The Whisky a Go Go

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I’ve never really been into music.  As I have mentioned before, if it’s not sung by Michael Bublé, Britney Spears or Michael Jackson, or was not a top ‘80s hit, chances are I haven’t heard it.  But my good friend Kim from Kentucky is a huge music buff, so when she and our good friend Lavonna came out for a visit in November, we made sure to hit up what is arguably one of the most famous rock venues in the world, the Whisky a Go Go on the Sunset Strip.

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Whenever Kim, Lavonna and I do any stalking together, we seem to have miraculous luck.  This day was no different.  We showed up to the Whisky in the late afternoon only to find it closed.  There was a sign on the front door, though, that stated that anyone looking to buy merchandise could call the club’s office during daytime hours.  So we did just that, using Lavonna’s twang to full effect, of course.  An incredibly nice booking agent named Bekah (that’s her pictured below) let us in and, after Kim and Lavonna purchased pretty much every piece of merchandise available (not joking!), offered to give us on a tour of the place!

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We wound up being taken on an epic tour of the venue and, even though I am not into music, I was pinching myself the whole time.

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While a sign on the Whisky’s front door specifically states that no photography of any kind is allowed inside, Bekah told us that we could take all of the pics that we wanted, so as you can imagine I was snapping away like a madwoman!

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It was so neat to be able to see the Whisky while empty, because come nightfall it is typically packed to the gills with crowds.

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It was also amazing to stand in the space and think about the music history that had taken place within the four walls and the many legends who had performed on its stage.  Lavonna, Kim and I were walking in the footsteps of some major music legends and it was pretty surreal to contemplate.

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Just standing on the Whisky a Go Go stage.  NBD.  Winking smile

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The Whisky a Go Go first opened its doors on January 15th, 1964.  The club was founded by Elmer Valentine, a one-time Chicago cop who was the then owner of P.J.’s restaurant in West Hollywood.  During a fateful trip to Paris in 1963, Valentine visited a discotheque named Whisky a Go Go and thought the concept would be successful in L.A.  Upon returning home, he secured three investors and opened his club inside of a former Bank of America branch.  He hired singer Johnny Rivers to be the headliner.  The venue was instantly popular, though small – seating capacity was just 500.  The space was so tiny, in fact, that there was no room for a D.J. booth.  In a 2006 Vanity Fair article, author David Camp states, “Between sets, the audience would dance to records spun by a D.J.—but not just any D.J.: a girl D.J., suspended high above the audience in a glass-walled cage.  This faintly ridiculous idea was Valentine’s pragmatic response to the room’s space limitations: the Whisky was not a big club, and the only way he could fit the D.J. booth was to mount it on a metal support beam that ran alongside the performing area.”

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As fate would have it, that D.J. box wound up leading to the go-go dancing craze.  Prior to the Whisky’s launch, Valentine decided to hold a contest for the D.J. job, but as Camp explains in the Vanity Fair article, “On the very night of the Whisky’s opening, January 15, 1964, the contest winner called Valentine in tears, explaining that her disapproving mother wouldn’t let her take the job.  So Valentine pressed his reluctant cigarette girl, a young woman named Patty Brockhurst, into action.  ‘She had on a slit skirt, and we put her up there,’ he says.  ‘So she’s up there playing the records.  She’s a young girl, so while she’s playing ’em, all of a sudden she starts dancing to ’em!  It was a dream.  It worked.’  Thus, out of calamity and serendipity, was born the go-go girl.  Valentine acted fast to formalize the position, installing two more cages and hiring two more girl dancers, one of whom, Joanie Labine, designed the official go-go-girl costume of fringed dress and white boots.”  The rest, as they say, is history.

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Whisky a Go-Go was also responsible for launching the careers of countless legendary musicians and bands.  Just a few who played at the club during their early days include Fleetwood Mac, Janis Joplin, Led Zeppelin, Frank Zappa, Mötley Crüe, Metallica, Nirvana, Hole, The Bangles, Guns ‘N Roses, the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, Jimi Hendrix, KISS, Rage Against the Machine, Korn, and Limp Bizkit.   The Doors and Chicago even served as the Whisky’s house bands for a time before hitting it big.  Celebrities could often be found in the audience, as well, including Cary Grant, Nicolas Cage, Patricia Arquette, Steve McQueen, Jayne Mansfield, Jack Paar, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger, Michelle Phillips, and Cass Elliot.

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Perhaps most phenomenal about the Whisky a Go Go is that the place is still a veritable rock institution to this day, over 51 years after its opening.

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The Whisky is also a filming location!  It is outside of the club that Ben Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) and Elaine Robinson (Katharine Ross) kiss after a very bad first date in the 1967 classic The Graduate.

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The venue played itself in the 1991 film The Doors.  It was there that Jim Morrison (Val Kilmer) and the group were famously fired after performing the Oedipus section of “The End.”

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You can watch an interesting featurette about the filming of that scene by clicking below.

Suzette (Goldie Hawn) gets fired from her Whisky bartending job at the beginning of the 2002 comedy The Banger Sisters.

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The Whisky also served as the inspiration for the fictional Bourbon Club in Rock of Ages, but no filming took place there.  Though the 2012 musical was set on the Sunset Strip in the 1980s, director Adam Shankman needed to be able shut down traffic for six weeks during the shoot, a scenario that would have been impossible along one of L.A.’s busiest stretches of road.  So production instead took place in Miami.  For the filming, the intersection of North Miami Avenue & NE 14th Street was transformed into the Sunset Strip and the building located at 10 NE 14th Street was used for the exterior of The Bourbon Club.

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The nightclub Revolution Live at 100 Southwest 3rd Avenue in Fort Lauderdale masked as the interior of The Bourbon in the flick.

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For more stalking fun, follow me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Los Angeles magazine online.

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Until next time, Happy Stalking!  Smile

Stalk It: The Whisky a Go Go is located at 8901 Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood.  You can visit the venue’s official website here.

The “Rumor Has It” House

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Out of the blue last week, fellow stalker Owen and I became a bit obsessed with finding the white clapboard colonial style home used in the 2005 Jen Aniston movie Rumor Has It.  For some extremely odd reason, neither Owen (who is also a HUGE JA fan) nor I had ever tried to locate the house before.  I didn’t especially love the movie, though, in spite of the fact that it starred my girl Jen, so that’s probably why I never sought it out.  But, last week, when Owen mentioned the movie to me, we both got the exact same thought in our head at the exact same time – “We have GOT to find that house!”  LOL  And find it, we did!  Well, he did, actually!

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Even though the movie supposedly takes places in Pasadena and even though the house looks like a very typical Pasadena area home – there’s a white clapboard colonial on practically every corner here – I was convinced that, in typical Hollywood fashion, the house would most likely be located elsewhere.  Because Pasadena stands in for pretty much every city in pretty much every state in pretty much every movie LOL, it seemed only fitting that when a production called for a Pasadena area home, the location scouts would find it in a city other than Pasadena. LOL

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So, imagine my surprise when Owen texted me to let me know that he had found the house exactly where the movie said it would be.   While searching the IMDB Rumor Has It message boards he found a thread entitled “White Colonial In Pasadena Used As Movie Set” where a man had written the following entry: “It was quite a shock seeing Rumor Has it while flying back to Boston.  I suddenly recognized the home my grandfather built in Pasadena at 717 South Hudson Avenue in 1920 and that I lived in briefly in 1946-47 while my father built a new home near the Annandale golf course. Not often that one sees one’s childhood home used as a movie set — and sees Shirley MacLaine walking out the front door or Kevin Costner arriving.”   So, Owen googled the address and, sure enough, it was the house!!    THANK YOU, IMDB!

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So, of course, as soon as I had the address, I immediately ran right out to stalk the house!  🙂   Surprisingly enough, I had actually parked RIGHT in front of the Rumor Has It house just two weeks prior while stalking the Dickie Roberts house, which is ironically located just two doors down!!!!    I felt like such an airhead for not recognizing the house at the time, but, in my defense, it actually looks quite different in person than it did in the movie. The paint color has been changed from white and forest green to more muted tones and, sadly, the house just isn’t as charming in person as it was in Rumor Has It.  Don’t get me wrong, the house is cute, it’s just not AS cute as it was in the movie.  But there was also something else that looked quite different to me that I just couldn’t put my finger on – until I got home.

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In person, the house seemed much smaller than it did in Rumor Has It and I couldn’t figure out why until I was able to compare screen captures from the movie to the photographs I had just taken.  As you can see in the above screen capture, producers actually put large hedges over the real driveway of the home and extended the curb and grass area on the sidewalk in front of the driveway, making the front yard appear much larger than it actually is.

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In the scene when Jen Aniston’s father pulls up to the house, he actually parks in the real life home’s neighboring driveway (pictured above)!  LOL  Why go to all of that trouble just to give the illusion that the house is larger than it actually is?  Why not just film at a bigger house?  As I mentioned above there are houses similar to this one on practically every Pasadena street corner.   LOL  Ah, the magic of Hollywood!

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But even though the house looked quite different in person than it did in the movie, I was still absolutely floored to be stalking it!  It was soooo exciting to think that my girl Jen – and Shirley MacLaine and Kevin Costner –  had once stood on the very same sidewalk that I was now standing on.  🙂  LOVE IT!

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Had to do it!  🙂

Big THANK YOU to Owen for finding this location!  🙂

Until next time, Happy Stalking!  🙂

Stalk It: The Rumor Has It house is located at 717 South Hudson Avenue in Pasadena, just two houses down from the home used in Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star.

The Robinson House from “The Graduate”

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A few weeks back fellow stalker Scott, from the Film in America website, asked me if I knew the location of the Robinson house and the Braddock house from the 1967 movie The Graduate.   He told me that he feared the locations of those homes were lost to history being that the movie was filmed over forty years ago and the addresses didn’t seem to be posted anywhere.   So I just had to get Mike from MovieShotsLA on the case – and sure enough he found the houses.  Well, the house, actually, but I’ll get to that later.  🙂  While doing some cyberstalking Mike came across this Wikipedia article stating that the Robinson home was located on North Palm Drive in Beverly Hills, and after a quick search of Google Maps he found the house, right where Wikipedia said it would be.  🙂

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The Robinson house looks much different today than it did back in 1967 when The Graduate was filmed.  At the time of filming, the home had an all white exterior while today it has a red brick facade.  My initial belief was that the brick exterior was added to the house sometime after filming had been completed, but after seeing the above screen capture, I realized that, in actuality, the home has always been brick. When The Graduate  was filmed the bricks were just painted white.  🙂

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Because the Robinson house looks so very different today than how it appeared onscreen forty years ago, I was shocked Mike was able to locate it.  But he found two “landmarks” of a sort on Mrs. Robinson’s house that he used while searching Palm Drive.  The first landmark was the wierd brown wooden design that appears to the left of the front door.  The second was the house’s small peaked roof area.  Both are pictured above.  But here’s where things get really weird!

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While looking at aerial images of the Palm Drive house, I realized that the pool area and backyard looked a whole lot like Benjamin Braddock’s backyard from the movie.  Armed with a pretty big hunch I grabbed my Graduate DVD and fast-forwarded through the entire thing.  And sure enough, my hunch was correct – the front of the Braddock house is never shown in the Graduate – only the backyard is shown.  And after looking at all of the Braddock backyard scenes one more time, I realized that the Braddock house and the Robinson house were one in the same!   LOL

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So last week I dragged my boyfriend out to Beverly Hills to stalk the (one and only) Graduate  house and while I was there taking photographs the owner happened to drive up.  So, of course, I just had to talk to her!  🙂   I asked her if she lived in the home at the time  The Graduate was filmed and her mouth pretty much just fell to the floor and she said “HOW did you know this was The Graduate  house?”  LOL  I told her that my friend Mike was a master stalker and that he had found the house by doing some cyber-stalking.  She confirmed that her home was indeed used in The Graduate, but said that she didn’t live in it at the time.  She said that when she purchased the house about twenty years ago, the real estate agent was marketing it as “the Robinson house”.  LOL  Then I asked her if her backyard was in fact Benjamin Braddock’s backyard and once again her mouth just hung open.  Apparently she didn’t realize who she was dealing with! LOL  She told me that, in actuality, Benjamin Braddock’s backyard existed only on a soundstage, but that his backyard and pool area were indeed modeled after hers. I’m not sure she’s entirely correct on that, though.  While I have no doubt that her backyard was re-created on a soundstage and that most of the filming probably took place there, if you watch some of the Graduate pool scenes closely it becomes obvious that at least some filming did actually take place at the Palm Drive home.

So, there you have it, the mystery of The Graduate  houses is finally solved.   🙂

Until next time, Happy Stalking!  🙂

Stalk It: The Graduate  house is located at 607 North Palm Drive in Beverly Hills.