The Cellular House

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Back in September of last year, while stalking the house from fave 80s movie License to Drive, I just happened to stumble upon another famous movie home – Kim Basinger’s residence from the 2004 flick Cellular.  Well, truth be told, “stumble upon” isn’t exactly the terminology I should be using here. 🙂  The real story is that while taking pictures in front of the License to Drive house, the owner came outside and struck up a conversation with me.  And while he had no idea that he was living in a famous home, he did tell me that the movie Cellular  had been filmed on the street directly behind his!  So, of course, off I went to stalk that house!  But somehow, in all this time, I never got around to blogging about it.  So, here goes.  🙂

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In the very beginning of Cellular, Kim Basinger, aka Jessica Martin, is kidnapped out of the large, traditional style home pictured above.   Her only hope for rescue lies in reluctant hero – and total cutie – Chris Evans, whose cell phone accidentally intercepts a 911 call Jessica is trying to make.

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In the movie, we are told that Jessica’s home is located at 3270 Bonhill Road in Brentwood.   And, while  a Bonhill Road in Brentwood does actually exist, the street numbers there don’t go higher than 800.  In actuality, the home where filming took place is located about three miles east of Brentwood.

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 And, as you can see in the above screen capture, producers even went so far as to paint the number 3270 on the curb in front of the home!  Which would have made locating this house extremely difficult for stalkers!!!!!  So, I definitely owe a big THANK YOU to the owner of the License to Drive  house.  😉  If you haven’t seen the movie Cellular yet, I highly recommend doing so!  While the campy thriller has to be one of the cheesiest movies ever made, I have to say that I absolutely LOVED it!    🙂     

Until next time, Happy Stalking! 🙂

Stalk It: The Cellular  house is located at 527 Loring Avenue in Los Angeles.

The L.A. Confidential Liquor Store

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Got an email a few weeks back from fellow stalker Tracey who gave me the address of a film location that Mike, from MovieShotsLA, and I had been trying to find for months – the liquor store from the 1997 movie L.A. Confidential!   Mike and I had known from doing some online research that the liquor store featured in the movie was not actually real.  Instead, producers had built a fake liquor store inside of a real storefront somewhere in the L.A. area.    According to this film locations book, that storefront was located somewhere on Larchmont Avenue, but as so often happens with location books, that information was not correct.  Mike and I had actually driven up and down Larchmont Avenue several times one  day looking for the storefront without any luck. We even stopped in and spoke with the editor of the Larchmont Chronicle to see if she knew where the filming of the liquor shop scenes had taken place.  LOL  It wasn’t long before we figured out that the L.A. Confidential  liquor store was not actually located on Larchmont Avenue and for a while the two of us put the liquor store quest on the back burner.

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So you can imagine how excited I was to receive an email from one of my readers named Tracey, who, after several years of being on the prowl for the elusive liquor store, had finally located it!   Turns out she had taken a surface street to work one morning hoping to avoid freeway traffic and, lo and behold, drove right past the liquor store and recognized it immediately!  Yay!  It’s amazing how often that actually happens.  You spend hours upon hours seaching high and low for a location, only to randomly drive by it one day.  In this city, you’ve just gotta keep your eyes open!  🙂  In real life the L.A. Confidential  liquor store is a furniture repair store named Ramon’s Cane Shop.  And it looks like it has been around forever.  (In the above photo I am actually standing in front of the wrong storefront.  I’m such a blond!  Although in real life both storefronts are occupied by Ramon’s Cane Shop, in L.A. Confidential only the middle storefront was used.)

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The liquor store shows up twice in L.A. Confidential.   It is first featured in the scene when Bud White, while picking up some liquor for a Christmas party, first lays eyes on Veronica Lake lookalike Lynn Bracken.

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After leaving the liquor store, Bud spots Pierce Patchett’s car with what appears to be a very beat up Susan Lefferts inside.  A brief fight ensues before Lynn Bracken walks outside and explains that all is not as it seems.  In the scene, Pierce’s car was parked in the driveway of a parking lot located just to the left of Ramon’s Cane Shop.

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The liquor store pops up once again a bit later on in the movie, when Bud White stops by to try to dig up some information on Lynn Bracken.

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I must say it was VERY cool to be stalking the L.A. Confidential  liquor store, especially since – aside from the fact that it’s not really a liquor store – it looks pretty much exactly the same as it did onscreen.  Sadly, though, the shop was closed when we were stalking it, and since the windows were completely covered, I didn’t get to peek inside.  Looks like I’ll have to take another stalking trip out there!!  Big, big THANK YOU to Tracey for tipping me off to this location.  🙂

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Until next time, Happy Stalking!  🙂

Stalk It: The L.A. Confidential  liquor store, aka Ramon’s Cane Shop, is located at 1279 South Cochran Avenue in Los Angeles.  The area where Pierce Patchett’s car was parked when Bud White confronts him is located just to the left of the cane shop.

Lynn Bracken’s House

Thanks to E.J. over at The Movieland Directory, I was able to do a bit more LA Confidential stalking this weekend. As I mentioned in a previous post, LA Confidential is one of my mom’s favorite movies of all time. She has always been in love with the houses and bungalows used in the movie and has requested several times that I stalk them for her. In fact, when my family first moved to LA she told our real estate agent that she wanted an “LA Confidential house” and that’s pretty much exactly the type of house we moved into. 🙂

So when E.J. gave me the address to Kim Basinger’s character’s house from the movie, I of course had to run right out and stalk it. Lynn Bracken’s house shows up several times in the film, especially the front door and front porch area, and from what I can tell from watching the movie, it appears that both the interior and the exterior of the home were used for filming. The house is a very cute little 1950’s style Spanish bungalow and it’s pretty easy to see why producers chose to use it in the movie as it looks like it came straight out of the 1950’s.

I must admit that when we first arrived at the house, I didn’t immediately recognize it. The way the movie was filmed was somewhat deceiving and the layout of the house appears much different in person than I’d remembered it looking onscreen. In the movie, Russell Crowe spends many hours in his car staked out in front of Lynn’s home watching her greet and say goodbye to her many “houseguests”. But in real life the front door is located on the side of the home and is not immediately visible from the street which made me not entirely sure I was stalking the correct house. But when I got home and popped in my LA Confidential DVD it was easy to see that the two houses matched perfectly! 🙂 Thanks, EJ!

I highly recommend stalking Lynn’s house if you are at all a fan of LA Confidential or 1950’s California architecture.

Until next time, Happy Stalking! 🙂

Stalk It: Lynn Bracken’s house is located at 501 Wilcox Avenue, right where Wilcox meets Rossmore, in Los Angeles. It is just around the corner from the American Idol and SYTYCD apartment which is located at 445 N. Rossmore.