The company I work at recently moved their LA office from one building to another and I went out to assist with the pre-move setup. I was looking forward to assisting my LA team with the move, visiting Southern California in March, but mostly, I was looking forward to visiting the building that we were moving into.
I was born, grew up, and have spent my life in a place where hundreds of thousands of movies and TV shows were shot or took place (IMDb says 255,498 as of this morning). On any given day doing random activities I can accidentally stumble upon the setting of a scene from a movie or TV show without planning it. I have stumbled upon the diner from “Seinfeld”, the firehouse from “Ghostbusters”, the exterior where “Leon The Professional” lived, the shop where Harry and Sally bought the Christmas tree, the “Friends” exterior, and mutliple locations from “Die Hard With A Vengeance”, to name a few. I grew up one and a half blocks away from where Popeye Doyle stood outside my parent’s shoemaker to surveil Alain Charnier in “The French Connection”, and a few blocks away from where some of the NYC events took place in the Bourne movies. I work in a building complex where, most days, I can see the spot where Buddy and Jovie shared their first kiss in “Elf”, and several times a week I walk on the spot where Michael Corleone found out his father was shot and then ran across the street and made a phone call in The “Godfather” (newsstand and phone booth are no longer there). Etcetera, Etcetera, Etcetera.
None of that is interesting to me, and I’ve never had the urge to take a photo of them or a selfie in front of them.
So why, if I’m so jaded to seeing movie/TV locations, was I squealing like a teenage girl at a Taylor Swift concert when I visited an office building in LA?
Because 2121 Avenue of the Stars was the setting for the movie “Die Hard”.
After flying into LAX and catching a cab, I made my way to my hotel, and that was the first time I saw it…
After checking into the hotel, I made my way over to our old office and met with my coworkers. After chatting a bit, I was taken over to the new building, and noticed, unsurprisingly, that the lobby has been redone, which means no security desk with touch screen monitors. We went up our floors and did a quick tour. We couldn’t use the internal stairs between them because they were unfinished, so we opted to use the fire stairs. As we walked into them, I stopped dead in my tracks…’these are the same stairs where John McClane killed Tony!’
We walked around a bit more doing work related items and I looked out of a window and there was the plaza where John welcomed Al Powell to the party.
I innocently went to the bathroom to wash my hands, and BOOM ‘it’s the same bathroom!’ The fixtures are different, but the bones are the same.
When I left the office that day, my first time using the elevators alone, I noticed something odd…the paneling is exactly the same! I would have thought, especially since the lobby had been redone, that the elevators would have been redone as well. While they have had some work done on them, no floor buttons, etc., the paneling remains the same as it is in the move, some 36 years ago.
The lobby has different cladding, but the structure hasn’t changed.
Even the view of the road the fire engines were on is the same, and Ralph’s is still there. The convenience store where Powell buy Twinkies (for his wife) is no longer a convenience store.
So, again, why was I so excited to visit this one building from one movie when it generally doesn’t phase me at all to see filming locations?
I’ve thought about this a bit since the trip, and I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s a combination of a few items 1) I love the movie; I watch it at least once a year. 2) Almost the entire movie takes place in and around this one location. 3) It actually was filmed in this building; the building is not just an exterior and everything interior was filmed on sets. 4) Since I don’t live in LA, I can’t just visit it any time or stumble upon it while doing errands. And finally, 5) I had actual access to the building because my company was moving in; I was not just looking at the exterior of the building, but was able to go in and see similar shots from the movie.
Couldn’t do that with the “Seinfeld” apartment exterior location.
