Tag: Hilary Swank

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The Quality Café

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While stalking in Downtown Los Angeles a couple of weekends ago, the Grim Cheaper and I found ourselves hungry so I suggested grabbing some lunch at the Quality Café on West 7th Street – a diner that has appeared in countless productions over the years.  When we showed up to stalk the place, though, we were shocked to discover that it was completely boarded up.  I was even further shocked to discover, once I returned home, that, aside from some brief blurbs about its filming history, I could not seem to find any information about the place online.  I was extremely curious if the cafe had ever been an actual working restaurant or if it had only ever existed as a film set.  So I contacted fellow stalker Harry Medved, author of one of my very favorite stalking tomes – Hollywood Escapes: The Moviegoer’s Guide to Exploring Southern California’s Great Outdoors – who was nice enough to give me the scoop on the former greasy spoon.  As it turns out, the Quality Café was indeed a real life restaurant at one point time.  It closed its doors a few years back and is now used solely for filming, although word on the street is that the place might re-open as an eatery once again in the near future.

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Being that it is completely boarded up and there is not a whole lot to see while there, the Quality Café does not make for a great stalking venue, but because it has such an incredibly vast filming history, I figured it was worthy of a blog post.

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In Catch Me If You Can, it is while dining at the Quality Café that a waiter clues Carl Hanratty (aka Tom Hanks) into the fact that Barry Allen, the alias Frank Abagnale Jr. (aka Leonardo DiCaprio) has been using, is the actual name of the comic book character “The Flash”.

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In 1995’s Se7en, Tracy Mills (aka Gwyneth Paltrow) confesses to Detective Lt. William Somerset (aka Morgan Freeman) that she is pregnant with Detective David Mills’ (aka Brad Pitt’s) baby over a cup of coffee at the Quality Café.

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Morgan Freeman returned to the Quality Café in 2004 to film the scene from Million Dollar Baby in which his character, Eddie Scrap-Iron Dupris, takes Maggie Fitzgerald (aka Hilary Swank) out to celebrate her birthday.

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In Gone in Sixty Seconds, the Quality Café is the diner where Helen Raines (aka Grace Zabriskie), the mother of Memphis (aka Nicolas Cage) and Kip Raines (aka Giovanni Ribisi), works.

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In Training Day, Detective Alonzo Harris (aka Denzel Washington) and Jake Hoyt (aka Ethan Hawke) meet up at the café on their first day of working together.

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In Old School, Mitch Martin (aka Luke Wilson) takes Nicole (aka Ellen Pompeo) to the Quality Café and tries to convince her that he is actually a nice guy.

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In Mr. and Mrs. Smith, John Smith (aka Brad Pitt) and Eddie (aka Vince Vaughn) meet up at the Quality Café to discuss the failed assassination attempt of Benjamin Danz (aka Adam Brody).

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In 2001’s Ghost World, Enid (aka Thora Birch) and Rebecca (aka a very young Scarlett Johansson) spy on some supposed Satanists while dining at the Quality Café.

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In 2009’s The Stepfather, the Quality Café is where David Harris (aka Dylan Walsh) asks Michael Harding (aka Penn Badgley) to be his best man.

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In Sex and Death 101, the Quality Café is where Death Nell (aka Winona Ryder) tells Roderick Blank (aka Simon Baker) her life story.

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In 2008’s The Midnight Meat Train, the Quality Café is where Leon’s (aka Bradley Cooper’s) wife, Maya (aka Leslie Bibb), works.

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In 1993’s What’s Love Got To Do With It, the Quality Café is where Ike Turner (aka Laurence Fishburne) takes Anna Mae Bullock (aka Angela Bassett) out to dinner for the first time.

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The Quality Café was the site of a triple murder in the Season One episode of CSI: New York titled “Outside Man”.

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In the Season One episode of Mad Men titled “5G”, the Quality Café stood in for the Delight Café where Don Draper (aka Jon Hamm) met up with his half-brother, Adam Whitman (aka Jay Paulson), whom he had been estranged from for years.

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Harry Medved also let me know that, according to Marty Cummins, the key assistant location manager for 500 Days of Summer, the Quality Café is where Summer (aka Zooey Deschanel) broke up with Tom (aka Joseph Gordon-Levitt) at the beginning of the flick.

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And while the exterior of the restaurant appeared as a local hangout in 2004’s You Got Served . . .

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. . . as you can see in the above screen captures, a different restaurant was used for the interior filming.


EMBED-The Quality Cafe in Movies Mash-Up – Watch more free videos

You can watch a fabulous compilation from the Screen Junkies website of several different movies that have been filmed at the café by clicking above.

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Big THANK YOU to Harry Medved for filling me in on the restaurant’s history.

Until next time, Happy Stalking!  Smile

Stalk It: The Quality Café is located at 1238 West 7th Street in Downtown Los Angeles.  The restaurant is currently closed to the public and is only available for film shoots, so I can’t say that I’d really recommend stalking it as there is just not a whole lot to see.

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David’s Bungalow from “Beverly Hills, 90210”

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This past Tuesday night, Geoff, from the 90210locations website, asked for my help in tracking down the blue and white bungalow where Carly Reynolds (aka Hilary Swank) – and in later years David Silver (aka Brian Austin Green), Dylan McKay (aka Luke Perry), and Noah Hunter (aka Vincent Young) – lived during Season 8 of fave show Beverly Hills, 90210.  Now as I have mentioned a few times before on this site, I stopped watching 90210 after Season 4 when my girl Shannen Doherty left the series, but Geoff sent me a screen capture of the bungalow in the hopes that I could track the place down anyway.  Randomly enough, Mike, from MovieShotsLA, had just loaned me several of his DVDs of the older seasons of the show with the instruction that I should start watching the series over again from the beginning.   One of the seasons he loaned me just happened to be Season 8, so after I received Geoff’s email, I immediately popped in the first DVD and started scanning through it looking for clues to the location of Carly’s bungalow.  And, thanks to a little help from Mike, I was able to find the place almost immediately.

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Mike clued me into the fact that every shot of the bungalow shown on the series seemed to have been taken at an odd, sideways angle.  And scanning through the Season 8 episodes, I realized that I could literally not find one single establishing shot that had been taken of the house head on. 

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That paired with the fact that the home seemed to be situated at an angle perpendicular to that of its front gate led Mike to believe that the property did not actually face the street. 

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He had also noticed that in both the episodes “Pride and Prejudice” and “Toil and Trouble” there was a house that looked like a mirror image of Carly’s located in very close proximity and directly across the street from it.  All of these little “clues” added together led him to believe that Carly’s residence was not actually a house at all, but what is commonly referred to in Los Angeles as a “bungalow court” apartment complex.  So, armed with that information from Mike and after scanning through quite a few Season 8 episodes of the show, I immediately starting searching through Google for addresses of different bungalow court apartments.  And thankfully quite a few came up, almost all of which were in the Hollywood area.  I then looked at all of those addresses using Bing aerial views.  Because Carly’s house had a very unique roofline I thought it would be fairly easy to spot from above and, thankfully, it was!  One of the addresses that had come up on Google was for a bungalow court located at 1554 North Serrano Avenue.  And while that complex wasn’t where Carly lived on 90210, I did notice that there were quite a few other bungalow courts located on that very same street.  And, magically, one was Carly’s!  YAY!  So, I immediately dragged my dad out to stalk the place yesterday afternoon.

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Carly and David’s bungalow court apartment complex is actually something of a historic property and was designed by architect A.B. Crist in 1919.  It is a SUPER cute and picturesque little grouping of homes and it is not at all hard to see why producers chose to use it on Beverly Hills, 90210.

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Unfortunately, there is a large tree that is now situated in front of Carly’s bungalow which considerably blocks the view of it from the street.

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But the bungalow located directly across from it is very visible and, as you can see in the above photographs, looks exactly like Carly and David’s home.  Like Geoff said to me after I told him I had found the place, I guess I am going to have to start watching all of the later seasons of the show now.  Smile

On a side note – I just wanted to let all of my fellow stalkers know that Bing Maps has recently added a “Streetside” feature to its site and it is A-MA-ZING!  In fact, I think it is safe to say that I am absolutely in love with it!  The imaging is one hundred times better than that of Google Street View, not to mention one hundred times faster.  If you are trying to track a location down, I honestly cannot recommend using it enough!

Big THANK YO U to Mike, from MovieShotsLA, for helping me find this location!

Until next time, Happy Stalking!  Smile

Stalk It: David Silver’s bungalow  – aka Carly Reynold’s bungalow – from the later seasons of Beverly Hills, 90210 is located at 1547 North Serrano Avenue in Hollywood.