Alan Arkin filming locations

August 5, 2013August 4, 2013

The “Little Miss Sunshine” Motel

Another Little Miss Sunshine locale that I desperately wanted to stalk was the supposed Arizona motel where the Hoover family – Olive (Abigail Breslin), Richard (Greg Kinnear), Sheryl (Toni Collette), Dwayne (Paul Dano), Grandpa Edwin (Alan Arkin), and Frank Ginsberg (Steve Carell) – stayed mid-way through their road trip from Albuquerque to Redondo Beach in the 2006 flick. Thankfully, smbstressfest had visited the site during the filming of his fabulous YouTube video, which chronicles most of the locations that appeared in LMS, so I posted a comment on his page asking for the address. I was not sure if he would get back to me, though, so I also sent screen captures of the motel to Mike, from MovieShotsLA, in case he recognized it. And, amazingly enough, he did! At the very same time that I received an email notification alerting me that smbstressfest had replied to my comment with an address, I was also sent an email from Mike letting me know that the Little Miss Sunshine motel was actually the Budget Inn of North Hills located at 9151 Sepulveda Boulevard. As it turns out, Mike drives by the place almost daily on his way to work. So I ran right out to stalk it while the Grim Cheaper and I were in L.A. two weekends ago.

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As you can see below, the Budget Inn of North Hills has, unfortunately, been remodeled slightly since filming took place in the summer of 2005. The motel was still in its Little Miss Sunshine state back in May 2007 when smbstressfest stalked it (as you can see in his video), but it seems that I, sadly, missed the boat on this one. Boo! At least the basic structure of the property remains unchanged.

Despite the alterations being fairly minor, I had an extremely hard time getting my bearings while I was stalking the motel and could not get a grasp on what part of the property appeared in Little Miss Sunshine. I am directionally-challenged anyway (my mom likes to say that I could not find my way out of a paper bag), and because of the way the Budget Inn of North Hills is set up with four practically identical corners, I just could not figure which area had been used in the filming. So, unfortunately, my photographs of this particular locale are not the greatest.

Add to that the fact that the motel is kind of an odd place and, even though I had talked to the management prior to taking photographs, I did not feel entirely comfortable being there and therefore did not do much exploring.

Had I stuck around, I would have loved to have ventured upstairs to take photographs of Room 208, where Olive and Grandpa Edwin spent the night in Little Miss Sunshine. (Dwayne and Frank and Sheryl and Richard stayed in the two rooms located just east of 208.)

And while I am 99.9% certain that the real life interior of three of the Budget Inn’s rooms were used during the filming, unfortunately, due to the remodel, the rooms (which you can see photographs of here) no longer look anything like they did onscreen. Again, boo!

For more stalking fun, be sure to follow me on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. And you can check out my other blog, The Well-Heeled Diabetic, here.

Big THANK YOU to fellow stalkers Mike, from MovieShotsLA, and smbstressfest for finding this location! Smile

Until next time, Happy Stalking! Smile

Stalk It: The Budget Inn of North Hills, aka the Little Miss Sunshine motel, is located at 9151 Sepulveda Boulevard in North Hills. You can visit the Booking.com page for the hotel here. The Hometown Inn from the 2002 Britney Spears’ movie Crossroads is located just down the street at 9401 Sepulveda Boulevard.

August 2, 2013August 1, 2013

The “Little Miss Sunshine” Restaurant

As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, while doing research on the former Abiquiu eatery (now Wokcano) from Get Shorty (which I blogged about here), I came across a Chowhound message board on which a commenter named Kevin stated that Pann’s restaurant in Ladera Heights was the spot where the Hoover clan – Olive (Abigail Breslin), Richard (Greg Kinnear), Dwayne (Paul Dano), Grandpa Edwin (Alan Arkin), Sheryl (Toni Collette), and Frank Ginsberg (Steve Carell) – stopped for a mid-road-trip breakfast in fave movie Little Miss Sunshine. Because the breakfast scene was one of my favorites in the entire flick, I was extremely excited to learn this information. Unfortunately though, as is so often the case with locales that are posted online, this one turned out to be wrong.

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While Pann’s menus were visible in the scene, as you can see below, one look at online images of the interior of the restaurant and I knew that it was not the right place. Convincing me further was the fact that Pann’s is not located directly below a freeway overpass, as the Little Miss Sunshine café was shown to be (which you can also see below).

So I got to cyberstalking and fairly quickly came across an absolutely amazing YouTube video (that you can watch by clicking below) in which a fellow stalker named smbstressfest chronicled pretty much every single locale that appeared in the movie. And while he did not state the addresses of any of the places, in response to a commenter named starbucksmunkey (love it!), he did give the Google Earth coordinates of the restaurant. Woot woot! And even though smbstressfest had mentioned that the eatery was no longer in operation, I was still chomping at the bit to stalk it and dragged the Grim Cheaper right on over there this past weekend while the two of us were in L.A.

The Little Miss Sunshine production notes state that the flick was lensed over a thirty-day period during the “hot” summer of 2005, at which time, according to the mmm-yoso!!! website, the space housed an eatery named Rutt’s Hawaiian Café. Rutt’s was shuttered by the time smbstressfest stalked it in 2007 (the chain still boasts an outpost in Culver City, though) and at some point thereafter a Mexican steakhouse named Don Carlos was opened on the site, but it, too, has since been closed. According the property’s LoopNet listing, the 5,130-square-foot building also once housed a Denny’s.

Which makes sense because the property does look very much like a Denny’s location – to me, at least.

And while a sign in the window states that Maly’s Pizza Buffet is “coming soon”, I do not know how accurate that is.

In Little Miss Sunshine, the Hoover family stops at the café towards the beginning of their road trip from Albuquerque to Redondo Beach. It is there that Olive orders waffles “alamodie” and is lambasted by her father for choosing to eat something so high in fat.

The interior of Rutt’s was used quite extensively in the filming. Oh, what I wouldn’t have given to have been able to go inside that restaurant!

Thankfully, I was able to snap a few photographs of the interior through the front window, although they are not of the section of the restaurant that appeared in the movie. In Little Miss Sunshine, Olive and her family dined in the southeast portion of the building, but the only area in which the blinds were not drawn was the northern part, unfortunately. Boo!

The exterior of Rutt’s was also shown in the scene.

You can watch the Little Miss Sunshine restaurant scene by clicking below.

For more stalking fun, be sure to follow me on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. And you can check out my other blog, The Well-Heeled Diabetic, here.

Big THANK YOU to smbstressfest for finding this location! Smile

Until next time, Happy Stalking! Smile

Stalk It: The supposed Pann’s restaurant from Little Miss Sunshine is actually the former Rutt’s Hawaiian Café located at 17371 East Valley Boulevard in La Puente. Unfortunately, the eatery is currently closed.

August 1, 2013August 1, 2013

The “Little Miss Sunshine” Gas Station

A few months back, while doing research on Wokcano from Get Shorty (which I blogged about here), I came across a Chowhound message board titled “Restaurants Seen in the Movies.” One of the eateries mentioned on the page was Pann’s restaurant at 6710 La Tijera Boulevard in Ladera Heights, which a commenter named Kevin said was used in 2006’s Little Miss Sunshine – a film that I absolutely LOVED. (That information actually turned out to be incorrect – Pann’s did not appear in Little Miss Sunshine, but that’s a different story for a different post.) Prior to visiting the message board, I had no idea whatsoever that LMS had done any filming in the L.A. area (outside of a very brief driving scene near Vasquez Rocks). So that night I popped in our Little Miss Sunshine DVD to re-watch it and hopefully track down some of its locales. And track some down, I did, the first of which was the supposed HartCo gas station that the Hoover family – Richard (Greg Kinnear), Sheryl (Toni Collette), Dwayne (Paul Dano), Olive (Abigail Breslin), Grandpa Edwin (Alan Arkin), and Frank Ginsberg (Steve Carell) – stopped at during their road trip from Albuquerque to Redondo Beach.

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This location was actually quite an easy find. While watching the movie, I spotted the back of an address number through the gas station’s front window that I was fairly certain read “24518”.

Thanks to the station’s red, blue and gray color scheme (which you can see below), I was fairly certain that it was a Chevron. So I did a Google search for “Chevron”, “Los Angeles” and “24518” and, sure enough, the first result returned was for a station located at 24518 Lyons Avenue in Newhall, which turned out to be the right place. Yay! So I dragged the Grim Cheaper right on out there to stalk it this past weekend while we were in L.A.

The gas station pit stop is a bad (but absolutely hilarious) experience for the Hoover family in Little Miss Sunshine. While there, Frank, who has just recently been released from the hospital after trying to kill himself, runs into his ex-boyfriend, Josh (Justin Shilton), and Josh’s new uber-successful boyfriend, Larry Sugarman (Gordon Thomson); Richard learns via a phone call that his new business venture has fallen through; and Olive, who has been practicing a dance routine on the side of the property, gets accidentally left behind when her distracted family later drives away.

Because the clutch on the Hoover’s Volkswagen bus is broken, when they return to the station to retrieve Olive a few minutes later, they are unable to stop and Olive has to run alongside the car and hop inside while it is still moving! I swear, the scene never fails to make me laugh (like hysterically laugh!), even though I have seen it about 25 times!

While this location is technically “just a gas station”, I could NOT have been more excited to stalk it. I was literally jumping up and down when we arrived. Looking back, though, I really think the GC and I should have rented a yellow VW bus for the occasion. Winking smile

Adding to my excitement was the fact that the station looks pretty much EXACTLY the same in person as it did onscreen in Little Miss Sunshine!

The payphone that Richard used in the scene was just a prop, though, that was brought in for the filming and is not actually there in real life.

Which is odd because the property does have two working payphones that could have been utilized in the scene.

The interior of the Chevron station also appeared in the movie and the manager who was on duty when we stalked the place was nice enough to let me snap a picture of it. As you can see, it was altered significantly for the filming, with the cigarette and chewing tobacco racks taken out to make room for the pornographic magazine display that played a significant role in the scene.

For more stalking fun, be sure to follow me on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. And you can check out my other blog, The Well-Heeled Diabetic, here.

Until next time, Happy Stalking! Smile

Stalk It: The HartCo gas station from Little Miss Sunshine is actually the Chevron station located at 24518 Lyons Avenue in Newhall.

January 29, 2013January 29, 2013

Lester Siegel’s House from “Argo”

Today’s post is the very first blog written from my new home in the desert. The Grim Cheaper and I moved last Wednesday (it took over 15 hours!) and are finally getting settled in to our Palm Springs pad. There is still quite a bit left to complete, though, and, while the hyper-organized/anal/OCD-side of me has a hard time doing anything while there are still boxes to be unpacked and rooms to be organized, I decided to do a little blogging today, regardless. My posts over the next couple of weeks will most likely be intermittent, though, while we continue to settle in. And now, on with the post! Another filming location from fave movie Argo that I found thanks to the fabulous Los Angeles Times article forwarded to me by Mike, from MovieShotsLA, was the home where Hollywood producer Lester Siegel (Alan Arkin) lived. And I just have to say here how desperate I am to stalk LA/Ontario International Airport, which masqueraded as the Tehran airport in Argo. I have a flight scheduled out of there in early March and, let me tell you, I canNOT wait! But I digress. Anyway, I dragged the GC right on out to stalk Lester Siegel’s mansion a few weekends ago, shortly before our big move.

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In real life, Lester’s mansion actually belongs to actress Zsa Zsa Gabor and her longtime husband, Frederic Prinz von Anhalt, who seems to be a rather accident-prone individual – in October 2010, Frederic swallowed a bee that then stung him in the throat; in December 2010, after mistaking nail glue for eye drops, he accidentally glued his own eye shut; and in September 2011, he was hit by a car while walking in Beverly Hills. Yikes! Although there are quite a few conflicting reports about the property’s history online (many of which seem to have been propagated by Gabor and Frederic themselves), the fact of the matter is that the residence was originally built in 1955 for John and Gladys Zurlo. And while famous recluse Howard Hughes did rent the dwelling for a time in the 1960s (and apparently wore a hole in the carpet thanks to his notorious pacing), he never owned the place nor was it built for him. Gabor has also reportedly stated that she bought the pad directly from Hughes, but according to the Zurlos’ granddaughter, Barbara Yobs, the couple themselves sold the home to Gabor in 1973 for $250,000. For the record, it is further untrue that Elvis Presley ever lived on the premises, as Gabor has also claimed. Anyway, due to failing health and mounting medical bills, Gabor and Frederic put the property on the market in June 2011 for $15 million. It has yet to sell, though, so in the meantime the couple has been leasing the place out to film crews. HBO’s yet-to-be released Liberace biopic Behind the Candelabra also made use of the estate last year.

Sadly, as you can see below, aside from the front gate, very little of the dwelling is visible from the street. Back in June 2011, fave website CurbedLA posted quite a few real estate photographs, though, which you can check out here. As stated in a Huffington Post article, the home “was built in the ‘50s and doesn’t look as if it has been redecorated since. It is lavish and sings old over-the-top Hollywood glamour.” Yep, that pretty much sums it up. The Hollywood Regency-style dwelling boasts seven bedrooms, seven baths, 8,878 square feet of living space (or 6,393 depending on which real estate listing you check), one acre of land, 270-degree views of downtown Los Angeles and the Pacific Ocean, a grand salon, staff quarters, a bar, a rooftop terrace, indoor and outdoor entertaining areas, and a pool. Supposedly, Zsa Zsa swam naked in said pool every morning (yuck!) and also entertained such luminaries as Queen Elizabeth, Bob Hope, Ronald and Nancy Reagan, Elizabeth Taylor, Kirk Douglas, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, Frank Sinatra, and Henry Kissinger on the premises.

Quite a few areas of the house were used in Argo, including the front exterior;

the circular entry-way (LOVE those red walls!);

the formal living room;

the bar;

and the backyard and pool.

A great aerial view of the house was also shown in the flick. Man, what I wouldn’t give to see the inside of that place!

On an Argo side-note – for those interested in how much of the movie was actually true (and the vast majority of it was – even the part about the Iranian government hiring professional carpet-weavers to piece together documents and photographs that had been shredded by American diplomats just prior to the embassy being taken hostage!), you can check out a fabulous Slate.com article here.

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!

Stalk It: Zsa Zsa Gabor’s house, aka Lester Siegel’s mansion from Argo, is located at 1001 Bel Air Road in Bel Air.