Hollywood Dreaming
I have always liked that old Mamas and Papas song
California Dreaming
It's always been on my Bucket List of places to see before the Big One Hits.
It was all "San Andreas Fault" I can hear you say. But it is a fabulous place.
Lots of movies made there. I never knew they shot the last scenes from Planet Of The Apes on a Beach in California.
Oul, From My Cold Dead Hands, Charlton Heston discovering the Statue of Liberty lying on a beach.
Turns out its not New York after all.
Maybe the Apes moved it to the sun.
But that and lots more I found out from reading:
Nick Carr shares his favorite Hollywood backdrops for Three Obscure Days in Los Angeles.
So Read On:
The history of Los Angeles’ dominance in the entertainment industry involves a trope older than Hollywood itself. East Coast-based filmmakers longed for the year-round sunshine of Southern California.
The other major reason nearly all of America’s early film studios ended up in L.A. was to escape the iron grip of Thomas Edison’s Motion Picture Patents company, which made it nearly impossible for filmmakers to work independent of Edison. Across the country in California, the inventor’s patents weren’t enforced.
But Los Angeles didn’t just offer mild weather and artistic (and legal) freedom. “Within a 30 or 40 mile radius, you have desert, you have beach, you have mountains, you have city, and you have suburbia,” the location scout Nick Carr explains. “You have everything.”
For storytellers, Los Angeles’ diverse terrain offers endless possibilities. Since cinema first took root in the city around 1912, the relationship between filmmaking and Los Angeles has been symbiotic. On a micro-level, mini-transformations take place on a daily basis, when buildings, blocks, or patches of wilderness are made to look like far-flung locales. On a macro-level, the city has evolved into the metropolis it is today because of its widely diverse landscapes.
In 2015, Carr—known for his blog Scouting New York and now, Scouting L.A.—moved from New York to Los Angeles and “never looked back.”
Carr spends his days driving through Los Angeles, sizing up the smallest of details and weighing careful, logistical considerations in search of real places that suit fictional universes.
It doesn’t happen often, but sometimes, a location itself becomes the star of a film. “Storytelling elevates these places to mythic status,” Carr says. And even when it doesn’t, there’s nothing quite like stumbling on a place and finding out that one of your favorite movies was filmed there. This can happen anywhere, but it happens all the time in Los Angeles.
Following Carr’s lead, we’ve put together a three-day itinerary featuring some of Los Angeles’s most iconic shooting locations. While some are well-known pilgrimage sites for film buffs, others are inconspicuous reminders that, like the most skilled of actors, Los Angeles can take on any role.
Check out the Whole Story:
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/location-scout-los-angeles-itinerary