Frank the Tank’s House from “Old School”

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Three weeks ago, fellow stalker Geoff, from the 90210Locations website, emailed me to let me know that he had recently tracked down the house where Frank Ricard (Will Ferrell), aka “Frank the Tank”, and his new wife, Marissa Jones (Perrey Reeves), aka “Mrs. Ari” from Entourage, lived – well, until she kicked him out for streaking, anyway Winking smile – in the 2003 comedy Old School.  I was beyond thrilled to hear this news as Frank and Marissa’s abode is one location that I have long wondered about and always wanted to stalk.  So I dragged the Grim Cheaper right on over there to do just that this past weekend.

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While watching Old School on television a few weeks back, Geoff’s wife happened to ask if he knew where Frank and Marissa’s house was located.  He didn’t, but figured that the information had to be mentioned somewhere online.  After checking all of the usual stalking websites, though, he came up empty-handed and decided to begin his own search.  Thankfully, an address number of “2234” was visible in the background of one of the scenes, so that search was a short one.  As it turns out, Frank the Tank’s house is located in Altadena – pretty much right in my own backyard.

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In real life, the property was originally built in 1917 and boasts four bedrooms, three baths, 2,400 square feet of living space, and a 0.34-acre plot of land.  As you can see below, it could not be more charming or idyllic.  This place has got curb appeal down to a T!  And while this website claims that the abode was recently listed for sale at $43,250 (as if!!!!), according to Zillow, it actually last sold in August 2001 for $560,000.

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Frank the Tank’s house actually only shows up twice in Old School, and very briefly at that.  But it made quite an impression on me nonetheless.

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So much so that, even though I had not seen the flick in ages, I recognized the place immediately when we pulled up and could almost see Frank the Tank working on his Trans-Am, “The Red Dragon”, in the driveway, with the strains of Whitesnake’s “Here I Go Again” blaring out of his speakers.  SUCH A GREAT MOVIE!

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As you can see in these photographs, the real life interior of the home, which is absolutely ADORABLE (so shabby chic!), was also used in the filming.  I was literally drooling over the shots of the sweeping front porch, the backyard and the kitchen.

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Be sure to “Like” IAMNOTASTALKER on Facebook here and “Friend” me on my personal page here.  You can also check out the IAMNOTASTALKER About Me page here and you can follow me on Twitter at @IAMNOTASTALKER.  And you can take a look my other blog, The Well-Heeled Diabetic, here.

Big THANK YOU to Geoff, from the 90210Locations website, for finding this location!  Smile

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Until next time, Happy Stalking!  Smile

Stalk It: Frank the Tank’s house from Old School is located at 2284 Mar Vista Avenue in Altadena.

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 Wedding Singer Bakery

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A few weeks ago, fellow stalker Owen asked for my help in locating the bakery featured in one of his all time favorite movies, the 1998 comedy The Wedding Singer.  Owen had actually contacted one of the movie’s crew members who happened to remember that the bakery where filming took place was located somewhere in Montrose, a small town in the San Gabriel Valley where quite a few scenes from The Wedding Singer were filmed.  Because Owen does not live in the area, he sent me out on a mission to stalk all of the bakeries located in the tiny town in the hopes that I would eventually find the right one.   So, early one morning last week, I dragged my parents out to Montrose to hopefully stalk the Wedding Singer  bakery.

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And, sure enough, it was the very first bakery we walked into!!  Ironically, I had ALREADY STALKED this location just last month while visiting some sites from the Will Ferrell comedy Old School.  It turns out that the exterior of the Wedding Singer bakery was also used as the restaurant in Old School  where Luke Wilson and his “brothers” have a meeting about saving their fraternity!  I didn’t immediately recognize the place from my previous stalking trip because, due to the fact that only the exterior of the bakery was featured in Old School,  I never ventured inside.  But while walking by last week, I peeked in the window and immediately recognized the pink sign pictured above which reads “This is the same ol place”.  That sign was featured pretty prominently in the Wedding Singer  bakery scene, so as soon as I saw it I knew I had found the right spot.  It was at that point that I pretty much started screaming “This is it!  This is it!  This is it!” to my parents right there on the street out in front of the shop!   While I had figured that the bakery featured in the movie would still be around, never in a million years did I think it would still look EXACTLY the same today as it did when the Wedding Singer  was filmed over a decade ago!  YAY! 

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Montrose Home Bakery and Sandwich Shoppe actually pops up during my very favorite part of The Wedding Singer – at the beginning of the Drew Barrymore/Adam Sandler falling in love montage set to the Hall & Oates song “You Make My Dreams Come True”.  🙂  In the scene, Drew Barrymore and friends are first seen looking at wedding cakes in the bakery’s glass display counter.  You can even see the bakery’s striped awning behind actor Allen Covert in the above screen capture.

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Drew and friends then proceed to feed each other wedding cake in the scene.  Although the bakery is only featured for a few brief moments, thanks to the awesome ’80s song playing in the background, it’s quite a memorable little part of the movie. 

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While stalking the bakery, I happened to start up a conversation with the owner who really could NOT have been nicer to us!  He answered a whole bunch of my silly questions and told me to take all the pictures I wanted.  It turns out that the Montrose Home Bakery and Sandwich Shoppe has been used for quite a bit of filming over the years.  Besides The Wedding Singer and Old School, the shop was also featured in several episodes of the now-defunct television series Dirty Sexy Money.  There is even a photograph of the owner and Donald Sutherland taken during the filming posted in the shop’s front window.  Apparently, he used to have a picture of himself with Drew Barrymore in that same window, but it is now stored at his home.  He told me that if he posted all of his celebrity photographs from all of the filming that has taken place at his little shop, his entire front window would be covered up!  LOL LOL LOL LOVE IT!  

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Montrose Home Bakery and Sandwich Shoppe is a super cute little place and I HIGHLY recommend stalking it.  The shop smelled absolutely delicious inside, but, unfortunately, because I am diabetic, I wasn’t able to sample any of the sweets.  🙁  I am seriously thinking about having them make the cupcakes for my wedding, though.  How fitting would it be to get my wedding cupcakes from the Wedding Singer  bakery????  😉

Until next time, Happy Stalking!  🙂

Stalk It: The Wedding Singer  Bakery, aka Montrose Home Bakery and Sandwich Shoppe, is located at 2325 1/2 Honolulu Avenue in Montrose.  The shop houses both a bakery and a restaurant, and, from what I’ve heard, the restaurant serves up a GREAT breakfast.

The Old School House

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A few weeks ago, while out stalking, Mike, from MovieShotsLA, and I decided to pay a little visit to the house where Luke Wilson lived and set up his fictional Lamdba Epsilon Omega fraternity in the 2003 comedy Old School.  The house is located on a quiet, tree-lined street that has long been a favorite of location scouts.   South Pasadena’s Bushnell Avenue has shown up in everything from the movies Back to the Future and  Ghost Dad  to the television series thirtysomething.  I promise to devote a future post to the other famous homes located on the oft-filmed street, but today’s post will be dedicated solely to the Old School  house.  🙂

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I am happy to report that aside from a few minor changes, the Old School  house looks exactly the same in person as it appeared onscreen.   Unfortunately, the sun was shining very brightly the day we stalked the house, so my pictures did not turn out very good.  🙁

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Because the Old School  house was supposed to be located very close to, or as Vince Vaughn says “practically on”, a college campus, producers brought in a mailbox, a kiosk, and several parking meters to make the area look less residential.  They also created fake parking places in front of the home, much like was done at the nearby Bedtimes Stories  house.

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The house shows up many times throughout the movie, most notably as the site of Vince Vaughn’s Mitch-A-Palooza Party, where he hires Snoop Dogg to perform.

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Will Ferrell’s streaking expedition was also filmed in front of the Old School  house.  Before heading over to Honolulu Avenue in nearby Montrose, Frank-the-Tank tries to lead his fellow Mitch-A-Palooza partiers on a streaking trip down Bushnell Avenue.  Unbeknownst to him, he is the only one streaking.  LOL

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My friend and fellow stalker Owen, informed me that the Old School  house was also used in the 1989 flick Back to the Future II.  In the movie, bully Biff  steals a little kid’s ball and tosses it up onto the balcony of the Old School  house.

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In a very random side note, the Old School  fraternity house actually belonged to Will Ferrell at the time of the filming.  In the movie’s DVD commentary, Will Ferrel says, “And this was actually my house.   My little craftsman house in Pasadena.  I was cool with it, even though you guys ruined the hardwood floors with all the equipment.”   Actors Vince Vaughn and Luke Wilson also took part in the DVD commentary and since there was quite a bit of joking around going on during their talk, I can’t say with absolute certainty that the house ever actually belonged to Will.  He very well could have just been joking around.  But he does continally refer to the house as being his throughout the entire commentary, so I think it might actually be true.  At one point he even said that his wife was extremely upset when she saw the house set up for the post-Mitch-A-Palooza scene (pictured above).   According to property records, the home was sold to a new owner in 2006, so while I can’t say for sure that Will owned it during the filming of Old School, I can say he for sure that he doesn’t own it anymore.

Until next time, Happy Stalking!  🙂

Stalk It: The Old School  house is located at 1803 Bushnell Avenue in South Pasadena.  The house located at 1727 Bushnell was used as both Lorraine’s 1955 house in Back to the Future and Michael J. Fox’s house in Teen Wolf.  George McFly’s 1955 house is located at 1711 Bushnell, while Biff’s from Back to the Future Part II is at 1809.  At 1710 Bushnell is the home that was featured as Ken Olin and Mel Harris’ in  the television series thirtysomething.   Ghost Dad  was filmed at both 1615 and 1621 Bushnell.  I will write a more detailed post on all of those locations at a later date.  🙂

Will Ferrell’s Streaking Scene

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A few weeks ago, while out stalking in Montrose, Mike, from MovieShotsLA, and I decided to pinpoint the exact location where Will Ferrell went streaking in the 2003 movie Old School.   Although it’s fairly common location knowledge that the streaking scene took place on Honolulu Avenue in the City of Montrose, I actually first heard that information straight from the horse’s mouth last July when I saw Will Ferrell speak at my acting school.  During the question and answer session of Will’s presentation, one of my fellow students raised their hand and asked Frank the Tank himself where the streaking scene had taken place.  Love it!!  🙂  Amazingly enough, Will remembered the general location where that scene had been filmed and ever since then I have been meaning to stalk it.   So, a few weeks ago, Mike and I set out to do just that. 

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With our Blackberries in hand, the two of us walked up and down Honolulu Avenue watching Will’s streaking scene on YouTube while trying to find the exact location.  And sure enough, we did!  🙂   We were actually able to pinpoint Will’s streaking spot by matching up the Montrose Shopping Park Directory sign . . .

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and some windows that were shown in the background of the scene.  YAY! 

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While we were stalking Honolulu Avenue, one of the super-friendly local shop owners informed us that the Montrose Bakery and Cafe, which is located just down the road from Will’s streaking spot, was also featured in Old School. The Cafe’s exterior stood in for the exterior of the University Cafe where Luke Wilson and his friends have a pow wow about how to save their fraternity.  Interestingly enough, though, the Cafe’s interior was not used in the filming.   The interior scenes were filmed at another location altogether.  

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You can watch Will Ferrell’s absolutely hilarious – but NSFW – streaking scene here.  “We’re going streaking!  Yeah!  We’re going streaking through the quad and into the gymnasium!  Come on, everybody!  Come on, Snoop, Snoop-a-Loop!  Bring your green hat!”  LOL LOL LOL

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On a bittersweet side note, I dragged my mom out to Montrose earlier today to snap some more photos of the “streaking street” and we noticed the above tribute to Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett posted outside of a local shop named Pure Sunshine Beauty Supply.  It seems everyone the world over is mourning Michael and Farrah’s untimely passings.  🙁

 Until next time, Happy Stalking!  🙂

Stalk It: Will Ferrell’s streaking scene took place on the block of Honolulu Avenue located between Market Street and Ocean View Boulevard in Montrose.  Frank’s wife is driving East on Honolulu Avenue when she first spots Frank.   She stops the car right around 2246 Honolulu Avenue to let him hop inside.  Montrose Bakery and Cafe, aka the University Cafe, is located at 2325 Honolulu Avenue, also in Montrose.