Tim Allen – IAMNOTASTALKER

March 17, 2017March 13, 2017

The “Last Man Standing” House

The Grim Cheaper and I watch a lot of TV. Like a lot. So I am always surprised when I receive an email from a reader asking about a location from a show I am not familiar with. Such was the case in January, when fellow stalker Marjorie reached out to ask for my assistance in tracking down the house where the Baxter family lives on Last Man Standing. Though I had never seen even one episode of the CBS series, I am always up for a good hunt, so I asked Marjorie to send me some screen captures of the residence. When she did, I was shocked to see that it was a virtual carbon copy of a home that has been featured on The Goldbergs numerous times – one that I will be blogging about soon. I had tracked down that pad – it’s at 2822 Forrester Drive in Cheviot Hills – just a few weeks prior and, due to the similarities, figured the Last Man Standing dwelling had to be located nearby. So I began poking around the area. After a few hours of futile searching, I decided to set my sights on Hancock Park and its environs instead, and hit pay dirt rather quickly.

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Said to be located at 9504 Dublin Street in downtown Denver on the series, the Baxter family home can actually be found at 611 Lorraine Boulevard in Windsor Square.

In real life, the 1923 Tudor boasts 5 bedrooms, 4 baths, 4,680 square feet, a library, several fireplaces, a butler’s pantry, a formal dining room, a breakfast room, a detached garage, a covered patio, maid’s quarters, and a 0.33-acre lot.

Per real estate website Zillow, the two-story residence, which was designed by architect Preston Wright, last sold in October 2013 for $2.7 million.

As you can see, the property looks much the same in person as it does on Last Man Standing.

At some point, a flagpole with a brick base was added to the home’s front yard on the show.

The flagpole is not there in real life, though, and I am guessing it is not a set piece, but something that is superimposed digitally into each image of the house featured on the series.

The handsome brick pad appears regularly each week in establishing shots on Last Man Standing, though no actual filming takes place there.

The series is instead lensed on a set constructed on Stage 9 at CBS Studio Center in Studio City.

The set of the Baxter family’s home does not resemble the interior of the actual residence, which is much larger and much more grand. You can check out what the real inside of the property looks like here.

During my search for the Last Man Standing house, I came across a 2011 Inland Valley Daily Bulletin article that mentioned the series’ regular use of the Bass Pro Shops in Rancho Cucamonga. I was thrilled upon learning the news being that the massive sporting goods emporium is one of my dad’s favorite places in the entire world. I’m not kidding – when we lived in Pasadena and friends would visit from out of town, he would invariably drive them the 35 miles to Rancho Cucamonga to see Bass Pro. Not that I blame him. The 180,000-square-foot site, which boasts waterfalls, an 8,000-gallon fish tank, a shooting gallery, a 2-story lobby with a fireplace and a 60-foot clerestory, murals, museum-like dioramas, and a restaurant (yes, a restaurant!), is not your average sporting goods store. It’s pretty darn unique. You can check out some photos of it here. On Last Man Standing, Bass Pro, which is located at 7777 Victoria Gardens Lane, masks as Outdoor Man, where Baxter patriarch Mike (Tim Allen) works as a marketing director. Only the exterior of the shop is utilized on the series. The inside of Outdoor Man is a set that exists at CBS Studio Center and, unlike the Baxter house, it was closely modeled after Bass Pro’s real life interior. In an interesting twist, as the Daily Bulletin points out, a green truck is visible parked outside of the store in the establishing shots featured on the show. That truck is an actual décor fixture of Bass Pro. Producers must have liked the look of it because it somehow made its way on to Last Man Standing as Mike’s car. If you scroll up, you can see an identical green pick-up parked in the driveway in several establishing shots of the Baxter home.

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

Big THANK YOU to fellow stalker Marjorie for asking me to find this location!

Until next time, Happy Stalking! Smile

Stalk It: The Baxter residence from Last Man Standing is located at 611 Lorraine Boulevard in Windsor Square. Bass Pro Shops, aka Outdoor Man from the series, is located at 7777 Victoria Gardens Lane in Rancho Cucamonga.

December 23, 2016December 21, 2016

“Christmas with the Kranks” Studio Locations

Since I have been on such a Christmas with the Kranks kick as of late, I thought I’d finish out this year’s Yuletide posts by blogging about the movie’s studio locations. The 2004 comedy was unusual in that it utilized the backlots of not one, not two, but three different L.A.-area studios!

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The main backlot set featured in Christmas with the Kranks was the Hemlock Street neighborhood at the now defunct Downey Studios, formerly located at 12214 Lakewood Boulevard in Downey. The residential complex, which took 12 weeks to construct at a cost of $5 million and was comprised of 16 Midwest-style homes, was built specifically for the movie after producers came up empty-handed searching for a Chicago-area community to use in the production. When Christmas with the Kranks wrapped, Downey Studios chose to leave the expansive set intact to be used in future productions. It subsequently popped up in Pineapple Express, Supernatural, 24, and the Jonas Brothers’ “Paranoid” music video. Unfortunately, Downey Studios was shuttered in 2012 and all of its sets and soundstages razed, including Hemlock Street. Today, a retail complex known as The Promenade at Downey stands on the site.

During the time that Downey Studios was in operation, the Hemlock Street homes were visible to passersby from nearby roads. I stalked the place back in 2011 and seeing the façades was a thrill to say the least. You can read a more extensive post I wrote about the former studio here.

Because Downey Studios lacked a downtown backlot set, the production team had to venture elsewhere to film the movie’s urban scenes. They found what they were looking for (well, in part) at Universal Studios Hollywood, located at 100 Universal City Plaza in Universal City. It was in the studio’s New York Street area that cast and crew shot the scene involving Chip’s Market, where Luther Krank (Tim Allen) attempted to buy white chocolate and pistachios for his wife, Nora (Jamie Lee Curtis).

The Pumpkin Seed Paperie & Press stationary store, where Nora failed to place her annual Christmas card order, was also located on New York Street. Unfortunately, the façades used in the movie were destroyed by a fire in 2008 and no longer exist. You can see some images of them on The Studio Tour website here, here, here, and here.

Though not a backlot location, it bears mentioning that another spot at Universal made an appearance in Christmas with the Kranks. One of the property’s restaurants, The Studio Grill by Wolfgang Puck, is where Nora lunched with her friends Merry (Felicity Huffman) and Candi (Caroline Rhea) at the beginning of the movie. You can check out some photos of the eatery here.

For whatever reason, when it came time to film the scene in which Officers Salino (Cheech Marin) and Treen (Jake Busey) drive Blair Krank (Julie Gonzalo) and her new fiancé, Enrique Decardenal (Rene Lavan), home from the airport, producers chose not to utilize the Universal backlot, but instead headed over to Warner Bros. Studio, located at 3400 West Riverside Drive in Burbank. (Big THANK YOU to Mike, from MovieShotsLA, for the photo that appears below, which he took during one of the many WB tours that we’ve embarked upon together.)

The scene was shot on Warner Bros. Studio’s famed Hennesy Street.

The spot where the officers arrest a burglar in the scene can be found in the southeastern portion of Hennesy Street.

If that area looks familiar to my fellow stalkers, that’s because it should. It has been immortalized in numerous iconic productions over the years.

I chronicled some of its onscreen appearances for both Los Angeles magazine and Discover Los Angeles, but figured it was worthy of a re-cap.

The same area of the backlot is most famous for being the site of the upside-down kiss in 2002’s Spider-Man.

It also served as the rear of the Hudson St. Home for Girls in the 1982 musical Annie.

The southeastern portion of Hennesy Street masked as the block in Okinawa, Japan where Sato’s (Danny Kamekona) dojo was located in 1986’s The Karate Kid Part II.

It was also there that Rachel Green (Jennifer Aniston) introduced herself to Jean-Claude Van Damme in the Season 2 episode of Friends titled “The One After the Superbowl: Part 2.”

Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) attempted to smoke there in the Season 3 episode of Sex and the City titled “Escape from New York.”

And the area was also used as the exterior of Toby Cavanaugh’s (Keegan Allen) loft on Pretty Little Liars.

I would like to wish all of my fellow stalkers a very Merry Christmas! I hope everyone has a safe and joyous holiday! My posts in the coming week will be light, but I promise to be back in 2017 with lots of new content!

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

Until next time, Happy Stalking! Smile

December 19, 2016December 21, 2016

Westside Pavilion from “Christmas with the Kranks”

Some cities know how to do Christmas right. Sadly, Palm Springs is not one of them. As I mentioned last year, the desert just seems to be lacking when it comes to Christmas décor. Yes, there are lights and garland strung in certain sections of our local mall and colorful wreaths hung from a few select street lights, but overall the Coachella Valley doesn’t really have a holiday feel. So much so that two years ago, the Grim Cheaper and I decided to make an annual December pilgrimage to Los Angeles so that we could shop in a city that truly embraces the holidays. (You’d be hard-pressed to find a mall in L.A. that does not have a two- or three-story tree. Now that’s how I want to do my Christmas shopping!) Shortly before we ventured out this year, I discovered that Christmas with the Kranks had done some filming at Westside Pavilion, so we headed there first. And it turned out to be a truly magical experience. But more on that in a bit.

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As I talked about in Friday’s post, earlier this month I set out to track down some unknown locations from Christmas with the Kranks. After identifying the Irish pub from the 2004 comedy, I turned my focus on the mall where Nora Krank (Jamie Lee Curtis) and her husband, Luther Krank (Tim Allen), visited “Tans Forever” tanning booth.

While watching the scene, I noticed, via the escalators visible behind Nora and Luther, that the Christmas with the Kranks shopping center had three levels. So I did a Google search for “three-story mall” and “Los Angeles” and was led to this LA Tourist article which mentioned the Westside Pavilion and its three floors of storefronts. One look at images of the Pavilion told me that it was definitely the right place! From there, I just had to figure out the exact spot where filming had occurred.

It was obvious in the scene that the Tans Forever storefront had been created on Westside Pavilion’s second floor. And thankfully the names of a few neighboring businesses were visible in the background, including Shoe Care, Payless ShoeSource, and Regis Hairstylists.

A quick look at Westside Pavilion’s online map showed me that while Regis had since moved, Payless and Shoe Care were still located in the same area – on the mall’s second level near Macy’s. So the Grim Cheaper and I headed right on over to that spot upon arriving at the shopping center.

To our surprise, as soon as we stepped off the escalator we noticed that a film shoot was taking place! As we walked closer, I just about fainted upon realizing the shoot was for The Goldbergs, a show that the GC and I just recently started watching and are officially obsessed with. The cast and crew honestly could not have been nicer and I will be doing a whole post on our experience as soon as the episode that was being filmed airs.

After watching The Goldbergs shoot for a bit, the GC and I attempted to figure out the exact spots where Christmas with the Kranks filming had taken place. We pinpointed the escalator used in the movie easily enough. In the scene, Nora and Luther use the down escalator situated near PacSun to go from the mall’s third level to the second.

Even though I knew the general vicinity, pinpointing the spot where the Tans Forever storefront had been set up proved more difficult. It was not until I got home and enlisted the help of my friend/guest poster extraordinaire Michael (you can read his many amazing posts here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here) that I was able to figure it out. As we discovered, the Tans Forever salon was created in what is now Kid’s Club (that’s the teal storefront in the photograph pictured below).

Thanks to some old Westside Pavilion maps that he found online, Michael learned that at the time of the filming the Kid’s Club space was vacant and had most recently housed a Ritz Camera. Sadly, but not surprisingly, the storefront does not currently look anything like it did in Christmas with the Kranks. Sadder still, while stalking the mall, I came to believe that a different shop had been used in the shoot, so I barely took any photos of Kid’s Club.

We did venture inside, though, while looking for some gifts for the kids on our list and, while the real life interior of the space was also used in Christmas with the Kranks, because it was a shop created especially for the movie, it currently bears no resemblance to its onscreen appearance.

Westside Pavilion has been featured in a few other holiday-themed productions, as well! Though not a Christmas movie, in 1987’s No Man’s Land, Ted Varrick (Charlie Sheen) and Benjy Taylor (D.B. Sweeney) shop at – and steal a Porsche from – the mall during Christmastime.

The Season 5 holiday-themed episode of Modern Family titled “The Old Man and the Tree,” which aired in 2013, was also shot at Westside Pavilion. It is there that Mitchell Pritchett (Jesse Tyler Ferguson) shops for a Puppy Pound toy for his daughter, Lily (Aubrey Anderson-Emmons), and that Alex Dunphy (Ariel Winter) and Haley Dunphy (Sarah Hyland) work as Mrs. Claus and an elf, respectively, for an absentee Santa Claus.

The mall has also appeared in a couple of non-Christmas-themed productions. Tom Petty rode the escalators there in his 1989 “Free Fallin’” music video, which you can watch here.

And the exterior of the Pavilion was used in an establishing shot in the 1995 comedy Clueless. (All of the movie’s interior mall scenes were lensed at Westfield Fashion Square in Sherman Oaks, which I blogged about here.)

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

Big THANK YOU to my friend Michael for all of his help in pinpointing the Tans Forever storefront!

Until next time, Happy Stalking! Smile

Stalk It: Westside Pavilion from Christmas with the Kranks is located at 10800 West Pico Boulevard in Rancho Park. Filming took place on the second level in and around what is now Kid’s Club. You can visit the mall’s official website here.

December 16, 2016December 21, 2016

Du-par’s Restaurant and Bakery from “Christmas with the Kranks”

I don’t know what it is about Christmas movies, but I cannot watch them without crying. Even the not-so-great ones make me bawl. Case in point – the 2004 comedy Christmas with the Kranks. While admittedly not one of the best Yuletide films, the Grim Cheaper and I watch it each year and I cry every.single.time. After our recent annual watch, I decided to attempt to track down some of the flick’s unknown locales. The spot at the top of my list was the Irish pub where Nora Krank (Jamie Lee Curtis) ate with her husband, Luther Krank (Tim Allen). Imagine my surprise when it turned out to be a place I have dined at many times!

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In Christmas with the Kranks, upon facing the prospect of spending the holidays without their daughter who has just joined the Peace Corps, Luther convinces Nora to skip Christmas. Their friends and neighbors don’t take the decision lightly. While dining at an Irish pub towards the beginning of the movie, Nora complains to Luther that she is the one having to deal with the fallout. As she explains, “It’s us women who handle Christmas, not men. I am the one taking the brunt for your harebrained scheme! I am the one on the front lines!”

Besides the fact that the pub looked incredibly cozy in the scene, there’s pretty much nothing I love more than dining at movie restaurants, so it was a no-brainer that I wanted to track this spot down. Unfortunately, I had a little trouble doing so due to the fact that not much of the eatery was shown onscreen and no notable clues were visible in the background.

The more I re-watched the scene, though, the more I had a sense that the restaurant was familiar to me – that I had been there before. Then, all of a sudden, the green-hued bar-top visible behind Nora jumped out at me and I immediately knew where filming had taken place – the Hamburger Hamlet located at 214 South Lake Avenue in Pasadena.

I have dined at the Hamlet countless times over the years. In fact, ironically enough, when I lived in Pasadena the eatery was a regular pit stop during the holidays. Every December, my mom and I would inevitably pop in for a bite to eat while out Christmas shopping in the area. Even more ironic, we would invariably sit in the bar, the exact area where Christmas with the Kranks was filmed!

Why I had such a tough time identifying the place is beyond me, but I am guessing it is because Hamburger Hamlet is not actually an Irish pub as was depicted in the movie and therefore is not decorated as such, it is not nearly as dark as it was portrayed to be onscreen, and only a tight shot of it was ever shown. I really should have recognized the restaurant’s unique back room, though, which is visible behind Luther in the screen capture below.

Hamburger Hamlet’s rear room, which is strewn with spacious red leather arm chairs, is situated around a large central brick fire pit, made complete with a metal hood affixed to the ceiling. As I said, it’s unique. Being that the chains that anchor the hood to the ceiling were visible in the background of Christmas with the Kranks, this one really should have been an easy find.

Now you’re probably saying, “Wait a minute, the title of this post is ‘Du-par’s Restaurant and Bakery’ not ‘Hamburger Hamlet!’” Sadly, the Pasadena Hamlet, which was originally established in 1967, shut its doors after almost fifty years in business on January 3rd, 2014. A Du-par’s outpost was opened at the site the following morning.

I had yet to visit the location since Du-par’s took over and assumed that all of the décor had been changed. I was thrilled to see, via the hundreds of photographs on Yelp, that that was not the case! The eatery still looks exactly as it did during its Hamburger Hamlet days, i.e. wood paneling and red leather galore!

The GC and I headed over there to grab a bite a few days later and I am happy to report that the restaurant looks just as great in person as it did in the Yelp images. And the food is darn good, too, though that did not come as a surprise being that I’ve always been a big fan of Du-par’s fare. Any eatery that serves a hot turkey meal with all the fixings on a daily basis is A-ok in my book!

As I mentioned earlier, in Christmas with the Kranks, Nora and Luther sat in the restaurant’s bar area, pretty much in the exact spot where the pub table is situated in the images below.

I would like to wish a VERY happy birthday to my dad (and my uncle – his twin) – today! Thank you for all the light and laughter you bring us on a daily basis (as evidenced by the photo below – I remember exactly what you said to me in that moment and still crack up whenever I think about it!), despite all your suffering! I love you!

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: Du-par’s Restaurant and Bakery, aka the former Hamburger Hamlet, aka the Irish pub from Christmas with the Kranks, is located at 214 South Lake Avenue in Pasadena.

March 17, 2010March 16, 2010

Millions of Milkshakes

Thanks to the earthquake which jolted me awake at around 4 O’clock this morning after which I was not able to fall back asleep, I am currently feeling a bit off my game. So, I have to apologize in advance if today’s particular blog post isn’t exactly up to par. Anyway, on with the stalking! Back in November, fellow stalker Lavonna tipped me off to a little milkshake stand in West Hollywood named Millions of Milkshakes which has become quite the celebrity hot spot as of late. The shop, which opened up in 2008, is basically a make your own milkshake bar featuring a virtual smorgasbord of over one hundred different ingredients (consisting of everything from chocolate chip cookie dough and Toblerone chocolate bars to fresh blueberries and protein powder), that customers can mix together in over 75 million different combinations – and yes, they actually paid a mathematician to calculate the number of milkshake possibilities – with either regular ice cream, non-fat frozen yogurt, or non-dairy ice cream. If you’re not brave enough to invent your own concoction, or don’t have the time to peruse the shop’s extensive menu of toppings – and believe me, it is overwhelming! – you can order up one of the many varieties created by and named after your favorite celebrity. Of course, once Lavonna told me about the place I immediately added it to my long list of “To Stalk” locations, but since I don’t get out to WeHo very often, I had yet to actually visit it. But since we were in the area two Saturdays ago eating at the nearby Marix Tex Mex Cafe, I just had to drag my fiancé a few blocks to the west to finally stalk the famous milkshake stand. And, let me tell you, the place was well worth the wait!

Millions of Milkshakes is an absolutely adorable little spot that was first opened up on Halloween day of 2008 by a British restaurateur named Sheeraz Hasan. At the tender age of 16 in his hometown of London, Sheeraz came up with the inspired idea of converting his family’s then-failing restaurant into a Hollywood themed eatery named the Tinseltown Cafe. His cafe became an immediate success and a few years later Sheeraz headed out to Hollywood, with stars in his eyes. He ended up becoming friends with Creative Artists’ Agency founder Roland Perkins and creating his very own Los Angeles news show entitled Hollywood TV. After the show took off, Sheeraz set his sights on opening up a milkshake stand. Using his Hollywood connections, he invited tween queen Miley Cyrus to make an appearance at his newly opened eatery which set off an immediate publicity storm. Shortly thereafter, the place became insanely popular with celebrities and non-celebrities alike. Just a few of the stars who have created their own signature shake at the now-famous milkshake bar include LaToya Jackson, Vivica A. Fox, Donny Osmond, Ben Stein, Aaron Carter, John Gosselin (UGH!), Leonardo DiCaprio, Lindsay Lohan, Spencer and Heidi Pratt, Stephanie Pratt, Antonio Sabato, Jr., Gwen Stefani, Adam Sandler, Tim Allen, Paris Hilton, all three Kardashian sisters, and fellow stalker Owen’s main gal Jennifer Love Hewitt. In fact, Millions of Milkshakes has become such a celebrity hotspot that Good Day L.A. recently dubbed the place “the new red carpet”. Love it! Also adding to the stand’s popularity (at least in my eyes) is the fact that they are almost always playing Michael Jackson music on the stereo. 😉

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Because my girl Jen Aniston has yet to create a Millions of Milkshakes signature shake, my fiancé and I opted instead to order Miley Cyrus’ creation. And even though I really can’t stand the singer/actress, I have to say that the girl’s got some good taste in shakes! The Hannah Montana star’s drink is made up of vanilla ice cream, chocolate chip cookie dough, and Reese’s peanut butter cups and I have to say that it was simply A-MA-ZING. Like quite possibly one of the best things I have ever tasted in my entire life! Sadly, because I am diabetic, I could only sample two small sips of the drink, but OMG you can bet I’m running straight to Millions of Milkshakes the next time my blood sugar is low. 😉

Big THANK YOU to fellow stalker Lavonna for tipping me off to this location and a Happy St. Patrick’s Day to all of my fellow stalkers! 🙂

Until next time, Happy Stalking! 🙂

Stalk It: Millions of Milkshakes is located at 8910 Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood. You can visit their website here.