Valley Village – IAMNOTASTALKER

March 27, 2019April 2, 2019

The “Young Sheldon” House

I don’t think I’ve ever hated a television character more than Samantha Ruland on Scandal (though Beverly Hills, 90210’s Kelly Taylor ranks a close second). Played by Zoe Perry, Samantha represented pure evil – there was literally not a single redeeming thing about her. It got to the point that even hearing her voice had a Pavlov’s-dog-like effect on me, making me want to throw my television out a window each time she spoke. So when I learned that Perry had been cast as Mary Cooper, mother to Sheldon Cooper (Iain Armitage), on Young Sheldon, I did not have high hopes for liking the CBS series, which premiered in September 2017. I still gave it a shot, though, and was pleasantly surprised. While not as good as its parent show, The Big Bang Theory, it is still enjoyable and, amazingly, I have even come to like Zoe! So I was thrilled when fellow stalker Julie posted a comment on my site recently supplying the address of the supposed Medford, Texas home of the Cooper family on the series (spoiler – it’s actually in Valley Village) with the request that I stalk it. Your wish is my command, Julie!

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In real life, the Cooper house, which was built in 1949, boasts 2 bedrooms, 1.5 baths, 1,335 square feet of living space, and a 0.18-acre plot of land. It was sold early last year for a whopping $827,000, though surprisingly there was no mention of its current onscreen role in any of the listing information I came across online.

The new owners appear to be doing some remodeling, but hopefully they are only making changes to the interior and not the exterior. You can check out what the inside of the residence looked like in the 2018 listing photos here.

The ranch-style property is used regularly on Young Sheldon in both establishing shots . . .

. . . and for occasional on location filming.

The pad looks much the same onscreen as it does in person aside from a few minor changes including the removal of the stop sign out front and the red paint on the curb (I believe the latter is taken away digitally), and the addition of the family’s tire swing.

Though Julie surmised that the inside of the home had been utilized in the Young Sheldon pilot, upon close inspection it appears that the Cooper house interior has been a set from the get-go. As you can see in the screen capture from the inaugural episode as compared to the MLS photo below, though similar, the two interiors are not one and the same. Page 30 of Assistant Art Director Andrew Sloane’s online portfolio also notes that the inside of the Cooper residence was built for the pilot. As regular readers of my site know, sets for television shows are typically not constructed until a series is picked up by a network, which is why the vast majority of pilots are filmed on location inside of actual residences. In this case, though, Young Sheldon was a spin-off of the highly popular The Big Bang Theory and therefore came with a built-in audience, so CBS ordered a run of episodes before the pilot had even been shot. As such, the show’s sets were assembled from the outset.

Though the general layout and look of the Cooper house is the same as the Valley Village pad, there are many differences.

The set, which exists on Stage 6 at Warner Bros. Studio in Burbank, is much more dated than the actual house, which makes sense being that Young Sheldon takes place in the late 80s/early 90s.

It does certainly echo the real life home, though.

Even the bathroom (visible in the background of the screen capture below) largely resembles that of the house.

You can check out a video tour of the set given by Raegan Revord, who plays Sheldon’s twin sister, Missy, here.

The picturesque Colonial home belonging to Meemaw (Annie Potts) on the series, said to be located across the street from the Cooper residence, can actually be found about four miles away.

It is none other than the Partridge House on Blondie Street at Warner Bros. Ranch (albeit with a small front porch added). You can read a bit about the property’s history and its other onscreen appearances in this 2016 post I wrote for the Mike the Fanboy website.

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

Big THANK YOU to fellow stalker Julie for telling me about this location and asking me to stalk it!

Until next time, Happy Stalking! Smile

Stalk It: The Cooper family home from Young Sheldon is located at 5501 Morella Avenue in Valley Village.

September 30, 2016February 17, 2017

The House from “The Brady Brides”

I’m sad to say that we’ve arrived at the final day of my friend Michael’s guest post week. I have thoroughly enjoyed all of his fabulous articles (you check them out here, here, here and here – as well as his prior The Brady Bunch-related guest articles here, here, here and here.). Today we are coming full circle with a return to The Brady Bunch franchise. So without further ado, here’s the story of a lovely location . . .

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Now that I’ve done a few non-Brady Bunch guest-posts, it doesn’t mean that I’ve abandoned the grooviest of sitcom families. In 1981, a Brady Bunch spin-off, The Brady Brides, was launched with a multi-part television movie, The Brady Girls Get Married. The telefilm, in which Marcia and Jan are married to Wally Logan and Phillip Covington, is also notable in that it’s the last Brady enterprise to feature the entire original cast.

In the first episode of the The Brady Brides, Carol, now a realtor, shows Marcia and Wally a home that she’s trying to sell. Jan loves it, too…and well, the opening theme song (sung to the tune of the The Brady Bunch theme) explains it best.

A house was too expensive for each couple,
The only way to buy would they decide,
Is to share the cost by moving in together,
That’s the way that they became the Brady brides,
The Brady brides,
The Brady brides,
That’s the way they became the Brady brides.

By the end of the first episode, the four had purchased the house and moved in together. Add one nosey neighbor, an occasional cameo by Carol or Alice, and the comedic hijinks write themselves. Or maybe not; the sitcom was canceled after only ten episodes.

Establishing shots of a home were sprinkled through the series and the program’s opening titles show Marcia, Wally, Jan, and Phillip standing, on location, in its yard.

I stayed at The Garland last winter and took a number of walks around Studio City, North Hollywood, and Valley Village. From those walks I had a hunch that the Brady Brides house might be located in Valley Village where I’d seen many similarly styled homes. As luck would have it, I happened upon the house pretty quickly while looking through aerial maps of the area. And when I was last in Los Angeles, I Ubered out to Valley Village to have a look for myself.

I was excited to see that the house looks nearly identical to when it was filmed 35 years ago. Even the decorative iron columns are still standing in the same spot. And although the tree near the driveway has grown, you can still recognize it.

My apologies for the poor quality screen grabs. The Brady Brides hasn’t cornered the syndication market like its progenitor and is one of the few Brady-related properties not currently available on DVD.

Editor’s Note – Poor-quality screen grabs or not, this post was exceptional, per usual! I honestly cannot thank you enough, Michael, for sharing these locations – and your locations expertise – over the past week with us. I’m already eagerly awaiting your return!

Stalk It: The Brady Brides house is located at 11813 Hartsook Street in Valley Village.

July 6, 2012July 29, 2012

Elijah Wood’s Former House

As I have mentioned many times before on my site, this stalker absolutely loves herself some L.A. Magazine – especially “L.A. Story”, one of the publication’s newer columns in which, each month, a different SoCal-bred celeb shares his or her experiences growing up in La La Land. This month’s column was written by The Lord of the Rings actor Elijah Wood, who moved to Southern California from Iowa when he was just seven. In the article, Elijah wrote, “For five or six years we lived on Hesby Street, and it was the first house of ours that felt truly like home. When we were buying it, I was shooting a movie called North with director Rob Reiner. He overheard a conversation about the house and said, ‘I used to live on Hesby.’ Turns out he and Penny Marshall had lived in the same house—our house!—back in the ’70s.” Well, believe you me, once I read those words, I became just a wee bit obsessed with tracking the place down (I mean, hello, Elijah Wood, Penny Marshall AND Rob Reiner???), which, thankfully was not too hard to do.

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In a definite stalker maneuver, I looked up the name of Elijah’s father (Warren) and then inputted “Warren Wood” and “Hesby Street” into a Google search and was directed right to this page on the BlockShopper website which stated that Warren Wood had once owned a residence at 12247 Hesby Street in Valley Village. Voila! And, not ten minutes later, I dragged the Grim Cheaper right on out there to stalk the place. Sadly though, as you can see below, not much of it can be seen from the street. The one-story abode, which was originally built in 1936, boasts three bedrooms, two baths, and 1,937 square feet. The Woods purchased the dwelling in April of 1993, after Elijah had already become quite famous from his roles in Radio Flyer, Avalon and Forever Young. While living there, his career further skyrocketed and he starred in such hits as The Good Son, Flipper, The Ice Storm, Deep Impact, and The Faculty. In his “L.A. Story”, Elijah also said of the home, “For me it’s where I became a teenager. I learned to drive at that house, and with that I learned Laurel Canyon was the gateway, the connective tissue, between the Valley and basically the rest of L.A.” Elijah’s mom, Debra, who had since divorced Warren, sold the property in October of 1999, a little over six years after purchasing it.

While searching for the exact location of the home, I came across a tweet from @Praeriedikter which said, in response to @MovieElijahWood sending out a link to Elijah’s “L.A. Story”, “Thanks for sharing! Wonderful article. Wonder how many fangirls will be cruising Hesby Street looking for his old house? LOL” And here I thought I was the only one. Winking smile

According to my buddy E.J., over at The Movieland Directory website, Rob Reiner and Penny Marshall owned the residence in 1973. While researching the place, I happened to find a 1992 Los Angeles Times article about Rob Reiner in which his Castle Rock Entertainment partner Andy Scheinman, who spent six or seven nights a week at the property, had this to say, “It was almost like a fraternity house. Albert Brooks was there every day. Jim Brooks was there a lot. And you didn’t even call or knock on the door. You just opened the door. Sometimes Rob and Penny weren’t there. I’d come in there and Albert would have his head in the refrigerator and someone else would be watching TV. But we were all in our 20s. We all went to college in the ’60s, so it was a very free and open kind of approach to things.” Amazingly enough, up until reading Garry Marshall’s new book, My Happy Days in Hollywood: A Memoir (which was fabulous, by the way), a couple of weeks ago, I had no idea whatsoever that Rob and Penny had once been married! And I call myself a stalker!

In “L.A. Story”, Elijah also mentioned living at the famous Oakwood Toluca Hills Apartments, which is a place that I have long been dying to stalk. Countless celebrities have called Oakwood home over the years, including Jennifer Love Hewitt, Michelle Williams, Kirsten Dunst, Jessica Stroup, Michael C. Hall, and Kurt Cobain. In her Revealed with Jules Asner special, Katie Holmes talked about living at the complex and running down to the WB lot every morning to try to catch a glimpse of George Clooney, who was filming ER at the time. Zac Efron once filmed a pilot at the site, while Corey Haim tragically died there in March 2010, as did Rick James in August 2004. The place is just teeming with Hollywood history and I am dying to get in! You can read a fabulous EW article about the Oakwood Toluca Hills complex here.

On an Elijah Wood side-note – while researching this post, I discovered that a seven-year-old Elijah was featured in Paula Abdul’s “Forever Your Girl” music video! How I did not previously know that information is absolutely beyond me!

You can watch the “Forever Your Girl” music video by clicking below.

Elijah Wood in “Forever Your Girl” Video

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Until next time, Happy Stalking! Smile

Stalk It: Elijah Wood’s former home is located at 12247 Hesby Street in Valley Village/North Hollywood.