Alfred Hitchcock filming locations

Hold on to your hats, my fellow stalkers, ‘cause today’s post is going to be a long one! A couple of months ago, Mike, from MovieShotsLA, called me up to let me know that he had just watched a screener of the 2012 biopic Hitchcock (he works at a high-profile production company) and, knowing my penchant for the Master of Suspense, suggested I run right out and see it for myself as soon as possible. Thankfully, because Helen Mirren, who played Alma Reville, Hitch’s wife, in the flick, had been nominated for a Screen Actors Guild award, Fox Searchlight had made a digital screener available for SAG members and I was able to watch it shortly after Mike’s call. I have to say that I thoroughly enjoyed the film and learned quite a bit lot about the legendary director that I had not previously been aware of. The locations (all of which are in L.A.) and design of the movie were quite stellar, to boot! And while I recognized that the exterior of the Hitchcock household had been portrayed by Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes’ former Beverly Hills manse (which I blogged about here), what I did not realize (until Mike told me) was that the interiors were filmed at a residence in Pasadena – one that I was actually quite familiar with and had even blogged about before, way back in October 2008. Because the post did not cover the full filming history of the home, though, I figured the place was most-definitely worthy of a re-stalk and ran right out to do just that a few days before our move.

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The gargantuan Tudor mansion pictured below was originally constructed in 1902 as a Craftsman-style winter home for a Chicago novelist named Gertrude Potter Daniels. Just three years later, in 1905, the property was sold to a new owner, Salt Lake City mining magnate Susanna Bransford Emery Holmes, aka “Utah’s Silver Queen”, and her husband Colonel E.F. Holmes. The couple moved into the property fulltime in 1910 and immediately began an extensive $37,00- renovation project that significantly altered the dwelling. Holmes dubbed her new residence, which was completed in 1922, “El Roble” in honor of a massive oak tree that once stood on the premises.

Today, the dwelling, which was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2004, boasts a three-story, twenty-room, 7,300-square-foot main home, ten bedrooms, six baths, a 1.35-acre plot of land, a two-story freestanding gate house (pictured), chauffeur’s quarters, a pergola, and formal gardens. You can check out some fabulous photographs of what lies behind the mansion’s front gates here.

As you can see below, the land on which the home sits is absolutely gargantuan in size – as is the home itself.

The beautiful residence, which once belonged to Occidental College, was featured as the Pasadena Showcase House of Design in both 1975 and 1996 and its gardens have appeared twice in Sunset Magazine. The place has also been spotlighted countless times onscreen.

As I mentioned above, the exterior of Alfred and Alma’s mansion in Hitchcock was actually that of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes’ former Beverly Hills home. (Big THANK YOU to Mike for making the Hitchcock screen captures which appear below.)

The interiors were a mixture of both El Roble in Pasadena and studio sets. The areas of El Roble that appeared in Hitchcock include the wood-paneled study, which you can see a real life photograph of here;

the living room, which you can see a real life photograph of here;

and the entryway, which you can see a real life photograph of here.

The Hitchcocks’ bedroom;

bathroom;

and kitchen were all sets constructed on a studio soundstage.

To create the rich interiors of the Hitchcock homestead, production designer Judy Becker consulted historic photographs of the couple’s actual former residence in Bel-Air (which I blogged about here). Of the refrigerator pictured below, set decorator Robert Gould (whose father, as fate would have it, served as a second unit director on the original Psycho) said in a fabulous November 2012 Los Angeles Times article , “We chose the fridge because of the interesting handle with the round detail. It had an innuendo of a peep hole, a subtle way of referencing Hitchcock’s voyeurism throughout the film.” I absolutely love learning little tidbits like that! God is in the details, as they say.

In the fabulous 1978 comedy Foul Play, El Roble stood in for the supposed San Francisco-area residence belonging to Archbishop Thorncrest (Eugene Roche).

During Season 4 of Falcon Crest, El Roble appeared several times as the mansion where Cole Gioberti (William R. Moses) and Melissa Agretti Cumson Gioberti (Ana Alicia) lived.

In the Season 2 episode of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation titled “Cross Jurisdictions”, the house was where former chief of detectives Duke Rittle (John Kapelos) was tortured and killed.

In the Season 3 episode of Ghost Whisperer titled “Unhappy Medium”, El Roble was where the Drake family – Susan (Dawson’s Creek’s Mary-Margaret Humes), Nikki (a very young Elisabeth Moss), and Sydney (Austin Highsmith) – lived.

In the Season 4 episode of The Closer titled “Fate Line” (which I actually got to watch being filmed – you can read my blog post about the experience here), El Roble was the residence of murdered horror movie producer Sean Thompson (who was never actually seen onscreen).

In the Season 4 episode of Greek titled “Agents for Change”, El Roble stood in for the home belonging to Evan Chambers’ (Jake McDorman’s) parents, Mr. Chambers (Kevin Kilner) and Mrs. Chambers (Kathryn Harrold).

According to fave website OnLocationVacations, the yet-to-be released movie The Pretty One, starring Zoe Kazan and Jake Johnson, did some filming at El Roble this past June. And while an April 1996 issue of Los Angeles Magazine stated that The Godfather was also filmed on the premises, I scanned through the flick while doing research for this post and did not see the mansion pop up anywhere.

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.

Big THANK YOU to Mike, from MovieShotsLA, for telling me about this location and for providing all of the Hitchcock screen captures. Smile

Until next time, Happy Stalking! Smile

Stalk It: The home used for the interior of Alfred Hitchcock’s residence in Hitchcock is located at 141 North Grand Avenue in Pasadena. Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes’ former mansion, which stood in for the exterior of the Hitchcock house, is located at 918 North Alpine Drive in Beverly Hills.

While putting together a list of spooky-type locales to stalk during my Haunted Hollywood month a couple of weeks ago, I decided to peruse through fave book James Dean Died Here: The Locations of America’s Pop Culture Landmarks by Chris Epting for a little inspiration. And, let me tell you, I just about died of excitement when I saw a blurb about the North-Hollywood-area car dealership that appeared in the 1960 Alfred Hitchcock classic Psycho. In the blurb, Epting mentioned that not only was the place still standing, but that it was also still a car dealership – over fifty years later! How incredibly cool is that?!? So because Psycho is arguably one of the most well-known and best-loved horror movies of all time, I decided that I just had to include the location in my Haunted Hollywood postings and dragged the Grim Cheaper right on out to the Valley to stalk it a few days later.

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In Psycho, Marion Crane (aka Jamie Lee Curtis’ mother, Janet Leigh), who is on the run from the police after having stolen $40,000 in cash from her boss in Arizona, stops by the supposed-Bakersfield-area “California Charlie’s Used Car Lot” in order to trade her car in for one with California plates. While there, her brusque, hurried attitude causes California Charlie (aka John Anderson) to say his famous line, “Well, it’s the first time the customer ever high-pressured the salesman.” At the time of the filming, the dealership was known as Harry Maher’s Used Car Lot and, because the Ford Motor Company was a sponsor of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Maher was required to swap out his real life inventory with a supply of Fords for the one-day shoot. Hitchcock was apparently such a perfectionist that, according to a fabulous article written on The Cabinet website, he sent assistant director Hilton A. Green all the way to Bakersfield to photograph real-life used car salesmen in order to see their clothing so that California Charlie’s costume would be realistic. He also commissioned Psycho screenwriter Joseph Stefano to observe car salesmen while writing the script so that Charlie’s dialogue would be legitimate. Talk about attention to detail!

Also according to The Cabinet article, the bathroom scene, in which Marion takes $700 out of her purse in order to pay for her new car, was not filmed on location at Harry Maher’s Used Car Lot, as the restroom there was too small to fit an entire camera crew. Hitch instead decided to shoot that brief scene at Universal Studios, on what I am assuming was just a set that was built on a soundstage.

Today, Harry Maher’s Used Car Lot is home to MINI of Universal City and it, sadly, does not look much like it did in 1960 when Psycho was filmed.

Because the lot has changed so considerably over the years, it was hard to discern the exact spot where filming took place. But if I had to venture a guess, I would say that the California Charlie’s scene was shot in the area denoted with a pink rectangle in the above aerial view. And I am fairly certain that the building denoted with a blue arrow was not in existence at the time that Psycho was filmed.

It is my guess that the screen capture and photograph pictured above show the same exact area of the lot. I believe that the California Charlie’s sales office is now the MINI dealership’s service office . . .

. . . and that the door shown in the screen capture above is in pretty much the same location as the door denoted with a pink arrow in the photograph.

I am also fairly certain that the MINI showroom was built in the portion of the lot that Marion walked through in Psycho . . .

. . . and that the above images show the exact same view, albeit 50 years apart. Even though the property has changed so drastically in the five-plus decades since the filming of Psycho took place, I was still absolutely elated to be standing on such hallowed ground. The thought that Alfred Hitchcock had once been in the same spot I was now stalking was literally mind-blowing. So incredibly cool!

Until next time, Happy Stalking! Smile

Stalk It: MINI of Universal City, aka the Psycho car dealership, is located at 4270 Lankershim Boulevard in North Hollywood. You can visit the dealership’s official website here.

Tag: Alfred Hitchcock filming locations

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