The A-Team filming locations

January 17, 2013January 17, 2013

The VA Sepulveda Ambulatory Care Center aka the American Embassy from “Argo”

There are few things this stalker loves more than opening her mailbox to discover a slew of “For Your Consideration” screeners – something that happens each January shortly before the Screen Actors Guild Awards. This year, the DVDs waiting in my mailbox were Silver Linings Playbook (my pick for best movie of the year), Les Miserables (which I have yet to watch) and Argo (which absolutely KNOCKED MY SOCKS OFF!). I cannot believe that Ben Affleck was not nominated for a Best Director Academy Award. The mere fact that he was able to shoot 90% of Argo, a movie that supposedly takes place in 1970s Tehran, in 2013 Los Angeles is astounding! He deserves an Oscar for that alone. Anyway, a few weeks back, Mike, from MovieShotsLA, sent me a Los Angeles Times article about the Southern California locations featured in Argo and, believe you me, when I read that the Veterans Affairs Sepulveda Ambulatory Care Center in North Hills had masqueraded as the American Embassy in the flick, I immediately started chomping at the bit and dragged the Grim Cheaper right on out to stalk the place shortly thereafter.

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The Veterans Affairs Sepulveda Ambulatory Care Center (try saying that one three times fast!), which is absolutely ginormous, has quite an interesting history. In 1952, Lester and Mary Gentry donated a 160-acre plot of land to the city so that a veterans hospital could be built. The Sepulveda Care Center was the result of that generous donation and by 1993 the site was treating over 275,000 veterans each year. Sadly though, much of the property was damaged during the 1994 Northridge earthquake, the main hospital building subsequently torn down, and the majority of the premises shuttered. In a controversial move, the site was deemed “unsafe” to operate as a care center soon thereafter, yet it is constantly used by production companies for filming. According to a 2009 Los Angeles Daily News article, the designation “was all a smokescreen, a chance for VA officials to save some money, downsize and gut Sepulveda.” And while the property does currently house a working outpatient center, a pharmacy, a nursing home, an X-ray lab, a therapy pool, and a methadone clinic, the majority of the buildings remain vacant. As you can see below, though, a restoration project is currently underway. In February of last year, the city began gutting the interior of two of the dilapidated structures, with the plan to turn them both into housing for homeless vets. In the meantime, the Center is still being used for filming. And lots of it.

According to the Los Angeles Times article about Argo, two locations were used to stand in for the American Embassy in the film. The scenes that took place outside of the embassy walls (pictured below) were shot at a building in Istanbul, Turkey – one that I have yet to track down.

The scenes that took place inside of the embassy walls were, of course, shot at the VA Sepulveda Ambulatory Care Center. The L.A Times article states, “A Veterans Affairs medical building in North Hills, with its institutional, red brick facade, turned out to be remarkably similar to the U.S. embassy in Tehran from which six Americans escaped and sought refuge in the home of the Canadian ambassador. ‘It even had the same number of stories as the U.S. embassy in Tehran,’ said Chris Baugh, location manager for ‘Argo.’ ‘It was a huge stroke of luck.’” You can check out some photographs of the actual former American Embassy in Tehran here and here. As you can see, it does look quite a bit like the Sepulveda Ambulatory Care Center. Following the Iran hostage crisis in 1979, the embassy site ceased functioning as such and today is used by the Iranian government as a training facility for the Revolutionary Guards Corps.

Because the VA site is so incredibly vast (there are over 18 separate, very similar-looking buildings) and so little of the exterior of the American Embassy was actually shown in Argo, the GC and I had quite a time trying to pinpoint the exact spot where filming took place. Thankfully though, we ran into an extremely nice security guard who was all too happy to help. According to him, a façade of the embassy was constructed in a parking lot on the premises during the shoot, and I am fairly certain that that façade is what is pictured in the screen capture below, as it does not match up to any of the actual hospital buildings.

For some of the close-up angles of the embassy, the security guard informed us that Building 4 was used. Because the shots were so tight, though, the structure is not very recognizable from the film. In fact, the only recognizable element, besides the windows, is the brick wall situated at the front of the building.

That brick wall is pictured below.

The interior of one of the VA buildings (according to the security guard, Building 5) also stood in for the interior of the American Embassy in Argo.

Building 4 also appeared in Rob Zombie’s 2007 Halloween reboot as Smith’s Grove Sanitarium, where a young Michael Meyers (Scout Taylor-Compton) was institutionalized after murdering his family.

The real life interior of the hospital was also used in the filming.

In fact, the very same room that stood in for the Visa Application office in Argo also stood in for the family visiting room in Halloween, as you can see below. So incredibly cool!

Building 4 was also where Brennan Huff (Will Ferrell) and Dale Doback (John C. Reilly) were beat up by kid bullies in the 2008 comedy Step Brothers.

The north side of Building 4 (which I, unfortunately, did not get a picture of) was the main location used in Accepted. In the 2006 comedy, the site stood in for the abandoned Harmon Psychiatric Hospital . . .

. . . which Bartleby Gaines (Justin Long) and his friends turned into the fake South Harmon Institute of Technology.

The location was so prominent in the filming that it was even featured in the movie’s poster.

The real life interior of the building was also used in the filming.

And a pool was even built in the courtyard area for the shoot.

The exterior of VA Sepulveda’s Building 200, which is an actual working medical facility, is also used regularly for filming.

As is the interior. The building was closed when we showed up to stalk it, though, so I could only snap photographs through the front windows, unfortunately.

Building 200 is most notably used on Grey’s Anatomy where it stands in each week for Seattle Grace Hospital.

Because I have never actually watched an episode of Grey’s Anatomy (I know, I know), like a dork I accidentally took a picture of the wrong side of the building.

The south side of the building is the side used as Seattle Grace.

While the majority of the interior of Seattle Grace is just a set, the lobby of VA Sepulveda also pops up occasionally on the show.

The interior of Building 200 also masqueraded as a Geneva-area hospital in the Season 2 episode of Alias titled “Salvation”.

The 1981 horror flick Halloween II was also filmed at the VA Sepulveda Ambulatory Care Center, although I am unsure of which exact structure was used in the production. I am guessing, though, that it was the main hospital building that was demolished after the Northridge earthquake.

The Season 8 episodes of Falcon Crest titled “Ties that Bind” and “The Last Laugh” were also supposedly filmed at VA Sepulveda, but I could not find copies of either with which to verify that information.

You can find me on Facebook here and on Twitter at @IAMNOTASTALKER. And be sure to check out my other blog, The Well-Heeled Diabetic.

Until next time, Happy Stalking! Smile

Stalk It: The Veterans Affairs Sepulveda Ambulatory Care Center, aka the American Embassy from Argo, is located at 16111 Plummer Street in North Hills. Building 4 was used as the exterior of the embassy. Building 200 serves as Seattle Grace Hospital on Grey’s Anatomy. You can check out a map of the Ambulatory Care Center here.

February 12, 2010February 11, 2010

The Firehouse from “Ghostbusters”

This past weekend while doing some stalking in Downtown L.A. I dragged my fiancé out to see an oft-used filming location that has long been at the top of my “To-Stalk” list. That location is known as Fire Station #23, a real life former working fire house that served as the offices of Dr. Raymond Stantz (aka Dan Aykroyd), Dr. Peter Venkman (aka Bill Murray), Dr. Egon Spengler (aka Harold Ramis), and Winston Zeddmore (aka Ernie Hudson) in the 1984 movie Ghostbusters. And as fate would have it, when we pulled up to the now-defunct fire station, the caretaker of the property, an EXTREMELY nice man named Daniel Taylor, happened to be standing outside speaking with a student filmmaker. So, I, of course, struck up a conversation with him and asked if it might be alright if I stepped inside to take a look around and snap a few photographs. And, let me tell you, I just about fell over from excitement when Daniel told me to go right in! YAY!

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Fire Station #23 actually has quite a storied, and sometimes scandalous, history. The structure, which first opened on October 2, 1910, was designed by the prominent architectural firm of Hudson & Munsell and served as the headquarters of the Los Angeles Fire Department for over a decade. The three story building, which cost between $57,000 and $60,000 to construct and measured 26 feet wide, 167 feet deep and encompassed 13,600 square feet of space, has been mired in controversy ever since the day it was first dedicated. In the beginning, angry citizens deemed the construction costs far too steep for a public building, especially since tax payers were footing the bill and considering the extravagance with which the place was built. And it has been said that no other fire station in the country is as opulent. The top floor of the structure housed the Fire Chief’s suite, an apartment which every fire chief from 1910 to 1928 called home. The suite featured a marble bathroom complete with a double bathtub, Peruvian mahogany wall paneling, imported Italian tile detailing, oak flooring, a private elevator, a brass bed, a roof garden, a marble fireplace, and French bevel glass mirrors. The second floor contained the captain’s dwelling, a library with built-in bookshelves, and bunks for twenty firefighters. The bottom floor contained an open arcade with enamel tiled walls, 21 foot high pressed tin ceilings, and stalls to accommodate ten horses. Pretty amazing for a fire house, huh? The Los Angeles Times even dubbed the place “the Taj Mahal of fire stations”.

Fire Station #23 remained in operation for fifty years, whereupon its men responded to over 60,000 fires. But with the city moving towards building more modernized stations, Engine Truck Company #23 closed its doors for good on November 23rd, 1960. Because a station in Pacific Palisades adopted the “23” company number, the shuttered station took on the name “Old 23”. For the next six years, the fire department utilized the space for medial records storage and as a training facility. In 1966, the same year it became a City of Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument, the fire house was shut down by the department completely. For the next ten years, as the area surrounding the building became more and more impoverished, the station fell into serious disrepair and suffered from extreme vandalism and looting. In 1979, the Fire Commission decided to renovate the property and eventually turn it into a firehouse museum. A non-profit organization named Olde 23 was set up to oversee the restoration process and to raise funds for the massive undertaking. In 1980, the building was added to the National Register of Historic Places. Nine years later, though, in 1988, the plans for turning Old #23 into a museum were nixed and the city opened their Los Angeles Fire Department Museum at a location in Hollywood instead.

Seven years later controversy came raining down upon the fire house once again when Los Angeles Times staff writer Robert J. Lopez authored a front page article accusing the Olde 23 corporation of misuse of funds. According to the article, Olde 23 had been collecting massive amounts of money (over $210,000 to be exact) thanks to the numerous film shoots that had taken place on the premises over the years. Not only had the company failed to turn that money over to the city, though, but no one had even informed the city that any sort of filming was going on. Being that a city department is responsible for handing out film permits, I’m not quite sure how this even happened, but I guess it’s just another case of a beaurocracy’s right hand not knowing what the left is doing. Causing further scandal was the fact that even though the city had moved the museum location to a different site seven years prior, Olde 23 was still collecting not only filming fees that would supposedly go into the museum fund, but also donations for the project. AND (yes, there’s more!) the supposed non-profit was ALSO collecting filming fees from production companies for shoots that were taking place at other firehouses in the area – firehouses that the Olde 23 company had no jurisdiction over! LOL Talk about a sh*tstorm!! 😉 President and C.E.O. of the Olde 23 company was none other than Los Angeles Fire Chief Donald O. Manning himself, who resigned from his post just 8 days after Lopez’s newspaper article hit the stands. Following his resignation, Fire Station #23 continued to host film shoots, with the money going to the City of Los Angeles, the property’s rightful owner. Just this past September, though, the building was designated surplus property and the city is considering selling it to several different private investors, including a restaurant developer and a non-profit arts education group.

Daniel Taylor, who has been caretaker of the property since 1985 and who the city is currently trying to evict, has different plans for the building, though. He recently formed the Corporation for History, Arts, and Culture (CHAC) with the hopes of restoring the old firehouse to its original grandeur for use as both a cultural center and a filming location. He estimates the restoration project to cost upwards of $8 million and is trying to raise funds now. If you would like to learn more about the cause, you can do so on CHAC’s official website. And while the future of the historic firehouse remains to be seen, in the meantime I highly recommend stalking it as it is a truly beautiful and unique building.

In Ghostbusters, the exterior of the gang’s headquarters (pictured above) was actually filmed at Hook & Ladder Company #8 located at 14 North Moore Street in New York.

But for the interior filming, cast and crew came to Fire Station #23 in Downtown Los Angeles. And I am happy to report that the interior looks almost exactly the same today as it did in 1984 when Ghostbusters was filmed! Amazing!

The boys’ back office area is not there in real life, though, and I am assuming it was just a set that was added solely for the filming.

The upstairs of the firehouse was used in the filming, as well, but unfortunately I didn’t get to see that area while I was there.

Five years later cast and crew returned to Fire Station #23 once again to film the interior scenes for Ghostbusters II.

And I just about died when I spotted the wooden wall adornment pictured above, which was featured in the sequel. So cool!

The firehouse was also featured in 1994’s The Mask, in which it doubled as Jim Carrey’s deceitful car mechanic’s office.

He later vandalizes the place after turning into “The Mask”.

In 2003’s National Security, the firehouse was used as the location of Earl Montgomery (aka Martin Lawrence) and Hank Rafferty (aka Steve Zahn’s) stakeout. Only the exterior of the building and a very small portion of the interior (pictured above) were featured in that shoot, though. Firehouse #23 has also appeared in V.I. Warshawski, Police Academy 2, Flatliners, Set It Off, RE(e)volution, Big Trouble in Little China, in the television series Firehouse, and in the Season 4 episode of The A-Team entitled “The Road to Hope”. All in all, it has been featured in more than 50 commercial, television, movie, and music video productions over the years.

Until next time, Happy Stalking! 🙂

Stalk It: Fire Station #23, aka the firehouse from Ghostbusters, is located at 225 East Fifth Street in Downtown Los Angeles. Unfortunately, the station is not in the safest of areas, so please exercise caution if you choose to stalk it. You can visit the CHAC Fire Station #23 website here.