My Name is Earl – IAMNOTASTALKER

Another day, another motel location. Today’s is one that has been covered on many other blogs, so I realize I am a bit late to the game. I only just recently stalked it, though, and was shocked to discover that its most recognizable element had been removed! I am talking about the Palms Motel where Earl Hickey (Jason Lee) lived with his brother, Randy (Ethan Suplee), on the television series My Name Is Earl. Up until writing this post, I had never seen a full episode of the show, but my dad is a huge fan, so I had caught many bits and pieces of it over the years. I had also long been familiar with the real life location of the Palms Motel. In actuality, it’s known as the Palm Tree Inn Motel in North Hills. Mike, from MovieShotsLA, first pointed it out to me during one of our many Valley stalks ages ago and, when I was in the area recently, I decided to stop by to stalk it for my dad. I was absolutely shocked upon arriving, though, to see that the hotel’s iconic, murky-watered pool was no longer!

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For those unfamiliar with My Name Is Earl, the series centers around ne’er-do-well Earl, who, after winning $100,000 in the lottery and then promptly losing the ticket, decides to change his ways by adhering to the tenets of karma. He draws up a list of all of the people he has wronged throughout the course his life and proceeds to try to make amends with each of them. I absolutely love Earl’s mantra of “You do good things and good things happen to you. You do bad things and they’ll come back to haunt you.” It’s not a bad way to operate. After losing his winning lottery ticket and being dumped by his wife in the pilot episode (oh, and getting hit by a car – the guy was not having a good week), Earl and his brother move into a low-budget inn named the Palms Motel.

The motel went on to be featured regularly throughout the series’ four-season run. It also appeared each week in the My Name Is Earl opening credits.

The Palms’ dingy, fin-shaped pool was easily its most notable aspect – well, for me, at least.

Before venturing onto the property, I popped into the Palm Tree Inn’s front office to speak with the manager and he could not have been nicer, immediately welcoming me onto the premises to take all of the pictures that I wanted. Before I did so, he informed me that the pool had been filled in a few years prior (I believe around 2010) due to the fact that it was expensive to maintain and rarely used. He pointed me in the direction of the pool’s former location (it now serves as a parking lot addition) and, while distressed over the fact that it was no longer there, I was floored to see that its outline was still visible.

Oh, how I wish I had gotten to see the pool in person, though.

The outline of the circular space where the random blue sculpture once stood is also still visible. I am guessing that area was the site of a hot tub at one point in time.

On the series, the brothers were said to live in Room 231 and that is actually where filming took place.

Room 231 can be found on the second floor of the southeast corner of the Palm Tree Inn Motel.

That area is denoted with a pink arrow in the aerial view pictured below.

While the exterior of Room 231 was featured regularly throughout the series’ run, I believe that the actual (heavily dressed) interior was only used in My Name Is Earl’s pilot episode . . .

. . . and that a set re-creation of it was built for all subsequent filming once the series got picked up. You can check out some photographs of what the Palm Tree Inn’s real rooms look like here.

E & Z Liquor Market, where childhood Earl (Noah Crawford) taught his friend Ralph (Tanner Maguire) about “street piñatas” in the Season 1 episode “Teacher Earl,” is located adjacent to the Palm Tree Inn Motel at 8418 Sepulveda Boulevard.

The Palm Tree Inn Motel was originally built in the 1960s and was known as the Travelyn Hiway Host.

I believe that it did not become the Palm Tree Inn Motel until after My Name Is Earl started filming in 2005, which would mean that the owners re-named it in honor of its TV moniker, the Palms Motel, which is pretty darn incredible! Don’t quote me on that, though.

I was pleasantly surprised to discover while researching this post how much filming has taken place at the 76-room motel over the years.

The Palm Tree Inn appeared very briefly as the L.A. motel where Azamat (Ken Davitian) was living at the end of the 2006 comedy Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.

In the Season 1 episode of The Mentalist titled “The Thin Red Line,” which aired in 2008, the motel masked as the Davis Motor Inn in Davis, California, where the CBI team investigated the murder of a state witness.

One of the hotel’s actual rooms, Room 222, appeared in the episode.

A nice view of the pool was also shown.

In the Season 3 episode of Heroes titled “Chapter Four ‘Cold Wars,’” which aired in 2009, the property stood in for the Costa Verde motel where Peter Petrelli (Milo Ventimiglia), Matt Parkman (Greg Grunberg) and Mohinder Suresh (Sendhil Ramamurthy) interrogated Noah Bennet (Jack Coleman).

Ironically, Room 231, the very same room where Earl and Randy live on My Name Is Earl, was utilized in the filming.

Or at least the doorway was. I believe the interior of the room that appeared in the episode was just a set.

The Palm Tree Inn Motel was featured extensively in Kesha’s 2010 music video for “Take It Off.”

Though the property was made to appear as if it was located in a remote, mountainous area for the shoot.

An extensive sequence from the video took place in the motel’s pool.

You can watch the “Take It Off” video by clicking below.

Having viewed the many productions filmed at the motel, I’m rather shocked that the owners decided to have the pool filled in. Though, as I mentioned earlier, I was told it was expensive to maintain, it seems that all of the movies and shows lensed on the premises featured it in some aspect. The pool’s unique shape added a certain je ne sais quoi to the property, making it stand out from the countless roadside motels in the area, and no doubt proved attractive to location scouts. Without it, the place looks like every other motel in L.A., which probably explains why it, sadly, hasn’t seen much filming in recent years.

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Until next time, Happy Stalking! Smile

Stalk It: The Palm Tree Motor Inn, aka the Palms Motel from My Name Is Earl, is located at 8424 Sepulveda Boulevard in North Hills. E & Z Liquor Market, from the “Teacher Earl” episode, is located right next door at 8418 Sepulveda Boulevard. The areas of the motel that appeared on the series, as well as the liquor store, are denoted in the aerial view below. The Budget Inn of North Hills, aka the Little Miss Sunshine motel, is located a mile north at 9151 Sepulveda Boulevard. The Hometown Inn from the 2002 Britney Spears’ movie Crossroads is located just a bit north of that at 9401 Sepulveda Boulevard.

Another Haunted-Hollywood-type location that I found thanks to fellow stalker/David Lynch aficionado Brad, from the Brad D Studios website, was the fictionally-named “Sierra Bonita” apartment complex – the fairy-tale-style property that was featured in one of the more intense and terrifying scenes from the surrealist director’s incredibly odd 2001 thriller Mulholland Dr. Brad had posted a brief write-up of the unique Silverlake-area site just last week and, because I had stalked and blogged about Le Borghese, the other apartment building featured in the flick, way back in February of 2009, I immediately added the place to my “To-Stalk” list and dragged the Grim Cheaper out there to see it just a few days later.

The complex, which consists of eight small, wood-shingled bungalows built around a central courtyard, was originally designed by Ben Sherwood in 1931. Ironically enough, as you can see above, in real life there is nothing whatsoever spooky or macabre about the location. On the contrary, the bungalow court is actually quite charming and idyllic in person and seems far more Disney-esque than “Lynchian”, as David Lynch’s movies have come to be described.

Legend has it, in fact, that the bungalows were once occupied by Walt Disney Studios animators and that the storybook-like architecture served as the inspiration for the Seven Dwarf’s cottage in the very first full-length animated feature film, 1937’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. According to the “Ask Chris” column which appeared in the December 2006 issue of Los Angeles Magazine, Walt Disney Archive founder Dave Smith confirmed that director Hamilton Luske and animators Dick Lundy, Lee Morehouse, and Fred Moore all did occupy the complex once upon a time, which makes sense being that the original Walt Disney Studios was located a stone’s throw away on Hyperion Boulevard, where Gelson’s Market now stands. Because the apartments do bear a strong resemblance to the Seven Dwarf’s cottage, Chris suggests that the animators “might have taken their home to work with them”. Winking smile Thanks to the Snow White lore, the bungalows have come to be known as the “Snow White Cottages” or the “Disney Cottages”, although they have no official name.

The fact that David Lynch even thought to transform such a picturesque spot into a place so sinister and foreboding – solely using camera angles, a few set pieces, and some carefully timed bars of music, mind you – speaks volumes about the director’s massive creative genius. He also somehow managed to make the property look huge on film, when, in reality, it is incredibly small and sits on a plot of land that measures less than two-tenths of an acre.

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In Mulholland Dr., the Sierra Bonita Apartments are where budding actress Betty Elms (aka Naomi Watts) and her amnesiac new friend Rita (aka Laura Harring) search for a mysterious stranger named Diane Selwyn. When Betty and Rita first arrive at Sierra Bonita, their taxi drives past the front of the complex, down a side alley located just north of the complex, and then drops them off in the rear of the property where the carports are located.

The carport area is pictured above and, as you can see, even it is picturesque! I can honestly say that was the first time in history I have ever seen a cute carport!

Betty and Rita then walk through the Disney-esque tower located at the back of the complex. A fake wall and apartment directory were set up in that area for the filming, which blocked the rest of the property from view.

That tower is pictured above.

According to the directory, Diane Selwyn lives in Apartment Number 12 in the complex’s West Courtyard. In reality, though, the property only has one courtyard.

Betty and Rita then make their way along meandering pathways and through maze-like foliage to Apartment 12. It was here that David Lynch employed tricky camera work and the magic of Hollywood to make the complex appear to be much larger than it actually is. To borrow a phrase from the British, I was absolutely gobsmacked when I arrived at the property and saw how miniscule it was.

Lynch also had a fake wall and gate installed at the front of the property, along Griffith Park Boulevard, which you can see in the background of the above screen capture.

The fake gate was built behind the complex’s real life gate, which can also be seen in the movie.

When Betty knocks on the door to Apartment 12, she is told that Diane Selwyn has recently moved into Apartment 17.

The bungalow used as Apartment 12 is actually numbered 2912 1/2 in real life and is the complex’s northwestern-most unit. It is located right on Griffith Park Boulevard and can be easily viewed from the street.

When Betty and Rita arrive at Apartment 17, they discover that no one is home and wind up breaking into the unit through a side window.

In real life, Apartment 17 is the bungalow numbered 2910 and it is located at the northeastern-most edge of the complex.

The window that Betty breaks into is pictured above.

I am fairly certain that the interior that was shown in the movie was just a set as the spacing of the windows in the kitchen area does not match up to the spacing of the windows on the exterior of the actual bungalow. You can check out some photographs of one of the actual apartment interiors on fave website CurbedLA here.

In the Season 2 episode of My Name Is Earl titled “Sticks & Stones”, the “Snow White Cottages” were used extensively as “Shady Grove”, where Maggie Lester, aka The Bearded Lady (aka Judy Greer), and her carnival friends lived.

Maggie lived in the bungalow numbered 2906 1/2 in the episode.

That bungalow is pictured above.

I am fairly certain that the real life interior of the unit was also used in the filming. How incredibly cute is Maggie’s place, by the way?!?! Oh, what I wouldn’t give to live there!

On a Mulholland Dr. side-note – Justin Theroux, my girl Jen Aniston’s current boyfriend, played the lead role of director Adam Kesher in the film.

Big THANK YOU to fellow stalker Brad, from the Brad D Studios website, for finding this location! Smile

Until next time, Happy Stalking! Smile

Stalk It: The “Sierra Bonita Apartments” from Mulholland Dr. are located at 2900 Griffith Park Boulevard in Silverlake. The units which were used in Mulholland Dr. are denoted with pink arrows in the above aerial view – Apartment #12 is actually the bungalow numbered 2912 1/2 and Apartment #17 is the bungalow numbered 2910. Maggie’s apartment from My Name Is Earl is denoted with a blue arrow in the above aerial view and is numbered 2906 1/2 in real life.

Tag: My Name is Earl

The Palms Motel from “My Name Is Earl”

The Sierra Bonita Apartments from “Mulholland Dr.”