed into a spacious, two-and-a-half-acre garden, which is used today as a wedding and event venue and after which the complex is now named.

On an interesting filming side-note – the Pickwick Drive-In Theatre was where a forlorn Danny Zuko (John Travolta) sang the song “Sandy” in the 1978 classic Grease. The drive-in was sadly shuttered and demolished in 1989 in order to make way for a strip mall, which reminds me of one of my favorite lines from the movie You’ve Got Mail. In an email to Joe Fox (Tom Hanks), Kathleen Kelly (Meg Ryan) writes, “People are always telling you that change is a good thing, but all they’re really saying is that something you didn’t want to happen at all has happened. My store is closing this week. I own a store – did I ever tell you that? It’s a lovely store and in a week it will be something really depressing, like a Baby Gap.” And while the Pickwick Drive-In strip mall does not currently house a Baby Gap, it does feature a Pavilion’s grocery store, an El Pollo Loco, a Staples, and a dry cleaner – all of which are just as equally depressing. The one plus? There is a Starbucks. You can check out some photographs of what the Pickwick Drive-In Theatre used to look like here.

I honestly cannot more highly recommend stalking Pickwick Bowl! The GC and I spent the entire afternoon there and had such a fabulous time! Although I was a little bummed out that the bar did not have champagne. After I came back from inquiring about it, the GC said, “Did you actually think that a bowling alley would serve champagne?” Um, yes, yes I did!

Besides being a filming location, Pickwick Bowl is also something of a celebrity hot spot. Adam Sandler rents out the entire complex each year for his Happy Madison holiday party, at which he has hosted such guests as Tom Cruise, Katie Holmes (and Suri!), AJ Michalka, Aly Michalka, Kate Hudson, Brett Ratner, Penelope Cruz, Jackson Browne, Maria Bello, Kevin James, Bryan Greenberg, Jennifer Love Hewitt, Tom Green, Rob Schneider, Demi Moore, Nick Swardson, and David Arquette. Man, what I wouldn’t give to score an invite to that thing! Nick Jonas and Miley Cyrus were also spotted bowling at Pickwick back in February of 2011.

In the “Bowling for Votes” episode of Parks and Recreation, Ben Wyatt (Adam Scott) holds a focus group to see how Pawnee citizens feel about city council candidate Leslie Knope (Amy Poehler). One particularly crusty man in the group named Derek (Kevin Dorff) announces that he would not vote for Leslie because “she doesn’t seem like the kind of person you could go bowling with.” Leslie, of course, becomes absolutely fixated by the man’s statement and convinces Ben to host a bowling night for her campaign at “Ricky’s Rock N’ Roll Bowl”, to which she invites Derek in an attempt to win him over. That, of course, does not happen and Ben ends up punching Derek in the face after Derek calls Leslie a b*tch. Gotta love P&R!

While at the alley, Ron Swanson (Nick Offerman) tells Leslie that Ricky’s Rock N’ Roll Bowl has his “favorite restaurant in Pawnee”. LOL

And I just have to say here that I love, love, love that Tom Haverford (Aziz Ansari) showed up carrying a Louis Vuitton Ellipse MM as his bowling bag! A man after my own heart, I swear!

And I am not at all ashamed to admit – despite the fact that several people were laughing at me! – that, while at Pickwick, I bowled granny-style, just like Tom did in the episode. And I scored more than a few strikes doing so.

Be sure to “Like” IAMNOTASTALKER on Facebook here and “Friend” me on my personal page here. You can also check out the IAMNOTASTALKER About Me page here and you can follow me on Twitter at @IAMNOTASTALKER. And don’t forget to take a look at my other blog, The Well-Heeled Diabetic, here.

Until next time, Happy Stalking!

Stalk It: Pickwick Bowl, from the “Bowling for Votes” episode of Parks and Recreation, is located at 1001 Riverside Drive in Burbank. You can visit the bowling alley’s official website here.

July 19, 2012
Mitch Hiller’s House from “Enough”

One location that I have been absolutely obsessed with for what seems like ages now is the ultra-modern beach house where Mitch Hiller (Billy Campbell) lived in the 2002 thriller Enough – which I just recently discovered is the very same spot that stands in for the exterior of the Indianapolis loft belonging to Chris Traeger (Rob Lowe) on fave show Parks and Recreation. Mike had long known where the property was located thanks to a former co-worker of his whose husband was on the Enough crew. So, while we were in the Marina Del Rey-area on Saturday (which, as I mentioned yesterday, was completely dreary and overcast – I thought it was supposed to be summer, folks!), he took me right on over to stalk the place. And I am very happy to report that it is just as spectacular in person as it was onscreen. Looks like this stalker may just have herself a new dream house!

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The Enough house, which was originally constructed in 1996 out of glass, cement and weathering steel, boasts four bedrooms, five baths, an upstairs office, an elevator, a gourmet kitchen, a detached two-car garage, private balconies off of each bedroom, floor-to-ceiling windows, a media room, and sweeping views of Marina Del Rey’s Grand Canal and the Pacific Ocean. There seems to be some discrepancy online over the abode’s square footage, though, as Zillow (and most property record sites) report it as measuring 5,758 square feet, while the pad’s real estate website claims it to be “almost 3,000”. From viewing the place’s exterior, I would guess the 3,000 measurement to be the better bet. And while the dwelling was just recently for sale for a whopping $4,850,000, it appears to have since been taken off the market.

In Enough, Slim Hiller (Jennifer Lopez) stalks her abusive ex-husband Mitch and sets up an extensive trap to kill him at the home.

And while I would have bet money that the real life interior of the home was used in the filming, that does not appear to have been the case.

As you can see below, the real life property is not nearly as open as its onscreen counterpart and its ceilings are not nearly as high.

The actual home also has a more polished and less industrial look than what appeared in the movie. So while I love, love, love the exterior of the place, I have to say that I much prefer the onscreen design of the interior to the reality.

And while we were there, I, of course, just had to sit where JLo sat at the end of the flick.

As I mentioned last week in my post about the loft where Chris lives on Parks and Recreation, the exterior of the Enough house also popped up as the exterior of Chris’ pad in the Season 3 episodes titled “Indianapolis” and “Road Trip”.

Mike, who, as I have mentioned countless times before, knows the City of L.A. and its surroundings like the back of his hand, also pointed out that retired Laker Rick Fox and then wife, actress Vanessa Williams, used to live right across the canal from the Enough house at 5518 Pacific Avenue. The home was sold to new owners, though, sometime after the couple divorced in 2004.

And while we were stalking the Enough house, Mike and I discovered a gorgeous garden named Channel Pointe located directly across the street. Apparently gardens like the one pictured below are quite common in Marina Del Rey (which is quickly turning out to be one of my favorite cities in Los Angeles). Love it!

Be sure to “Like” IAMNOTASTALKER on Facebook here and “Friend” me on my personal page here. You can also check out the IAMNOTASTALKER About Me page here and you can follow me on Twitter at @IAMNOTASTALKER. And don’t forget to take a look at my other blog, The Well-Heeled Diabetic, here.

Big THANK YOU to Mike, from MovieShotsLA, for telling me about this location!

Until next time, Happy Stalking!

Stalk It: Mitch’s house from Enough is located at 5417 Via Donte in Marina Del Rey. Rick Fox and Vanessa Williams formerly lived across the canal in the home located at 5518 Pacific Avenue. And the Channel Pointe Garden can be reached from Via Donte, directly across the street from the Enough house.

July 18, 2012
The Parking Lot Where Jack McKay was Killed on “Beverly Hills, 90210”

This past Saturday (which, as you can see above, was extremely overcast and cloudy – boo!), Mike, from MovieShotsLa, and I spent all day stalking in the Venice Beach/Marina Del Rey-area. After stopping by the Killer Café (aka the former Edie’s Diner from Enough and Dexter), which I will be blogging about soon, Mike pointed to the parking lot across the way and mentioned that it was where Jack McKay (Josh Taylor), father of Dylan McKay (Luke Perry – my high school love, sigh!), was killed by a car bomb in the Season 3 episode of fave show Beverly Hills, 90210 titled “Dead End”. Well, as you can imagine, I was completely bowled over at hearing this bit of information and asked Mike to take me right on over there to stalk the place.

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It’s funny, but even though I had only seen the “Dead End” episode once, way back in 1993 when it first aired, the parking lot where Jack McKay was killed was seared into my memory and, as soon as Mike pointed it out, I recognized the place at once and was immediately transported back to my high school days. It is amazing how some television shows and movies have that capability! I mean, I could literally almost feel the braces on my teeth!

In “Dead End”, Jack, who has just been released from federal prison, moves into a humongous, borrowed yacht with his girlfriend, Christine Pettit (Valerie Wildman), and Dylan. In the episode, the vessel was docked at the very end of Berth E2500 in Marina Del Rey.

One rainy morning, shortly after moving in together and mending their relationship, Dylan goes to move his father’s car from the marina parking lot. In the scene, he walks out of the gate marked “E2500, 2700, 2900”.

As fate would have it, just as Dylan is about to unlock the car door, Jack calls out to him to inform him that Kelly Taylor (Jennie Garth) is on the phone. (And I just have to say here that while scanning through “Dead End” to make screen captures for today’s post, I got seriously fed up with Kelly’s incessant baby-talk! Blech! I realize that this goes without saying, but Team Brenda all the way! ) Jack then runs up the dock to give Dylan the phone and tells him that he will move the car because, “Well, hey, what are dads for, huh?”

While Dylan is talking to Kelly, Jack’s car blows up, killing him (or so producers would have us believe) and forever altering Dylan’s life.

And I, of course, just had to imitate Dylan’s reaction to the explosion while I was there. (For some reason, I thought he had his arms out during the scene.)

The very same parking lot was also the spot where Dylan got rid of his gun – and let go of his anger over his father’s murder – with his girlfriend, Antonia “Toni” Marchette (Rebecca Gayheart), standing by his side in the Season 6 episode titled “Gypsies, Cramps and Fleas (a.k.a. Halloween VI)”.

The parking lot was also used in the Season 2 episode of Dexter titled “An Inconvenient Lie”, as Gulf Shore Motors, the used car dealership where murderer Roger Hicks (Don McManus) worked and where Dexter Morgan (Michael C. Hall) stalked him.

Be sure to “Like” IAMNOTASTALKER on Facebook here and “Friend” me on my personal page here. You can also check out the IAMNOTASTALKER About Me page here and you can follow me on Twitter at @IAMNOTASTALKER. And don’t forget to take a look at my latest post – about my no-carb diet – on my other blog, The Well-Heeled Diabetic, here.

Big THANK YOU to Mike, from MovieShotsLA, for showing me this location!

Until next time, Happy Stalking!

Stalk It: The parking lot where Dylan McKay’s father was killed in the “Dead End” episode of Beverly Hills, 90210 is Public Parking Lot # 9 located at 14110 Palawan Way in Marina Del Rey. In the above map, the location of Jack’s boat is denoted with an orange arrow; the gate Dylan and his father walked out of (for berth E2500, 2700, 2900) is marked with a blue arrow; the spot where Jack’s car was parked is designated with a pink arrow; the area where Dylan was standing when the bomb exploded is denoted with a yellow “X”; and finally, the used car lot from the “An Inconvenient Lie” episode of Dexter is stamped with a green circle.

July 17, 2012
Riley’s House from “The Client List”

As I have mentioned many times before on this site, fellow stalker Owen, of the When Write Is Wrong blog, is the biggest Jennifer Love Hewitt fan this side of the Atlantic. So when the actress’ new show, The Client List, premiered in April, he, of course, immediately set about searching for locations from it. He managed to track down quite a few of them, too, including “The Rub” massage parlor (which, ironically enough, has a significant Beverly Hills, 90210-connection, but I’ll save that information for a future post) and the supposed Beaumont, Texas-area home where JLH’s character, Riley Parks, lives with her two children, Travis Parks (Tyler Champagne – um, LOVE that last name!) and Katie Parks (Cassidy Guetersloh). So while out doing some stalking with Mike, from MovieShotsLA, a few weeks back, the two of us dropped by to stalk the abode.

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Riley’s one-story, ranch-style house appears regularly each week on The Client List. Quite a few areas of the home are featured on the series, including the front exterior . . .

. . . and the backyard.

If I had to guess, I would say that the real life interior of the home was used in the pilot episode of the series, which was titled “The Rub of Sugarland”, and was then recreated on a soundstage for the episodes that followed. Unfortunately though, I could not find any interior shots of the property with which to verify that hunch.

I absolutely LOVE, LOVE, LOVE Riley’s kitchen, by the way. Drool!

In real life, the abode, which was built in 1946, boasts two bedrooms, two baths, 1,836 square feet, and 0.36 acres of land. And, as you can see below, it looks pretty much exactly the same in person as it does onscreen – minus the Parks family’s white mailbox, which was just a prop brought in for the filming.

We happened to meet a super-nice neighbor while we were stalking the place and he told us that the white fence in the home’s front yard was installed specifically for the show to make the property appear more “Texas-like”. The owners ended up liking it, though, and decided to leave it up after filming for the season had been completed.

Before doing research for today’s post, I had no idea that The Client List was based upon a true story about an actual mom named Crystal Burchett and an actual prostitution scandal that rocked the small town of Odessa, Texas. In January 2005, Texas Monthly magazine published an expose on the scandal titled “She Had Brains, a Body, and the Ability To Make Men Love Her”, which Jennifer Love Hewitt’s production company, Fedora Films, later purchased the rights to. The article was then turned into the hit Lifetime Television Movie The Client List, which premiered in July 2010. A little over a year later, Lifetime greenlit a television series based upon that movie and the rest, as they say, is history. I highly recommend checking out the Texas Monthly article as it is an absolutely fascinating read! I tried to dig up some photographs of Crystal Burchett, whom Jennifer Love’s character is based upon, but I could not find any anywhere. And while the article describes the former homecoming-queen-turned-prostitute as not a “run-of-the-mill whore” (LOL) and having a “bubbly personality” and “girlish looks that made her irresistible” (which could very well be a description of JLH), I am going to go out on a limb and guess that the real life Crystal was nowhere near as good-looking.

I have to admit that I actually really like The Client List. It is a sweet show and Colin Egglesfield is not hard to look at, either. I do have to say, though, that JLH’s eyelashes in the series are completely distracting! She looks like she could take flight with those things! Ridic!

Be sure to “Like” IAMNOTASTALKER on Facebook here and “Friend” me on my personal page here. You can also check out the IAMNOTASTALKER About Me page here and you can follow me on Twitter at @IAMNOTASTALKER. And don’t forget to take a look at my other blog, The Well-Heeled Diabetic, here.

Big THANK YOU to Owen, from the When Write Is Wrong blog, for finding this location!

Until next time, Happy Stalking!

Stalk It: Riley’s house from The Client List is located at 6619 Peach Avenue in Van Nuys.

July 16, 2012
Clark Magnet High School from “Our House”

Back in March, a fellow stalker named Bill contacted me to ask for some help in tracking down the high school that Kris Witherspoon (my girl Shannen Doherty) attended in the 1986 television series Our House. In his email, Bill included the links to several episodes of the series on YouTube (because it is maddeningly not yet available on DVD!), but the large brick structure did not look at all familiar to me. So I called up Mike, from MovieShotsLA, and asked if he happened to know of any large brick schools in the L.A.-area off the top of his head. He, of course, did and mentioned three of them that he thought I should check out – Grant High School in Van Nuys, Taft High School in Woodland Hills and Clark Magnet High School in La Crescenta. As luck would have it, Clark Magnet was the right one! That right there is why I love Mike – I can give him the vaguest of descriptions and, right off the bat, he knows the exact place I am talking about! So I dragged the Grim Cheaper right on out there a few days later.

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Sadly though, Clark Magnet High School – like most schools in L.A. – is gated and, aside from the front entrance, not very accessible to the public. So I called on Mike – who is now a location manager – once again, and suggested that he scout Clark the next time he was in need of a high school location – and that he should also bring me along. Which he did just a few weeks later. Yay!

Clark Magnet High School, which was named in honor of humanitarian Anderson W. Clark, was originally founded in 1961 as a middle school, serving kids in the 7th through 9th grades. In 1983, suffering from low enrollment, the property’s doors were forced to close. Thankfully though, the structure was not torn down, but instead became a community center, a teacher resource and training station and an office for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. And it was also used for filming. Due to the fact that Clark was no longer a functioning school and therefore easy to film at, and had a desirable All-American look, the place became an obvious choice for location scouts. But more on that later. In 1996, a task force decided to re-open Clark, this time as a high school, to alleviate nearby overcrowding and the property subsequently underwent a 13-month, $15 million renovation and modernization project. The site was re-founded in the fall of 1998 as a magnet school with focuses on science and technology and is currently the most technologically advanced school in the entire Glendale Unified School District. In a very odd side-note – Clark has a “twin” – a virtually identical carbon copy – named Rosemont Middle School that is located about ten blocks east. Both properties were built at the same time and, in order to be cost efficient, were designed in the exact same image. So incredibly weird!

In Our House, Clark Magnet High School stood in for James Polk High School, which Kris attended and where her mother, Jessica ‘Jessie’ Witherspoon (Deidre Hall), taught for a time. The school can best be seen in the Season 1 episode titled “First Impressions”. As you will notice below, during the renovation, Clark’s windows were, unfortunately, changed and no longer look as they did in the series. Blah!

In the “First Impressions” episode, Kris and her friend are shown walking through Clark’s humongous interior quad and then sitting on a set of cement bleachers. It was those bleachers that I most wanted to see while we were there. And thankfully, unlike the windows, they still look pretty much exactly the same as they did onscreen.

And I, of course, just had to sit in the area where Shannen was sitting in the episode.

Clark Magnet High School was also the school attended by despondent teenager Lane Meyer (John Cusack) in the 1985 flick Better Off Dead. (My second photograph below does not exactly match the posted screen shot, but it is of the general area. I am going to re-stalk the school soon so that I can get an exact pic.)

In 2003’s Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star, Clark Magnet was the school attended by Sam Finney (Scott Terra) and Sally Finney (Jenna Boyd).

The school’s gym, which we did not get to see, appeared in the movie’s pep squad tryout scene. You can see a real life photograph of the Clark gym here.

And thanks to this 1987 Los Angeles Times article, I learned that the movie Return to Horror High was also filmed at Clark.

Randomly enough, a very young George Clooney had a starring role in Return to Horror High.

As did Maureen McCormick, aka Marcia Brady.

According to IMDB, the 1986 flick Dangerously Close was also filmed at Clark Magnet High School, but I could not find a copy of the movie with which to verify that.

Be sure to “Like” IAMNOTASTALKER on Facebook here and “Friend” me on my personal page here. You can also check out the IAMNOTASTALKER About Me page here and you can follow me on Twitter at @IAMNOTASTALKER. And don’t forget to take a look at my other blog, The Well-Heeled Diabetic, here.

Big THANK YOU to Mike, from MovieShotsLA, for finding this location and taking me to stalk it!

Until next time, Happy Stalking!

Stalk It: Clark Magnet High School from Our House is located at 4747 New York Avenue in La Crescenta. You can visit the school’s official website here. Clark’s twin, Rosemont Middle School, is located at 4725 Rosemont Avenue in La Crescenta. You can visit that school’s official website here.

July 13, 2012
Johnson Lake in Pasadena from “Celebrity Rehab”

A couple of weeks ago, while trying to track down the lake house belonging to Donna Meagle (Retta) in the Season 4 episode of Parks and Recreation titled “Sweet Sixteen”, I discovered that there was a lake in Pasadena and just about fell right off my chair! Having lived in the area – as a stalker, mind you! – for well over a decade now, I consider myself a virtual expert on Pasadena and its environs, so how in the world had I not previously known that there was a lake – like an actual lake! – within the city limits? Well, believe you me, I immediately added the place to my To-Stalk list and dragged the Grim Cheaper right on out there.

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There seems to be quite a bit of discrepancy online about the origins of Johnson Lake, which was formerly known as Mirror Lake and is also sometimes referred to as Johnson’s Lake, Johnston Lake and Beaudry Lake. According to the book Images of America: Garvanza by Charles J. Fisher, the lake is a natural one that was originally located on land belonging to Prudent Beaudry, the thirteenth Mayor of Los Angeles. At the time, the property was part of an area called Garvanza, but it was later integrated into Pasadena. Some other online reports stipulate that the lake was initially part of a natural spring that was dammed to provide irrigation to the 2,200-acre San Rafael Ranch, which was then owned by the Campbell-Johnsons, the very same family who built the oft-filmed-at Church of the Angels. And then there are further reports still which state that the site was first developed by the Annandale Golf Club and/or the San Rafael Winery in the late 1890s. (You can see a picture of the lake taken during that time period on the Pasadena Adjacent website here.) Whatever the case may be, at some point the lake became part of Brookmere, a private gated community comprised of about twenty homes. The Brookmere gates are pictured below.

Because Johnson Lake is located inside of a gated community, I scoped the place out online before heading over there to make sure that it was viewable from the road. And, as you can see below, it is clearly visible via Google Street View. So I was absolutely shocked when we arrived and the lake was nowhere to be found! As the GC later explained, the Google Street View camera is elevated and therefore had a view above the large hedges which surrounded the Brookmere community. Man, I have got to get me one of those!

Have no fear, though – the GC was able to snap some pics of it by holding the camera up over his head. So while we never actually got to lay eyes on the lake ourselves, our camera got a nice view of it and, as you can see below, it is pretty darn amazing.

You can also catch a very small glimpse of the lake through Brookmere’s front gates.

Oddly enough, the house that seems to have the most lakefront land is not located inside of Brookmere at all, but is on La Loma Road, a public street, just a few blocks west of the Beaches mansion (which I blogged about here). The 5,100-square-foot Craftsman-style home, which was designed by area architect Doug Ewing in 2006, boasts four bedrooms, five baths, a .59-acre plot of land, a whopping seven patios, and a 20-foot boat dock! You can see some interior photographs of the place here and here. Have a bib handy to catch the drool, though, because the place is nothing short of breathtaking! I realize that I stated in Monday’s post (which you can read here) that Chris Traeger’s apartment from Parks and Recreation was my dream home, but I think I’d be OK with this place, too.

Because the residence is so incredibly unique, not to mention picturesque, it is, of course, no stranger to filming. In the Season 3 episode of Celebrity Rehab titled “Family Weekend”, Dr. Drew takes his patients, including Heidi Fleiss, Dennis Rodman, and Mackenzie Phillips, to the house for a reunion with their family members. In the episode, the home was referred to as the fictional “Johnston Lake Retreat Center”, but in reality the place is just a private home where actual (and extremely lucky) people live.

Thanks to my buddy E.J. over at The Movieland Directory website, I learned that the home also appeared as the residence belonging to Gabrielle Cafferty (Marisa Coughlan) and Joel Tiernan (Max Casella) in the Season 5 episode of Medium titled “Soul Survivor”. In the episode, quite a bit of the property was used, including the front exterior;

the interior . . .

. . . and the backyard and lake.

Be sure to “Like” IAMNOTASTALKER on Facebook here and “Friend” me on my personal page here. You can also check out the IAMNOTASTALKER About Me page here and you can follow me on Twitter at @IAMNOTASTALKER. And don’t forget to take a look at my other blog, The Well-Heeled Diabetic, here.

Until next time, Happy Stalking!

Stalk It: Johnson Lake can (sort of) be viewed from the 800 block of Burleigh Drive, just south of where it meets Laguna Road, in Pasadena. The Johnson Lake Retreat Center from Celebrity Rehab is actually a private residence located at 1260 La Loma Road in Pasadena.

July 12, 2012