The Other “Catch Me If You Can” House

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A few years ago during an acting class, my very favorite acting teacher, Annie, happened to mention that the Catch Me If You Can house was located just around the corner from where she then lived in Studio City.  She said she had been walking her dogs one afternoon back in 2002 and had stumbled upon a scene from the movie being filmed at a large, Colonial-style house that producers had dressed in Christmas decor and covered with fake snow.  Well, her story had me thoroughly confused as I knew that the large, Colonial-style house where Frank Abagnale Jr.’s (aka Leonardo DiCaprio’s) mother, Paula (aka Nathalie Baye), lived in the flick, which was dressed in Christmas décor and covered with fake snow for a scene, was located on East California Boulevard in Pasadena.  Annie insisted, though, that the house was located in Studio City and that she had watched much of the filming take place.  I didn’t think much of it at the time and figured it was just a case of producers scrapping one location for another mid-shoot, as has been known to happen sometimes during the course of a production.  It wasn’t until I was scanning through Catch Me If You Can back in March to make screen captures for my post on the Barclay Hotel that I realized that, as incredible as it may sound, there were actually TWO large, Colonial-style homes that had been dressed in Christmas decor and covered with fake snow in the flick!  As it turns out, the house Annie had told me about appeared briefly in the very beginning of the movie as the supposed New Rochelle, New York-area residence where Frank Jr. lived with his parents before they lost all of their money. 

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Once I realized that the house that Annie had told our class about had, in fact, appeared in the movie, I immediately got to work in tracking it down.  I knew where Annie’s former residence was located, so it was just a matter of searching around her neighborhood for the property.  Thanks to the home’s distinct corner location, it was not very hard to find.  And I dragged the GC right on out there to stalk the place this past weekend.  The Catch Me If You Can house is quite charming in person and is situated on an absolutely HUGE corner lot which measures .38 of an acre.  And while the landscaping in front of it has changed quite a bit since filming took place, it is still very recognizable from the movie.

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The residence appeared in two scenes in the movie.  It first popped up in the scene in which Frank Abagnale Sr. (aka Christopher Walken) and his wife Paula dance in their living room after attending an awards ceremony at the local Rotary Club.

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And it later appears in the scene in which the family is shown moving out of the house after having fallen upon hard times.

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And, as you can see in these photographs of the home, the real life interior, including the living room area  . . .

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. . .and one of the bedrooms, was used in the filming.

Until next time, Happy Stalking!  Smile

Stalk It: Frank’s parents’ house from the beginning of Catch Me If You Can is located at 12075 Valleyheart Drive in Studio City.

The Quality Café

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While stalking in Downtown Los Angeles a couple of weekends ago, the Grim Cheaper and I found ourselves hungry so I suggested grabbing some lunch at the Quality Café on West 7th Street – a diner that has appeared in countless productions over the years.  When we showed up to stalk the place, though, we were shocked to discover that it was completely boarded up.  I was even further shocked to discover, once I returned home, that, aside from some brief blurbs about its filming history, I could not seem to find any information about the place online.  I was extremely curious if the cafe had ever been an actual working restaurant or if it had only ever existed as a film set.  So I contacted fellow stalker Harry Medved, author of one of my very favorite stalking tomes – Hollywood Escapes: The Moviegoer’s Guide to Exploring Southern California’s Great Outdoors – who was nice enough to give me the scoop on the former greasy spoon.  As it turns out, the Quality Café was indeed a real life restaurant at one point time.  It closed its doors a few years back and is now used solely for filming, although word on the street is that the place might re-open as an eatery once again in the near future.

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Being that it is completely boarded up and there is not a whole lot to see while there, the Quality Café does not make for a great stalking venue, but because it has such an incredibly vast filming history, I figured it was worthy of a blog post.

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In Catch Me If You Can, it is while dining at the Quality Café that a waiter clues Carl Hanratty (aka Tom Hanks) into the fact that Barry Allen, the alias Frank Abagnale Jr. (aka Leonardo DiCaprio) has been using, is the actual name of the comic book character “The Flash”.

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In 1995’s Se7en, Tracy Mills (aka Gwyneth Paltrow) confesses to Detective Lt. William Somerset (aka Morgan Freeman) that she is pregnant with Detective David Mills’ (aka Brad Pitt’s) baby over a cup of coffee at the Quality Café.

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Morgan Freeman returned to the Quality Café in 2004 to film the scene from Million Dollar Baby in which his character, Eddie Scrap-Iron Dupris, takes Maggie Fitzgerald (aka Hilary Swank) out to celebrate her birthday.

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In Gone in Sixty Seconds, the Quality Café is the diner where Helen Raines (aka Grace Zabriskie), the mother of Memphis (aka Nicolas Cage) and Kip Raines (aka Giovanni Ribisi), works.

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In Training Day, Detective Alonzo Harris (aka Denzel Washington) and Jake Hoyt (aka Ethan Hawke) meet up at the café on their first day of working together.

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In Old School, Mitch Martin (aka Luke Wilson) takes Nicole (aka Ellen Pompeo) to the Quality Café and tries to convince her that he is actually a nice guy.

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In Mr. and Mrs. Smith, John Smith (aka Brad Pitt) and Eddie (aka Vince Vaughn) meet up at the Quality Café to discuss the failed assassination attempt of Benjamin Danz (aka Adam Brody).

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In 2001’s Ghost World, Enid (aka Thora Birch) and Rebecca (aka a very young Scarlett Johansson) spy on some supposed Satanists while dining at the Quality Café.

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In 2009’s The Stepfather, the Quality Café is where David Harris (aka Dylan Walsh) asks Michael Harding (aka Penn Badgley) to be his best man.

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In Sex and Death 101, the Quality Café is where Death Nell (aka Winona Ryder) tells Roderick Blank (aka Simon Baker) her life story.

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In 2008’s The Midnight Meat Train, the Quality Café is where Leon’s (aka Bradley Cooper’s) wife, Maya (aka Leslie Bibb), works.

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In 1993’s What’s Love Got To Do With It, the Quality Café is where Ike Turner (aka Laurence Fishburne) takes Anna Mae Bullock (aka Angela Bassett) out to dinner for the first time.

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The Quality Café was the site of a triple murder in the Season One episode of CSI: New York titled “Outside Man”.

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In the Season One episode of Mad Men titled “5G”, the Quality Café stood in for the Delight Café where Don Draper (aka Jon Hamm) met up with his half-brother, Adam Whitman (aka Jay Paulson), whom he had been estranged from for years.

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Harry Medved also let me know that, according to Marty Cummins, the key assistant location manager for 500 Days of Summer, the Quality Café is where Summer (aka Zooey Deschanel) broke up with Tom (aka Joseph Gordon-Levitt) at the beginning of the flick.

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And while the exterior of the restaurant appeared as a local hangout in 2004’s You Got Served . . .

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. . . as you can see in the above screen captures, a different restaurant was used for the interior filming.


EMBED-The Quality Cafe in Movies Mash-Up – Watch more free videos

You can watch a fabulous compilation from the Screen Junkies website of several different movies that have been filmed at the café by clicking above.

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Big THANK YOU to Harry Medved for filling me in on the restaurant’s history.

Until next time, Happy Stalking!  Smile

Stalk It: The Quality Café is located at 1238 West 7th Street in Downtown Los Angeles.  The restaurant is currently closed to the public and is only available for film shoots, so I can’t say that I’d really recommend stalking it as there is just not a whole lot to see.

The Barclay Hotel from “As Good As It Gets”

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This past weekend, the Grim Cheaper and I re-watched the movie As Good As It Gets, which I had not seen since it first came out in theatres almost 15 years ago.  I am ashamed to admit that I had somehow forgotten what a great flick it is!  While watching, I, of course, became a bit obsessed with tracking down some of the Southern California locations featured in it and just about had a heart attack when I read on IMDB’s As Good As It Gets filming locations page that the interior of the Barclay Hotel in downtown Los Angeles stood in for the movie’s fictional Café 24 Heures, where Carol Connelly (Helen Hunt) worked and where Melvin Udall (Jack Nicholson) dined each morning.  So I dragged the GC right on out to stalk the place this past Sunday afternoon.  As it turns out, this location proved to be one VERY LUCKY find as it has been used in countless productions over the years.

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First built in 1897 and commissioned by L.A. businessman Isaac Newton Van Nuys, the Barclay Hotel was originally known as the Van Nuys Hotel    The Beaux-Arts-style building was designed by the architecture firm Morgan + Walls and, with its sprawling lobby, detailed stained glass windows, and phone service in each room, was considered one of the finest hotels of its day.  In 1929, the property’s name was changed to the Barclay Hotel and there is supposedly a sign still visible on one of the building’s exterior walls which reads “Van Nuys Hotel, Rooms $1 and Up.”  It would have been so incredibly cool to see, but, sadly, I could not find it anywhere.  The Barclay has the distinction of being known as downtown L.A.’s oldest continuously operating hotel and is a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument.  It currently serves as a residential hotel which offers affordable housing to its residents, many of whom have lived there for years.

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The GC and I were lucky enough to speak with the Barclay’s manager as well as one of the hotel’s longtime residents while we were stalking the place, both of whom could NOT have been nicer!  They filled us in on all of the filming that has taken place on the premises over the years and allowed me to take all of the photographs of the interior that I wanted.   Yay!  The resident that we spoke with was literally like a walking encyclopedia of the hotel’s vast filming history and in some instances was able to tell me not only when filming of certain productions had taken place, but how long the crew was onsite, AND he also knew the names of particular episodes of shows that had filmed on the premises and the exact dates on which those episodes had aired!  Speaking with him was like . . . well, it was like speaking with myself, actually.  Winking smile

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The Barclay Hotel’s actual, working lobby was transformed into the supposed Manhattan-area Café 24 Heures for the filming of As Good As It Gets.

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According to the hotel manager, producers not only brought in several booths for the filming;

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but they also built a fake waitress station;

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and swapped out the lobby’s front windows with French doors, which were then swapped back after filming had wrapped.

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The hotel’s real life check-in desk, which is now caged, was used as the Café’s bar in the movie.

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The entire opening scene of the 1998 disaster movie Armageddon takes place in front of the Barclay Hotel and the neighboring Farmers & Merchants National Bank, which were both made to look like they were located in New York City.

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In 2002’s Catch Me If You Can, the Barclay was the apartment building/residential hotel from which a young Frank Abagnale Jr. (Leonardo DiCaprio) was evicted after having written a series of bad checks to the landlord.

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Leo returned to the Barclay for the filming of last year’s Inception, in which the hotel was featured twice.  It first showed up towards the very beginning of the movie in the scene in which Cobb (DiCaprio) is dunked into a bathtub.  According to the manager, that scene was filmed in one of the Barclay’s second floor hotel rooms.

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The Barclay’s lobby was later used as the African casino where Cobb meets up with Eames (Tom Hardy).  The hotel’s check-in desk is where Eames cashed in his casino chips in the scene.

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The Barclay also stood in for the Columbian hotel where John Smith (Brad Pitt) and Jane Smith (Angelina Jolie) met at the very beginning of 2005’s Mr. and Mrs. Smith.

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A fake bar was set up in the Barclay’s lobby for the filming of that scene.

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In 2009’s (500) Days of Summer, the Barclay’s lobby was transformed into the coffee shop where Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) regularly hung out with his friends McKenzie (Geoffrey Arend) and Paul (Matthew Gray Gubler).

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The Barclay’s former coffee shop, which is located on the southeast corner of West 4th and South Main Streets, is not currently a working restaurant, but was kept intact in order to be used for filming, which I think is so incredibly cool!  Unfortunately, that area is closed to the public so I could only take photographs of it through its front windows.

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The cafe was featured in the Season 5 episode of The Closer titled “Tapped Out”, in the scene in which Lieutenants Flynn (Anthony John Denison) and Provenza (G.W. Bailey) are shown eating breakfast and discussing Provenza’s new girlfriend all the while ignoring a crime taking place directly outside.

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There is another vacant room located on the eastern side of the hotel that is also often used for filming.

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That room was recently dressed to look like a New York bakery in the Season 7 episode of CSI: New York titled “To What End”.

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The exterior of the Barclay also appeared a few times throughout the episode.

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Most amazing of all, though – to me, at least – is the fact that the Barclay appeared in the pilot episode of the television series Starsky & Hutch way back in 1975, looking almost exactly the same as it does today!  As I mentioned above, the check-in desk has since been caged in, but other than that minor detail, the Barclay has remained unchanged in the more than 36 years since filming took place.  Love it, love it, love it!

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Ironically enough, the Starsky and Hutch movie, which premiered in 2004, was also filmed at the Barclay.  The flick’s opening scene took place on the hotel’s roof.

Until next time, Happy Stalking!  Smile

Stalk It: The Barclay Hotel, aka Café 24 Heures from As Good As It Gets, is located at 103 West 4th Street in Downtown Los Angeles.