The “Rain Man” Convenience Store

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Back in February, while doing research on the Hollywood Hills apartment building where Charlie Babbitt (Tom Cruise) lived in 1988’s Rain Man, I came across a September 2004 article on the Palm Springs Life website titled “Quiet on the Set” about filming in the Coachella Valley.  And, let me tell you, I just about fell out of my chair when I read the (rather poorly written) words, “The wind energy farms on Interstate 10 are another popular attraction.  Tom Cruise and Valeria Golino drove past the Palm Springs windmills in the opening minutes of Rain Man.  Cruise exits from a convenience store at Windy Point on Highway 111 and puts sun block on the nose of his autistic brother, Dustin Hoffman.”  Prior to reading the article, I had no idea whatsoever that any Rain Man filming had taken place in the area.  So I, of course, immediately started searching through aerial views of Windy Point trying to locate the convenience store and, amazingly enough, it was not long before I found it!  Yay!  So I dragged the Grim Cheaper right on out there to stalk the place two weekends ago while on our way to visit my parents in the Desert.

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In Rain Man, Charlie and his brother, Raymond Babbitt (Dustin Hoffman), stop at the convenience store towards the end of their long cross-country road trip.  It is there that Charlie puts sunscreen on Raymond’s nose causing Raymond to say that his face feels “very slippery”.  LOL

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Remarkably, the convenience store still looks very much the same today as it did when the movie was filmed way back in 1988.

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I absolutely LOVE that the two poles which appeared in the background of the Rain Man scene are still there in real life, almost two and a half decades later!  SO INCREDIBLY COOL!

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While we were stalking the place, the GC and I ventured inside to see if any of the employees happened to know about the filming and, amazingly enough, the woman behind the counter did!  She informed us that the signs that were posted on the store back in 1988 when Rain Man was filmed were still there until just recently, when the property’s new owner had them replaced with the “Food Shop” sign pictured above.  Oh, why, oh why did I not know about this location sooner?  Ugh!

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On a Rain Man side-note – I am itching to track down the laundromat where Charlie made a phone call to his business partner, Lenny (Ralph Seymour), and learned that the four Lamborghinis he was trying to sell had all been repossessed.  The GC has a hunch that it is located in Nevada, somewhere near Red Rock Canyon, and I think he might be right.  I have not had time to do any research on it, though, but thought I would put it out there to my fellow stalkers.  Does the location look familiar to anyone?

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And on a Palm Springs side-note – while in the Desert last week, fellow stalker Kim informed me that a celebrity golf tournament was going to be taking place on Sunday, March 4th.  So, much to the GC’s chagrin, I, of course, just had to stalk it.  I ended up having an AMAZING time and really cannot thank Kim enough!  The stars (all of whom were incredibly nice) that I met while there were scratch golfer Oliver Hudson (Kate Hudson’s brother and Goldie Hawn’s son), from Dawson’s Creek and Rules of Engagement;

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Sam Page, from Shark (such a cutie!);

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Patrick Warburton, aka “David Puddy” from Seinfeld;

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Rob Morrow, from Numb3rs and Northern Exposure (SO amazingly nice – LOVE HIM!);

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Richard Karn, aka “Al Borland” from Home Improvement;

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Mike Inez, from Alice in Chains;

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Christopher McDonald, aka “Shooter McGavin” from Happy Gilmore (it was so incredibly cool to see “Shooter” play golf in person!);

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guitarist/songwriter/music producer Steve “The Colonel” Cropper (he was also a member of The Blue Brothers band in both the 1980 and 2000 movies of the same name);

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Cheech Marin;

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and Alice Cooper.  Such a fabulous day!  Thank you, Kim!  Smile

You can check out a great article about several Midwest Rain Man filming locations that I stumbled upon yesterday while doing research for this post on the Road Trip Memories blog here.

Until next time, Happy Stalking!  Smile

Stalk It: The convenience store from Rain Man is located at 60490 Overture Drive, about two miles south of where State Route 111 meets the Interstate 10 Freeway, in Palm Springs.

Charlie Babbitt’s Apartment from “Rain Man”

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A couple of weeks ago, I read on fellow stalker Lisa’s Finding the Famous blog that the apartment building where Charlie Babbitt (Tom Cruise) lived in the 1988 movie Rain Man was located somewhere in the Hollywood Hills.  I, of course, immediately started trying to track down the building’s exact location and fairly quickly found the information I was seeking thanks to my buddy E.J. over at The Movieland Directory.  E.J.’s website has actually been on a “hiatus” since January 8th of this year, while it is being updated from its previous database of 20,000 movie locales and celebrity addresses to one of over 90,000.  And while that all sounds well and good, this stalker has been simply lost without the website, as I use it almost daily as a resource.  When I emailed E.J. to tell him of my plight, he immediately sent over an extremely large Excel spreadsheet containing all 90,000 of his extensively-researched addresses for me to refer to at will.  Um, how do I even begin to say thank you for that???  Needless to say, the gesture was GREATLY appreciated.  And while I have to admit that I am, for whatever reason, supremely Excel-challenged, I have been using his database regularly and was able to find the location of the Rain Man apartment building with sufficient ease.  Thank you, “Ctrl-F” and thank you, E.J.!  So I dragged the Grim Cheaper right on out there to stalk the place this past weekend.

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Charlie Babbitt’s apartment building shows up only once, and very briefly, towards they end of Rain Man, in the scene in which Charlie brings his newly-found autistic brother, Raymond Babbitt (Dustin Hoffman), home to Los Angeles after a long road trip across America.  It is at the building that Raymond freaks out after setting off the fire alarm while attempting to cook Eggo Waffles in a convection oven.

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The area of the apartment building shown in Rain Man is not the front exterior, but the west side, which, thankfully, still looks much the same today as it did when the movie was filmed in 1988, despite the fact that almost two and a half decades have since passed.  The only difference I could spot is that the chain link fence which once surrounded the pool has since been replaced with a wooden fence.  But otherwise, the place looks exactly the same in person as it did onscreen.  So incredibly cool!

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The front exterior of the building is pictured above.  According to fave website Zillow, the dwelling was originally constructed in 1926 and measures 3 bedrooms, 3 baths, and 2,201 square feet.  And while I could not find much information about the place online, I am guessing that it is comprised of 3 separate apartment units.  I also learned from E.J.’s extensive files that actor Brad Pitt once lived on the premises sometime during the ‘90s, so the property has quite an extensive claim to fame!

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I am fairly certain that the real life interior of the building was also used in the filming of Rain Man, although I, unfortunately, could not find any interior photographs of the place online with which to verify that hunch.  And, legend has it that a lithograph of Tom Cruise, that was given to him during the production, still hangs in the property’s laundry room to this day.  Oh, what I wouldn’t give to get in there to see that!

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Big THANK YOU to fellow stalker Lisa, from the Finding the Famous blog, for informing me of this location and to my friend E.J., of The Movieland Directory website, for tracking it down.  Smile

Until next time, Happy Stalking!  Smile

Stalk It: Charlie Babbitt’s apartment building from Rain Man is located at 8800 Evanview Drive/1599 Sunset Plaza Drive in the Hollywood Hills.  The area of the building that was shown in the movie can be seen from Evanview Drive, just west of where it intersects with Sunset Plaza Drive.

Wattles Mansion from “Troop Beverly Hills”

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After re-watching Troop Beverly Hills a couple of weeks back and subsequently stalking the mansion where the Nefler family lived, I became just a wee bit obsessed with tracking down some of the other locales featured in the 1989 flick.  Thankfully IMDB had quite a few sites listed on its Troop Beverly Hills filming locations page, one of which was Wattles Mansion – a historic and oft-filmed at Hollywood estate that, amazingly enough, I had never before heard of.  So I immediately dragged the Grim Cheaper right on out to stalk the place the following weekend.

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Wattles Mansion was originally built in 1907 by Myron Hunt and Elmer Grey, the legendary Los Angeles-area architects who were also responsible for designing the Ambassador Hotel, the Huntington Art Gallery, Pasadena’s Wentworth Hotel (now the Langham), Occidental College (aka California University from fave show Beverly Hills, 90210), the California Institute of Technology, and the Beverly Hills Hotel.  The large Mission Revival-style dwelling was commissioned by a wealthy Omaha, Nebraska native named Gurdon Wallace Wattles to be used as his family’s winter residence.  The estate, which sat on 49 acres and was called“Jualita”, featured 6,167 square feet of living space, seven bedrooms, seven bathrooms, a wood-paneled library with a hand-painted ceiling, black-and-white checkerboard marble flooring, a terracotta tile terrace, wood-beamed ceilings, and a full basement.  The home’s extensive 5-acre formal garden area consisted of a Japanese Garden, an Italian Rose garden, a Spanish garden, an American garden, a palm court, sparkling ponds, and several fruit orchards.  In an amazing show of generosity, Gurdon opened his beloved gardens to the public upon moving into his new home and it was not long before they became a wildly popular tourist attraction.

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After Gurdon passed away in 1932, his widow, Julia Vance, and their son, Gurdon Wallace Wattles Jr., continued to live at the mansion.  In 1968, they sold the property to the City of Los Angeles and the Department of Parks and Recreation subsequently took over.  Sadly, the city lacked the money necessary to maintain the large estate and it quickly fell into a serious state of disrepair.  Gurdon’s formerly glorious gardens were taken over by drug dealers, squatters, and vandals, and what they didn’t destroy, a series of mudslides in the 1980s did.  Thankfully, in 1983 the Hollywood Heritage preservation group leased the property and began a massive restoration project before moving in and using the historic mansion as their headquarters.  It was at that time that the abode, which is a City of Los Angeles Cultural Monument, became a popular filming location.  For reasons that are not entirely clear, Hollywood Heritage was served with an eviction notice in 2008 and finally vacated the property in May of 2009.  The mansion is currently being maintained by the Los Angeles Department of Parks and Recreation once again.  (I snapped the interior pictures through one of the estate’s front windows.)

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The piece of property, which you can see in the above aerial view, is now made up of three separate areas.

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The section denoted with a pink square above, which measures 4.2 acres, was turned into a community garden in 1975 and has been continuously maintained by local residents.  It is private and not open to the public.  The middle section, which is denoted with a blue square, is a park known as Wattles Garden Park.  It is open to the public daily from dusk until dawn.  The mansion and formal garden area, which is denoted with a purple square above, is not open to the public, but is available for use as a special event and wedding venue.

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And although the formal gardens are not accessible to the public, from what was visible from the park, that area once again appears to be in a sad state of disrepair.  According to sign a posted on the premises, a restoration is currently in progress, so hopefully they will not look that way for long.

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Wattles Mansion actually stood in for two different locations in Troop Beverly Hills. It first appeared as the Beverly Hills Rest Haven where Phyllis Nefler (aka Shelley Long) and her group of Wilderness Girls performed their community service requirement.

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While there, Phyllis and her daughter, Hannah (aka Jenny Lewis), taught a group of senior citizens how to do the “Freddy” dance, so I, of course, just had to do a little recreation of that scene while I was stalking the place.  Winking smile

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In a later scene, the northern-facing side of Wattles Mansion and the formal garden area were used as the location of the “khaki” fashion show that was hosted by Robin Leach and featured cameos by Pia Zadora and Dr. Joyce Brothers.

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Wattles Mansion was also used extensively as the demon-haunted home inherited by Jonathan Graves (aka Peter Liapis) in the 1985 horror-comedy Ghoulies.

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The real life interior of the mansion, including the kitchen area and the formal library, appeared in Ghoulies, as well. You can check out some great interior photographs of the place here.

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Randomly enough, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit’s Mariska Hargitay made her feature film debut in Ghoulies.  She is pictured in the grey sweater above.  The actress was just 21 at the time that the movie was filmed.

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Wattles Mansion also appeared in Diana Ross’ ultra-weird 1985 music video for her single “Eaten Alive”, which was co-written by none other than the King of Pop himself, Michael Jackson.

Eaten Alive Music Video–Filmed at Wattles Mansion

You can watch that video by clicking above.

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In the 1989 movie Rain Man, Wattles Mansion stood in for the institution where the psychiatric evaluation of Raymond Babbitt (aka Dustin Hoffman) took place.

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Wattles was where Jose (aka Jacob Vargas) first met Maria (aka Jennifer Lopez) in the 1995 flick My Family.

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And finally, the mansion popped up in the Season 3 episode of The O.C. titled “The Man of the Year” as the supposed Montecito-area boarding school attended by Marissa Cooper’s (aka Mischa Barton’s) sister, Kaitlin (aka Willa Holland).

Until next time, Happy Stalking – and Happy Voting!  Don’t forget to vote for me today to be the new face of About MeSmile

Stalk It: Wattles Mansion, from Troop Beverly Hills, is located at 1824 North Curson Avenue in Hollywood.  The interior of the mansion and formal garden areas are not accessible to the public, but Wattles Park is open daily from dawn until dusk.  You can visit the official Wattles Mansion website here.