Old School – IAMNOTASTALKER

March 28, 2016March 25, 2016

Shakers Family Restaurant from “Old School”

Today’s locale is another one of those facepalm spots. For ages, I had been trying to track down the interior of the diner where Mitch (Owen Wilson) and the boys discussed saving their fraternity in the 2003 comedy Old School. While I had long known that Montrose Bakery & Café (which, sadly, Yelp is reporting has closed) was used as the exterior of the restaurant, the café that portrayed the interior remained a mystery. Then while watching the flick recently, I spotted something that I thought I recognized.

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Visible outside of the window behind Mitch in the restaurant scene was a red brick building that looked extremely familiar to me.

Upon scrutinizing the scene further, I spotted a Kentucky Fried Chicken outpost located across the street from the restaurant and it was then that everything clicked into place. I knew immediately that filming had occurred at Shakers Family Restaurant in South Pasadena. I used to get my nails done at a salon just south of Shakers and, though I had never eaten there, I passed by it, as well as the red brick building and the KFC (which is now Mamma’s Brick Oven Pizza and Pasta), on a regular basis, which is why they looked so familiar to me.

As soon as I figured out that filming had taken place at Shakers, I started doing some research on the eatery and its filming history and came across this mention of Old School being shot on the premises on the Scott’s L.A. Audio Tours website. Now, not only have I been to that website several times over the years, but I own and have listened to (several times, I might add!) the Scott’s L.A. Pasadena Audio Tour CD! D’oh! Feeling a bit sheepish, I immediately added the diner to my To-Stalk List and ran right on over there a couple of weeks later.

The Googie-style building that houses Shakers was originally built in 1965 for the Preble’s Restaurant and Coffee Shop chain. It was designed by the famed Armet & Davis architecture firm, who also gave us Norm’s La Cienega. You can see an advertisement for Preble’s here and you can check out what a few other restaurants built for the chain look like today here.

In 1971, the South Pasadena Preble’s changed hands and was turned into the Salt Shaker. Just a few years later, in 1975, the owners dropped “salt” from the name (according to Wikia, the change was made due to the many studies being released at the time that showed salt was unhealthy) and the eatery became known simply as “Shakers” or “Shakers Family Restaurant.” Though the interior has been remodeled slightly in recent years, it still boasts much of the same décor that it did when the Salt Shaker was originally established 45 years ago.

I cannot believe that in all the years I lived in Pasadena, I never dined at Shakers! The Grim Cheaper and I thoroughly enjoyed our lunch there, though I am really regretting not opting to order the chicken strips, which countless Yelp reviewers have touted as being the best they’ve ever had. That’s what I get for trying to be healthy! I cannot say enough good things about the Classical Cobb Salad that I did order, though. It was fabulous!

Thanks to the place’s fabulously retro aesthetic, it has long been a favorite of location managers.

In Old School, Mitch and his Alpha Epsilon Omega brothers discussed the Charter Certification Review of their fraternity while sitting in Shakers’ southern dining room.

As I mentioned earlier, only the interior of Shakers was featured in Old School. The exterior shown in the movie can be found at 2325 Honolulu Avenue in Montrose.

I was floored to learn via various websites and Yelp reviews that an episode of The X-Files had been lensed at Shakers. I was unsure of which episode, though, and while it took quite a bit of time, I finally managed to figure it out! Shakers was the spot where Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) told Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) the legend of the Lazarus Bowl in Season 7’s “Hollywood A.D.,” which aired in 2000 and was written and directed by Duchovny.

As I mentioned in my recent post about Beeman Park from Girls Just Want to Have Fun, Shakers masked as The Burger Hole in the 2008 comedy Role Models. The eatery popped up twice in the film and both the exterior . . .

. . . and interior were utilized.

In the Season 2 episode of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. titled “One of Us,” which aired in 2015, Calvin Zabo (Kyle MacLachlan) and the rest of the “Masters of Evil” dine at Shakers and discuss how to take down the Agents.

I immediately recognized the diner when it popped up in the recently-aired episode of Scandal titled “Wild Card” as the spot where Tom Larsen (Brian Letscher) convinced Wayne Turner (Braden Lynch) to hold up the Pennsylvania State Capital.

The exterior of Shakers also appeared in the episode.

The eatery was apparently featured in All Night Long, as well, but I could not find a copy of the 1981 comedy to verify that information.

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: Shakers Family Restaurant, from Old School, is located at 601 Fair Oaks Avenue in South Pasadena. You can visit the diner’s official website here.

March 21, 2011March 19, 2011

The Quality Café

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.

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”.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

. . . 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.

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.

August 19, 2009August 20, 2009

The Wedding Singer Bakery

A few weeks ago, fellow stalker Owen asked for my help in locating the bakery featured in one of his all time favorite movies, the 1998 comedy The Wedding Singer. Owen had actually contacted one of the movie’s crew members who happened to remember that the bakery where filming took place was located somewhere in Montrose, a small town in the San Gabriel Valley where quite a few scenes from The Wedding Singer were filmed. Because Owen does not live in the area, he sent me out on a mission to stalk all of the bakeries located in the tiny town in the hopes that I would eventually find the right one. So, early one morning last week, I dragged my parents out to Montrose to hopefully stalk the Wedding Singer bakery.

And, sure enough, it was the very first bakery we walked into!! Ironically, I had ALREADY STALKED this location just last month while visiting some sites from the Will Ferrell comedy Old School. It turns out that the exterior of the Wedding Singer bakery was also used as the restaurant in Old School where Luke Wilson and his “brothers” have a meeting about saving their fraternity! I didn’t immediately recognize the place from my previous stalking trip because, due to the fact that only the exterior of the bakery was featured in Old School, I never ventured inside. But while walking by last week, I peeked in the window and immediately recognized the pink sign pictured above which reads “This is the same ol place”. That sign was featured pretty prominently in the Wedding Singer bakery scene, so as soon as I saw it I knew I had found the right spot. It was at that point that I pretty much started screaming “This is it! This is it! This is it!” to my parents right there on the street out in front of the shop! While I had figured that the bakery featured in the movie would still be around, never in a million years did I think it would still look EXACTLY the same today as it did when the Wedding Singer was filmed over a decade ago! YAY!

Montrose Home Bakery and Sandwich Shoppe actually pops up during my very favorite part of The Wedding Singer – at the beginning of the Drew Barrymore/Adam Sandler falling in love montage set to the Hall & Oates song “You Make My Dreams Come True”. 🙂 In the scene, Drew Barrymore and friends are first seen looking at wedding cakes in the bakery’s glass display counter. You can even see the bakery’s striped awning behind actor Allen Covert in the above screen capture.

Drew and friends then proceed to feed each other wedding cake in the scene. Although the bakery is only featured for a few brief moments, thanks to the awesome ’80s song playing in the background, it’s quite a memorable little part of the movie.

While stalking the bakery, I happened to start up a conversation with the owner who really could NOT have been nicer to us! He answered a whole bunch of my silly questions and told me to take all the pictures I wanted. It turns out that the Montrose Home Bakery and Sandwich Shoppe has been used for quite a bit of filming over the years. Besides The Wedding Singer and Old School, the shop was also featured in several episodes of the now-defunct television series Dirty Sexy Money. There is even a photograph of the owner and Donald Sutherland taken during the filming posted in the shop’s front window. Apparently, he used to have a picture of himself with Drew Barrymore in that same window, but it is now stored at his home. He told me that if he posted all of his celebrity photographs from all of the filming that has taken place at his little shop, his entire front window would be covered up! LOL LOL LOL LOVE IT!

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Montrose Home Bakery and Sandwich Shoppe is a super cute little place and I HIGHLY recommend stalking it. The shop smelled absolutely delicious inside, but, unfortunately, because I am diabetic, I wasn’t able to sample any of the sweets. 🙁 I am seriously thinking about having them make the cupcakes for my wedding, though. How fitting would it be to get my wedding cupcakes from the Wedding Singer bakery???? 😉

Until next time, Happy Stalking! 🙂

Stalk It: The Wedding Singer Bakery, aka Montrose Home Bakery and Sandwich Shoppe, is located at 2325 1/2 Honolulu Avenue in Montrose. The shop houses both a bakery and a restaurant, and, from what I’ve heard, the restaurant serves up a GREAT breakfast.

July 6, 2009July 7, 2009

The Old School House

A few weeks ago, while out stalking, Mike, from MovieShotsLA, and I decided to pay a little visit to the house where Luke Wilson lived and set up his fictional Lamdba Epsilon Omega fraternity in the 2003 comedy Old School. The house is located on a quiet, tree-lined street that has long been a favorite of location scouts. South Pasadena’s Bushnell Avenue has shown up in everything from the movies Back to the Future and Ghost Dad to the television series thirtysomething. I promise to devote a future post to the other famous homes located on the oft-filmed street, but today’s post will be dedicated solely to the Old School house. 🙂

I am happy to report that aside from a few minor changes, the Old School house looks exactly the same in person as it appeared onscreen. Unfortunately, the sun was shining very brightly the day we stalked the house, so my pictures did not turn out very good. 🙁

Because the Old School house was supposed to be located very close to, or as Vince Vaughn says “practically on”, a college campus, producers brought in a mailbox, a kiosk, and several parking meters to make the area look less residential. They also created fake parking places in front of the home, much like was done at the nearby Bedtimes Stories house.

The house shows up many times throughout the movie, most notably as the site of Vince Vaughn’s Mitch-A-Palooza Party, where he hires Snoop Dogg to perform.

Will Ferrell’s streaking expedition was also filmed in front of the Old School house. Before heading over to Honolulu Avenue in nearby Montrose, Frank-the-Tank tries to lead his fellow Mitch-A-Palooza partiers on a streaking trip down Bushnell Avenue. Unbeknownst to him, he is the only one streaking. LOL

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My friend and fellow stalker Owen, informed me that the Old School house was also used in the 1989 flick Back to the Future II. In the movie, bully Biff steals a little kid’s ball and tosses it up onto the balcony of the Old School house.

In a very random side note, the Old School fraternity house actually belonged to Will Ferrell at the time of the filming. In the movie’s DVD commentary, Will Ferrel says, “And this was actually my house. My little craftsman house in Pasadena. I was cool with it, even though you guys ruined the hardwood floors with all the equipment.” Actors Vince Vaughn and Luke Wilson also took part in the DVD commentary and since there was quite a bit of joking around going on during their talk, I can’t say with absolute certainty that the house ever actually belonged to Will. He very well could have just been joking around. But he does continally refer to the house as being his throughout the entire commentary, so I think it might actually be true. At one point he even said that his wife was extremely upset when she saw the house set up for the post-Mitch-A-Palooza scene (pictured above). According to property records, the home was sold to a new owner in 2006, so while I can’t say for sure that Will owned it during the filming of Old School, I can say he for sure that he doesn’t own it anymore.

Until next time, Happy Stalking! 🙂

Stalk It: The Old School house is located at 1803 Bushnell Avenue in South Pasadena. The house located at 1727 Bushnell was used as both Lorraine’s 1955 house in Back to the Future and Michael J. Fox’s house in Teen Wolf. George McFly’s 1955 house is located at 1711 Bushnell, while Biff’s from Back to the Future Part II is at 1809. At 1710 Bushnell is the home that was featured as Ken Olin and Mel Harris’ in the television series thirtysomething. Ghost Dad was filmed at both 1615 and 1621 Bushnell. I will write a more detailed post on all of those locations at a later date. 🙂

July 1, 2009July 1, 2009

Will Ferrell’s Streaking Scene

A few weeks ago, while out stalking in Montrose, Mike, from MovieShotsLA, and I decided to pinpoint the exact location where Will Ferrell went streaking in the 2003 movie Old School. Although it’s fairly common location knowledge that the streaking scene took place on Honolulu Avenue in the City of Montrose, I actually first heard that information straight from the horse’s mouth last July when I saw Will Ferrell speak at my acting school. During the question and answer session of Will’s presentation, one of my fellow students raised their hand and asked Frank the Tank himself where the streaking scene had taken place. Love it!! 🙂 Amazingly enough, Will remembered the general location where that scene had been filmed and ever since then I have been meaning to stalk it. So, a few weeks ago, Mike and I set out to do just that.

With our Blackberries in hand, the two of us walked up and down Honolulu Avenue watching Will’s streaking scene on YouTube while trying to find the exact location. And sure enough, we did! 🙂 We were actually able to pinpoint Will’s streaking spot by matching up the Montrose Shopping Park Directory sign . . .

and some windows that were shown in the background of the scene. YAY!

While we were stalking Honolulu Avenue, one of the super-friendly local shop owners informed us that the Montrose Bakery and Cafe, which is located just down the road from Will’s streaking spot, was also featured in Old School. The Cafe’s exterior stood in for the exterior of the University Cafe where Luke Wilson and his friends have a pow wow about how to save their fraternity. Interestingly enough, though, the Cafe’s interior was not used in the filming. The interior scenes were filmed at another location altogether.

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You can watch Will Ferrell’s absolutely hilarious – but NSFW – streaking scene here. “We’re going streaking! Yeah! We’re going streaking through the quad and into the gymnasium! Come on, everybody! Come on, Snoop, Snoop-a-Loop! Bring your green hat!” LOL LOL LOL

On a bittersweet side note, I dragged my mom out to Montrose earlier today to snap some more photos of the “streaking street” and we noticed the above tribute to Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett posted outside of a local shop named Pure Sunshine Beauty Supply. It seems everyone the world over is mourning Michael and Farrah’s untimely passings. 🙁

Until next time, Happy Stalking! 🙂

Stalk It: Will Ferrell’s streaking scene took place on the block of Honolulu Avenue located between Market Street and Ocean View Boulevard in Montrose. Frank’s wife is driving East on Honolulu Avenue when she first spots Frank. She stops the car right around 2246 Honolulu Avenue to let him hop inside. Montrose Bakery and Cafe, aka the University Cafe, is located at 2325 Honolulu Avenue, also in Montrose.