movie houses – IAMNOTASTALKER

August 27, 2018August 29, 2018

“The Princess Diaries” Firehouse

My friend Nat is a definite hostess with the mostest. When I last visited her in San Francisco in October 2016, she not only had champagne chilling in the fridge, but an itinerary of area stalking locales she thought might interest me compiled and mapped out on her phone. The spot on the list I was most excited about seeing was former Engine Company No. 43, where Mia Thermopolis (Anne Hathaway) lived with her mom, Helen (Caroline Goodall), and cat, Fat Louis, in 2001’s The Princess Diaries. This stalker loves herself any adaptive reuse and in person, the firehouse-turned-home did not disappoint. Somehow I forgot to blog about the place after returning home from my trip, though, and was not reminded of it until last Thursday when Mandy Moore, who played meanie cheerleader Lana Thomas in the film, posted a #tbt image of The Princess Diaries July 2001 premiere on Instagram. Seeing the photo brought me right back to the day I stalked the firehouse and I figured there was no time like the present to finally blog about it.

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The Mission Revival-style Engine Company No. 43 was originally built in 1911, back when firemen were still fighting blazes via horse-drawn carriages.

Following its decommission, the 4,800-square-foot wood frame structure was sold to a private buyer at a surplus auction in 1976 and subsequently transformed into a residence.

Today, the unique homestead boasts 8 rooms, 2 stories, a 340-square-foot outbuilding that initially housed Company No. 43’s kitchen, a double 0.11-acre lot, parking for 4+ cars, and original detailing throughout including a fireman’s pole.

The residence last hit the market in late 2014 with an asking price of $2.6 million (at the time it was being utilized as a 2-unit rental property) and was sold the following March for $1.85 million. That’s quite a bargain to call The Princess Diaries firehouse home, if you ask me!

Engine Company No. 43 pops up numerous times throughout the film.

In person, the place still looks much the same as it did onscreen 17 years ago.

Only the front exterior of the structure is featured in the movie.

The home’s massive side staircase also makes a couple of appearances.

Because those scenes were shot from the backyard, I was, obviously, unable to snap any photos matching the angle shown in the flick. But I was thrilled to see that the staircase is visible from the street.

The interior of Mia and Helen’s pad was nothing more than an elaborate set built inside of a soundstage a good 350 miles away at Walt Disney Studios in Burbank. You can check out some fabulous photos of it on art director Caty Maxey’s website.

Engine Company No. 43’s actual interior (which you can see here) is a far cry from its onscreen counterpart. While Mia and Helen’s home is colorful and lovingly cluttered, the firehouse’s real life inside is sophisticated and minimalist. I honestly can’t decide which I like better.

Interestingly, while The Princess Diaries was set in San Francisco, not much of the movie was shot there. Along with Engine Company No. 43, the Anthony R. Grove High School exterior (which Nat took me to stalk many moons ago) can also be found in the City by the Bay at 2601 Lyon Street in Cow Hollow. The school’s courtyard scenes were lensed a bit closer to home, though, at Alverno Heights Academy in Sierra Madre, which I blogged about here.

Big THANK YOU to my friend Nat for telling me about and taking me to this location!

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

Until next time, Happy Stalking! Smile

Stalk It: Engine Company No. 43, aka The Princess Diaries firehouse, is located at 724 Brazil Avenue in San Francisco’s Excelsior District.

August 20, 2018August 20, 2018

The Wormwood Home from “Matilda”

Every time I open up Instagram lately I’m inundated with videos of the so-called “Matilda Challenge.” For those whose feeds haven’t been flooded by the clips, in the challenge fans of the 1996 film re-create this scene in which Matilda Wormwood (Mara Wilson) perfects her magic powers. Though I’ve never seen the movie (or read the 1988 Roald Dahl novel on which it was based), I did stalk the home where Matilda lived with her parents, Harry (Danny DeVito) and Zinnia (Rhea Perlman), and her brother, Michael (Brian Levinson), in it a few years back. The challenge served as a reminder that I somehow never blogged about the place and, being that there’s no time like the present, here goes!

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I first learned about the Wormwoods’ zany ranch-style residence via this image posted by fellow stalker Tony Hoffarth on his fabulous Flickr filming locations page. I immediately became fixated on the unique property, especially its cantilevered front steps, rock detailing, and double-peaked roof. Though I knew from Tony’s photo comparison that the actual home barely resembles its onscreen self, I ran right out to stalk it nonetheless.

In person, the dwelling is much more ordinary and non-descript than it appeared in Matilda, with a muted color palate and an abundance of foliage. Missing are the Wormwoods’ tanbark and rock front yard and odd decorative paneling, as well as many of the other elements that made it so eccentric onscreen.

The most glaring difference between the real house and its movie counterpart, though, is the front porch area. As you can see in my photos, while the Wormwood home has a flush front with a central window, the actual pad boasts a recessed entrance.

Several palm trees are planted in the space and the roof above it has an opening through which said palm trees grow.

There are also two dormer windows which sit behind the roof cutout, as well as a wrought iron gate enclosing it all. None of these elements are present in the film.

The property looks so different from the Wormwood pad that when I first sat down to make screen captures for this post, I thought Tony may have pinpointed the wrong locale. The dormer windows (which have to be fake being that the house is one-story) especially threw me for a loop – though, truth be told, it wasn’t the first time faux dormers figured into a filming locations hunt. Thanks to street signs visible in the background of a few scenes, though, as well as landmarks such as neighboring homes that were easily identifiable, I was able to verify his information. 15811 Youngwood Drive in Whittier did indeed portray the Wormwood residence. I am unsure if the many differences we are seeing today are the result of renovations done by the homeowners in the 22+ years since Matilda was lensed or if the dwelling was altered significantly by the production team for the shoot and then restored to its original state after filming wrapped, but I am guessing the latter.

In real life, the 1965 pad features 4 bedrooms, 3 baths, 2,366 square feet of living space, and a 0.46-acre plot of land.

The property does boast one fantastical, Matilda-esque element – an ornate leaf-covered wrought iron mailbox. I am unsure if it is original to the home or a left-over set piece, though.

The first time I scanned through the movie, I did not see the mailbox pop up at all, so I assumed it was an element authentic to the house. But during a second viewing I noticed the piece – painted red – in the very background of the scene in which Matilda confronts some FBI agents searching her parents’ garage. If the mailbox was just a set piece added for the shoot, I’d think it would have been made more visible and prominent throughout the flick, which leads me to believe it is actually genuine to the home.

Either way, the mailbox is one of the most fabulous I’ve ever encountered.

I am 99.9% certain that only the home’s exterior was utilized in the filming and that the interior of the Wormwood pad was a studio-built set.

And what a magical set it was! Production designer Bill Brzerski truly created a masterpiece with the Wormwoods’ congested, over-the-top, gaudy décor. Amazingly, Matilda was Brzerski’s inaugural feature film job! Talk about hitting it out of the park your first time up! You can read an interesting article about how he got started in the business here.

Big THANK YOU to fellow stalker Tony Hoffarth for finding this location. Smile You can check out his Flickr page here.

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

Until next time, Happy Stalking! Smile

Stalk It: The Wormwood home from Matilda is located at 15811 Youngwood Drive in Whittier.

August 13, 2018September 24, 2018

Oliver’s House from “A Lot Like Love”

A Lot Like Love is a movie I can’t not watch. Even though I’ve seen it at least a dozen times and own the DVD, if I happen to catch it on TV, need to scan through it for a post, or it pops up in my Netflix recommendations, I’m pretty much viewing it in its entirety. And thank goodness, too, because doing so led me to find a new location from the film recently, one that I thought I had already pinpointed – the house belonging to Oliver Martin’s (Ashton Kutcher) parents in the 2005 romcom. First, let me back up a bit.

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Ten years ago (egads!), my buddy Mike, from MovieShotsLA, tracked down what I thought was the Martin residence via a 2006 Los Angeles Times article chronicling homes featured onscreen. In the blurb, author Danny Miller states, “Encino resident Ramona Hennesy creates brochures showing her house’s best features and sends them off to location scouts all over town. Her efforts have paid off. Several commercials have been filmed in her ranch home. Last year, the house had a featured role in the film A Lot Like Love. Both the interior and the backyard were used, and her carport was even transformed into Ashton Kutcher’s bedroom.” A quick scan through public records provided us with the property’s address (17050 Magnolia Boulevard) and I ran right out to stalk the place shortly thereafter. Upon arriving, I was surprised to see the pad fronted by large hedges that obscured it almost entirely from view, as you can see below. What little was visible did not look familiar from the movie, as I mentioned in the post I wrote about the locale a few days later.

Google Maps imagery from 2007 (two years after the movie was released) show the hedges in a much less mature state, so figuring they were a post-A Lot Like Love addition, I did not think much further on the subject.

Flash forward to this past April. While making screen captures of the flick in preparation for this post, I fell into the familiar trap of viewing it through to the end and was shocked to see an address number of “17204” posted by the front door of the house across the street from Oliver’s parents’ place in the closing scene in which Oliver and his longtime on-again/off-again paramour Emily Friehl (Amanda Peet) finally get together. That number, though close, did not exactly coincide with the 17050 address of the property I’d blogged about all those years ago. What the whaaat? So I headed over to Google to search for homes numbered 17204 in the Los Angeles area and quickly came across one at 17204 Otsego Street in Encino that matched the residence Emily and Oliver kissed in front of, albeit with quite a bit more foliage.

From there, I flipped Google Street View’s little yellow man around to see the property across the street and, sure enough, Oliver’s parents’ house was staring me right in the face (again, with quite a bit more foliage). Had the article gotten things wrong?

Confused, I pulled up the old Los Angeles Times article and quickly realized that I had read too much between the lines all those years ago (that was back when I was an amateur stalker, after all Winking smile ). I’d simply assumed the Magnolia Boulevard residence had been used for exteriors and interiors, as well as backyard shots, but the article never actually mentions the front exterior at all. D’oh! As I soon came to find out, Oliver’s parents’ house was a mash-up of both properties, which are located right around the corner from each other. The Otsego Street house was utilized in all scenes featuring the front of the Martin home . . .

. . . including the final scene, which was my favorite of the movie. While there, I couldn’t help but re-enact the hissy fit Oliver’s sister, Ellen (Taryn Manning), has over the fact that Oliver is holding up her wedding. (Lucifer fans – that’s Aimee Garcia, aka forensics expert Ella Lopez, in the pink dress below! She plays Ellen’s best friend in the movie.)

All interior filming took place just around the corner at the Magnolia Boulevard house.

As you can see in the screen capture as compared to my photograph below, the roofline and window framing of 17050 Magnolia match that of the Martin home.

The shape of the Martin’s pool and its location in regard to the house, as well as the residence’s rear roofline . . .

. . . all also match what is visible of the Magnolia Boulevard dwelling in aerial views.

As mentioned in the Los Angeles Times article, the property’s carport was transformed into Oliver’s bedroom for the movie.

Luckily, the Magnolia Boulevard home’s front gates were open when I stalked the place back in 2008, so I got to snap a couple of photos of said carport.

Why producers chose to use two properties in the film is unclear to me, but I am guessing it has something to do with the hedges surrounding the Magnolia Boulevard residence, which I now believe were there at the time of the A Lot Like Love shoot. The movie’s final scene, in which Emily runs from Oliver’s house to her car parked across the street, required a location that was open to the road. I think the production team likely fell in love with the Magnolia pad’s interior, but found the exterior too closed-off for the end sequence, so they searched for a secondary property to utilize. I was hoping the DVD commentary with director Nigel Cole and producers Armyan Bernstein and Kevin Messick would provide some clarification on the subject, but, other than the fact that filming of the wedding segment took place in the Valley, nothing was said about the Martin residence.

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

Until next time, Happy Stalking! Smile

Stalk It: The house used for exterior shots of Oliver’s parents’ residence in A Lot Like Love can be found at 17201 Otsego Street in Encino. The pad Emily parks in front of at the end of the movie is directly across the street at 17204 Otsego. The home utilized for interior and backyard sequences is located around the corner at 17050 Magnolia Boulevard.

June 8, 2016June 7, 2016

Jules’ House from “The Intern”

For our recent Big Apple vacation, the Grim Cheaper and I took a red eye into New York, leaving Palm Springs at 11 p.m. and landing in NYC at 6:30 a.m. Working off zero sleep, we were obviously exhausted upon arrival (me especially considering the copious amounts of calming drugs I ingested to curtail my flight anxiety), but obviously were not able to check into our hotel at such an early hour. So what else were we to do, but head out for some stalking? (And major props to the GC for going all-in with me that day. Despite the lack of sleep and even after we were informed that our room was ready, we decided to stay up the rest of the day and stalked from one end of the city to the other! “We can sleep when we’re dead” pretty much became our trip motto.) For our first foray, we ventured over to Brooklyn so that I could see one of the locales I was most excited about – the house where Jules (Anne Hathaway) lived with her husband, Matt (Anders Holm), and daughter, Paige (JoJo Kushner), in The Intern. The romcom was easily my favorite movie of 2015 (I’ve literally watched it about twenty times since it came out) and Jules’ charming brownstone was easily my favorite location from it.

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I began the search for Jules’ house the moment I found out we were headed to New York. Said to be located in Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighborhood in the movie, thanks to this Architectural Digest article I learned that the pad was actually a renovated brownstone in Clinton Hill. That information led me to a post on the Brownstone website that stated that The Intern had done some filming at a home located at 385 Grand Avenue. Upon closer investigation, though, I discovered that the Brownstone website reporting was slightly off. Jules’ house can actually be found at 383 Grand Avenue.

Several of the houses along the 300 block of Grand Avenue bear strikingly similar façades, which made figuring out the exact spot where filming took place a bit difficult. I finally managed to pinpoint the locale, though, thanks to a few unique characteristics. Namely, the edge of the faux portico above Jules’ front door was shown to be a greater distance away from the crosshead of the window directly next to it. That was not the case with the neighboring homes. Jules’ house, which has a black door, was also shown to be situated next to a dwelling with a brown door and stairs with a concrete railing, and two doors away from a home with a brown door and stairs with a metal railing. From there, I simply headed to Google Street View and searched for the residence on that stretch of Grand with a large gap between its portico and window crosshead and a black door/concrete railing combo that was located next door to a house with a brown door and a concrete railing and two doors down from a house with a brown door and a metal railing. It was not long before I found the right spot.

Jules’ brownstone was featured extensively throughout The Intern.

In the movie, Jules says, “I love this house. It just looks happy to me, like if it was in a kid’s book, it would make you feel good when you turned the page and saw it,” which is the perfect way to describe the place.

In person, the residence did not disappoint.

It is not very hard to see how filmmakers came to choose it for the shoot.

The dwelling is charming, picturesque, and screams of being the quintessential New York brownstone.

It is very reminiscent, in fact, of Carrie Bradshaw’s (Sarah Jessica Parker) idyllic home from Sex and the City.

The entire street is quite heavenly, actually.

I was shocked to learn while researching this post that filming took place inside of the brownstone, as well, which is not in keeping with a typical Nancy Meyers shoot. Usually, the esteemed director constructs elaborate sets for the interior of her characters’ homes, as was the case with It’s Complicated and The Holiday. But for The Intern, the actual inside of 383 Grand was utilized as the interior of Jules’ spectacular house. You can check out some photographs of the inside of the residence here.

Though many of the living areas look much the same in reality as they did onscreen, the kitchen was completely redone for the shoot. The property’s dark wood and glass cabinets were swapped out for dark blue drawers and open shelving, the center island was replaced with a larger, bluer version that was then moved to the center of the room, and the oven was relocated to the back wall. You can check out how the kitchen is set up in real life here, here, and here.

Though the actual space is gorgeous, personally, I prefer the look of Jules’ kitchen.

According to a fascinating 2016 The New York Times article, the homeowners had to move out of the property for 11 weeks to accommodate the production, for which they were paid a whopping six figures! The lengthy shoot irritated neighbors, though, and the city eventually put a temporary moratorium on filming in the area.

The moratorium was rather unfortunate for the homeowners as the 4,032-square-foot, 4-story, 5-bedroom pad, which was originally built in 1900 and includes a separate ground-floor unit, is a virtual A-Lister of locations. According to The New York Times article, the residence has been featured in countless shoots since its onscreen debut in the 2011 movie Friends with Kids, in which it was used to portray two locales. It served as both the home of Missy (Kristen Wiig) and Ben (Jon Hamm) in the beginning of the flick . . .

. . . and then later masked as the dwelling that Julie Keller (Jennifer Westfeldt) moved into.

Some of the home’s other credits include a Nordstrom commercial and print ads for West Elm and Best Buy.

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

Until next time, Happy Stalking! Smile

Stalk It: Jules’ house from The Intern is located at 383 Grand Avenue in Brooklyn’s Clinton Hill neighborhood. (Note – the map link I’ve included is for 381 Grand Avenue as, for some reason, the 383 Grand Avenue link does not lead to the correct house.)

December 11, 2015December 11, 2015

Diane’s House from “Say Anything . . . “

I have been on a major Say Anything . . . kick lately thanks to a soon-to-be published post I recently wrote for Discover Los Angeles. While doing research for the article, I became a bit fixated on tracking down an unknown location from the 1989 romcom (one that I still have yet to find, darn it!) and in the process watched countless behind-the-scenes vignettes. Thanks to those viewings, not only did I learn an interesting fact about the movie, but I also wound up finally finding the house where Diane Court (Ione Skye) lived with her dad, James Court (John Mahoney), in the flick.

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Oddly, while Diane’s home was featured several times in Say Anything . . ., a full exterior view of it was never shown – nor were any background clues that could help aid in locating it. No street signs, no address numbers, no nothing.

But thanks to the steps leading up from the street to the front doors of the neighboring homes and the extensive amount of trees, I had a hunch that the residence was most likely located in or around the Hancock Park/Windsor Square area. Other than that small inkling, though, with this one I was at a loss. Until a couple of weeks ago, that is.

The most famous scene from Say Anything . . . is easily the iconic boom box scene in which lovelorn Lloyd Dobler (John Cusack) stands outside of Diane’s window with a large boom box playing Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes” held high atop his head. Oddly, the segment was not lensed near Diane’s house, or any house at all, but on a tree-lined stretch of North Hollywood Park, which I blogged about back in August 2012. I had never heard any sort of explanation for the weird location choice until watching “An Iconic Film Revisited: Say Anything . . . 20 Years Later,” a special feature included on the Say Anything . . . (20th Anniversary Edition) Blu-ray DVD. In it, director Cameron Crowe mentions that the boom box segment had actually been shot several different ways in the street in front of Diane’s house, but that none of the takes had really worked for him. Then, on the last day of filming, while shooting the movie’s other iconic scene, in which Lloyd brushes glass out of Diane’s path at a 7-Eleven, cinematographer László Kovács noticed that there was a park across the street that might be perfect for the boom box segment. With only a few minutes of daylight remaining, cast and crew rushed over to the spot that Kovács had selected and re-shot the scene. Cameron loved the way it turned out and that was the footage that made it into the final cut. So there you have it – the reasoning behind the boom box scene’s unconventional locale.

While Crowe was talking about the scene in “An Iconic Film Revisited,” some footage of the original takes were shown.

I was absolutely floored when I noticed that a “135” address number was visible on the curb in front of the house located across the street from Diane’s in the footage. So with that address number in hand, I began searching all of the 100 blocks of Hancock Park using Google Street View and, sure enough, found the place almost immediately.

In real life, the residence, which was built in 1913, features 5 bedrooms, 4 baths, 2,867 square feet of living space, 3 fire places, leaded glass windows, countless built-ins, a separate in-law unit, and 0.23 acres of land.

Though said to be located in Seattle, Washington in Say Anything . . . , in actuality the home can be found right where I thought it would be, on a tree-lined street in Windsor Square.

The residence’s front walkway is the only real portion of the exterior that made it onto the screen in Say Anything . . .

The walkway was featured in the beginning of the movie, in the scene in which Lloyd drops Diane off after attending the graduation party together.

The home’s front porch was originally intended to appear in a scene, as well, but it wound up on the cutting room floor. In the scene, which is included along with several other deleted/alternate/extended scenes on the Say Anything . . . (20th Anniversary Edition) Blu-ray DVD, Lloyd goes outside to smoke while at a dinner party at Diane’s house.

While doing research for this post, I came across a real estate listing for the home and was floored to see that the real life interior of it was also used in Say Anything . . .

Though there have been some changes (which is to be expected, being that filming took place 26 years ago), much of the abode still looks the same today as it did onscreen! As you can see below, the dining room is a direct match to what was shown in Say Anything . . .

As is the kitchen . . .

. . . living room . . .

. . . and stairs.

I absolutely love that little details, like the ceiling trim, have also remained unchanged.

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

Until next time, Happy Stalking! Smile

Stalk It: Diane’s house from Say Anything . . . is located at 140 South Norton Avenue in Windsor Square.

August 6, 2015July 30, 2015

New “L.A.” Mag Post – “The Gift” House

Be sure to check out today’s Scene It Before post for L.A.mag.com, about the house from the new movie The Gift. My articles typically get published in the late morning/early afternoon hours.

January 9, 2015January 8, 2015

Inez’s House from “Chef”

My favorite movie of 2014 was, hands down, The Other Woman. Running a close second was Chef, which I am guessing many of you have not heard of. Sadly, it was a bit of a sleeper. Take my word for it, though, the flick is fabulous. As are its locations! But more on that in a minute. The Grim Cheaper and I first heard about Chef thanks to Carson Daly who talked about it on his morning radio show on 97.1 FM a couple of months back. Carson had just watched the movie the night prior and was mesmerized by it. He even mentioned that it made him cry. So when the GC and I came across the title when perusing the Instant Video selections on Amazon a couple of weeks back while spending the night at my parents’ house, we decided to watch it. And we all had much the same reaction as Carson. Chef is heartwarming, funny and feel-good. We absolutely loved it! One thing that had us debating during our viewing and repeatedly pausing the movie (much to the GC’s chagrin), though, was the real life location of Inez’s (Sofia Vergara) onscreen house.

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Because of its Spanish-style architecture, my mom and the GC were convinced that the residence was located in Pasadena. I had my doubts, though. If a place of that massive size and spectacular beauty was actually located in the Crown City, I figured I most likely would have come across it during my ten-plus years of living there. As it turns out, my instincts were right. After some digging, I ended up finding the pad in Brentwood.

Chef centers around Carl Casper (Jon Favreau, who produced, wrote, directed and starred in the movie), a high-end chef who loses his job after getting into a Twitter war with a food critic. Following the advice of his ex-wife, Inez, Carl winds up purchasing an old food truck in Miami and refurbishing it, before driving it back to Los Angeles, selling his fare along the way. His son, Percy (Emjay Anthony), accompanies him on the journey and their adventure is nothing short of magical. Inez’s house in the flick is quite magical, as well.

In real life, the residence, which was built in 1926, features five bedrooms, three baths and 6,430 square feet of living space.

The dwelling looks just as spectacular in person as it did onscreen.

The real life interior of the house, which you can see photographs of here, was also used in the flick.

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

Until next time, Happy Stalking! Smile

Stalk It: Inez’s house from Chef is located at 250 South Bristol Avenue in Brentwood.

November 13, 2014November 6, 2014

Latest CityThink Post – About Lynn Bracken’s House from “L.A. Confidential”

Be sure to check out today’s Los Angeles magazine post – about Lynn Bracken’s house from L.A. Confidential. My articles typically get published in the late morning/early afternoon hours.

September 12, 2014September 11, 2014

The “Encino Man” House

Lately, I have been on a retro-movie watching kick. I think it has something to do with ”The ‘80s” issue of Los Angeles magazine that hit newsstands this past July. Reading through it got me in the mood to revisit decades past. So I was thrilled when my buddy Mike, from MovieShotsLA, took me by the residence that served as the Morgan family home in Encino Man (spoiler alert – it’s not actually in Encino!). I had not seen the 1992 comedy in ages and remembered very little about it. To be honest, I could not even recall what the house looked like at the time that Mike took me to stalk it. So I decided a re-watch was in order STAT and the Grim Cheaper and I sat down to view it earlier this week. The flick brought back some great memories. Man, I love me some Pauly Shore! “Meat group!”

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Mike found this location (sans help from a crew member, I might add) many years ago thanks to both this 1992 Los Angeles Daily News article, which stated that the Morgan home was located in West Hills, and an address number of 7511 that was visible on the curb of a neighboring residence in the scene in which newly-thawed caveman Link (Brendan Fraser) got into a fight with the mailman. He began searching all of the 7500 blocks in the West Hills area and, while it took him quite a bit of elbow grease, he eventually spotted the place at 7532 Sedgewick Court.

Amazingly, the Morgan house looks almost exactly the same today as it did onscreen 22 years ago when Encino Man first premiered!

The mailbox that appeared in the movie, which was modeled to look like the residence, is, sadly, not there in real life. I am guessing that it was a prop brought in for the shoot and not the home’s actual mailbox.

I so love that the front walkway, where Dave Morgan (Sean Astin) waited for Stoney Brown (Pauly Shore) and Link to return from Mega Mountain, is still in its 1992 state.

As you can see below, the house located next door to the Morgan’s looks completely different today than it did during filming. In 1992, the property was traditional in style and painted grey. It has since been transformed into a Spanish-style home, with a white exterior and red tile roof.

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In real life, the Morgan house boasts five bedrooms, five baths, 4,359 square feet and a 0.34-acre plot of land. It last sold in May 2009 for $970,000.

The property’s backyard – where Stoney and Dave discovered Link while digging a pool – was used extensively in the filming.

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An aerial view of the backyard in its current state is pictured below. You can also check out a real estate photograph of the backyard here.

As you can see, while the home does have a pool, it does not match the layout of the one that Dave and Stoney were digging in the movie. The real life pool sits horizontal to the home, while the pool in the movie was situated perpendicularly. The Morgan dwelling was originally built in 1988, only a couple of years before Encino Man was shot, so I am guessing that at the time of the filming the backyard was largely undeveloped, which is probably one of the reasons it was chosen for the movie. Once production wrapped, the hole was filled back in and then a pool with different positioning was later added.

The shed where Dave and Stoney left Link to thaw out after first discovering him was, I believe, not native to the residence, but a prop brought in for the shoot.

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And while I would have guessed that the real life interior of the home was used in the filming, the Los Angeles Daily News article that Mike found states that Encino Man’s interior sets were built inside of a warehouse in Sylmar.

For more stalking fun, be sure to follow me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Los Angeles magazine online. And you can check out my other blog, The Well-Heeled Diabetic, here.

Big THANK YOU to Mike, from MovieShotsLA, for finding this location! Smile

Until next time, Happy Stalking! Smile

Stalk It: The Encino Man house is located at 7532 Sedgewick Court in West Hills.

August 1, 2014July 31, 2014

The “Whatever It Takes” Houses

I am all about teen comedies, even admittedly bad ones. Drive Me Crazy is one of my favorite movies ever, I loved all of the Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen destination flicks, and Get Over It cracks me up every time I watch, even though I’ve seen it repeatedly. So I was shocked when I received an email from a fellow stalker named David who was writing to let me know that he had found the two main houses from Whatever It Takes, a 2000 teen comedy that I had never previously heard of. I ran right out to stalk the two properties, which are located next door to each other in South Pasadena, while I was in L.A. this past week and then watched the movie with the Grim Cheaper shortly thereafter. I have to say that I was not very impressed. There are bad teen comedies and then there are bad teen comedies. This was a bad one. Regardless, I figured the two houses were charming enough to be blog-worthy.

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Whatever It Takes is a Cyrano de Bergerac adaptation centered around two longtime best friends, Ryan (Shane West) and Maggie (Marla Sokoloff), who live next door to each other. Ryan is in love with the most popular girl in school, Ashley (Jodi Lyn O’Keefe). He eventually manages to strike up a friendship with Ashley’s cousin Chris (James Franco), who has a crush on Maggie. The two make a deal with each other – Chris will help Ryan out with Ashley, if Ryan helps Chris out with Maggie. Such a unique plotline. Winking smile I’ll give y’all one guess as to the outcome of the story.

David managed to track down Ryan and Maggie’s houses thanks to a 2016 address number that was visible above Ryan’s front door in a scene.

Oddly, while the two dwellings are shown together in wide establishing shots numerous times throughout Whatever It Takes, they are never shown individually – not a full-view of them, anyway.

Both properties are extremely charming in person. In real life, Ryan’s house was built in 1924 and boasts four bedrooms, two baths, 1,844 square feet and a 0.17-acre plot of land.

Maggie’s English-style residence was originally constructed in 1932 and features five bedrooms, four baths, 3,096 square feet and a 0.17-acre plot of land. The pad sold this past March for a whopping $1,830,000. You can check out some interior photographs of it here.

Only the exterior of the two homes appeared in Whatever It Takes. Maggie and Ryan’s bedrooms were just sets constructed on a soundstage, as were their two facing balconies, where countless scenes took place.

Big THANK YOU to fellow stalker David for telling me about this location! Smile

Until next time, Happy Stalking! Smile

Stalk It: Ryan’s house from Whatever It Takes is located at 2016 Le Droit Drive in South Pasadena. Maggie’s house is right next door at 2012 Le Droit Drive.