Check out the latest WeScoutLA video – about the Cowboy Palace Saloon – by clicking above! You can watch Episode 1 here and Episode 2 here and you can visit our YouTube channel here.
New Scene It Before Post – About the “Saved by the Bell” School
Don’t forget to check out today’s Los Angeles magazine post – about Ulysses S. Grant High School from Saved by the Bell. You can read it here. My columns typically get published in the late morning/early afternoon hours.
The Water Garden from “A to Z”
During my recent viewing of A to Z’s digital preview (which you can watch here – I’ve now seen it twice!), I recognized a location featured in it – The Water Garden in Santa Monica. The Grim Cheaper used to live close to the office complex and I had driven by it countless times over the years. I had never ventured onto the property for a closer look, though, so I decided to amend that while in the area last week. And I was shocked at what I discovered!
[ad]
While the exterior of The Water Garden (pictured below) is pretty, the interior grounds, which are not visible from the street, are absolutely breathtaking! I cannot even imagine having an office there! What an idyllic place to work!
The Water Garden complex is much larger than it appears to be from the street. The 17-acre property, which takes up an entire city block, is comprised of eight buildings (six 6-story structures and two 5-story structures) that total a whopping 1.27-million square feet of office space.
The eight buildings surround a massive waterway that meanders throughout the grounds, complete with geysers, fountains and bridges. Like I said, it is breathtaking.
The complex also features lush landscaping with rambling, trellised pathways that make the property look more like a public park than an office facility. What I wouldn’t give to work there!
On A to Z, The Water Garden is where both Andrew (Ben Feldman) and Zelda (Cristin Milioti) work – Ben at a matchmaking company named Wallflower and Zelda at a law firm.
The complex was used extensively throughout the pilot episode.
Some of The Water Garden’s interior space was also utilized in the pilot – as both the interior of the Wallflower offices . . .
. . . and Zelda’s law firm. I am guessing that will not be a regular practice, though, and that a set of both office interiors will be built on a soundstage for all subsequent filming.
The Water Garden also made an appearance in the Season 3 episode of CSI: Miami titled “Recoil,” in which it stood in for the Biscayne Courthouse where Horatio Caine (David Caruso) and the gang investigated a shooting.
Oddly, while an image of The Water Garden was used in an establishing shot of the Biscayne Courthouse in the Season 6 episode of CSI: Miami titled “Inside Out” . . .
. . . actual filming took place elsewhere.
The Water Garden also served as the San Francisco headquarters of Gryzzl in the Season 6 episode of Parks and Recreation titled “Moving Up.”
For more stalking fun, be sure to follow me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Los Angeles magazine online. And you can check out my other blog, The Well-Heeled Diabetic, here.
Until next time, Happy Stalking! 
Stalk It: The Water Garden, from A to Z, is located at 1620 26th Street in Santa Monica.
Villa Restaurant from “Must Love Dogs”
Some filming location finds turn out to be a disappointment in person while others wind up to be better than I ever could have imagined. Today’s stalk – of Villa restaurant from the 2005 romantic comedy Must Love Dogs – was a little bit of both.
[ad]
For several months, I had been on a fruitless search for the outdoor eatery that appeared in the beginning of Must Love Dogs, in the scene in which Sarah Nolan (Diane Lane) showed up for a date with someone she met online only to discover that her date was actually her father, Bill (Christopher Plummer). The bistro was absolutely adorable and reminded me quite a bit of Aroma Café in Studio City, one of my favorite spots in all of L.A. Try as I might, though, I just could not seem to locate it. I finally enlisted the help of fellow stalker Owen, from the When Write Is Wrong blog, and he found the place in record time. A Google search of the terms “restaurant, patio, fountain, San Fernando Valley,” led him to the website for Villa in Woodland Hills. Images posted there proved it was the right spot. Sadly though, the images also showed that the eatery had been remodeled in recent years and, in the process, seemed to have lost much of its charm. I was heartbroken to learn of the renovation, but decided to stalk the place nonetheless. As it turns out, despite the facelift, Villa is still quite spectacular.
The space that currently houses Villa was originally the site of Eckberg’s Steakhouse, which was founded in the 1960s. At the time, the property was a private home owned by Russ and Eleanor Eckberg. Russ worked in the meat industry and, upon retiring, decided to convert the living room of his house into a small ten-table restaurant with an adjacent open kitchen. And yes, Russ and Eleanor still lived on the premises. When they fully retired in the late 1970s, the space was taken over by restaurateur John Makhani. He remodeled and expanded the residence (keeping much of the original framing intact) and re-opened it in 1981.
The restaurant has gone through several incarnations under Makhani’s tutelage. At one point, it was a French eatery named Lautrec and then later it became an Italian spot named Villa Piacere. It was during its time as Piacere that Must Love Dogs was filmed on the premises. Makhani decided to revamp the space again in 2012 and, with the help of designer Thomas Schoos, transformed both the interior and the exterior.
When it was re-opened, the “Piacere” was dropped from the name and the restaurant became known simply as “Villa.”
The filming of Must Love Dogs took place on Villa Piacere’s back patio.
As you can see below, that area, while still somewhat recognizable, looks significantly different today.
Gone are the flowered tablecloths, country-style furniture and tiered water fountain.
While I was originally disappointed to learn of the changes, I was pleasantly surprised when I stepped onto Villa’s patio. In the photographs Owen had found online, the space looked sleek and cold, but in person, it turned out to be quaint, adorable and absolutely charming. I fell in love with it on site! So did Mike, from MovieShotsLA, who had joined me on the stalk, and we both promptly made plans to return there for dinner with our significant others in the near future.
The super-nice server whom we spoke with while we were there informed us that Villa had appeared onscreen numerous times over the years. The interior of the eatery popped up in the 2013 biopic Jobs as the spot where Steve Jobs (Ashton Kutcher) made the decision not to give Daniel Kottke (Lukas Haas) any Apple stock options.
A different exterior was used for the establishing shot of the restaurant in the scene.
In the Season 4 episode of Parks and Recreation titled “Operation Ann,” the exterior of Villa masked as the Bluebell Cafe. Interiors were filmed at the Hamburger Hamlet in Sherman Oaks, though. (Interiors from Season 2’s “Galentine’s Day” were also filmed at the Hamburger Hamlet.)
In the Season 1 episode of LeAnn & Eddie (and let’s hope that there only winds up to be one season of that train wreck of a show) titled “Babes and a Baby,” LeAnn Rimes dined at Villa with some of her childhood friends.
Villa’s tree-canopied parking lot appeared in Buick’s recent “Hmm” commercial.
The parking lot is absolutely gorgeous in person! I can only imagine what it looks like at night all lit up.
You can watch the Buick “Hmm” commercial by clicking below.
For more stalking fun, be sure to follow me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Los Angeles magazine online. And you can check out my other blog, The Well-Heeled Diabetic, here.
Big THANK YOU to fellow stalker Owen, from the When Write Is Wrong blog, for finding this location! 
Until next time, Happy Stalking!
Stalk It: Villa restaurant, from Must Love Dogs, is located at 22160 Ventura Boulevard in Woodland Hills. You can visit the eatery’s official website here.
Andrew’s House from “A to Z”
Networks have recently begun the practice of digitally releasing the pilot episodes of new shows weeks before their scheduled premiere dates. I think it’s a genius maneuver and have been relishing watching them all. One that I perused, on the recommendation of fellow stalker Owen, of the When Write Is Wrong blog, was A to Z, a comedy co-produced by actress Rashida Jones that centers on the relationship between hopeless romantic Andrew (Ben Feldman) and pragmatic lawyer Zelda (How I Met Your Mother’s Cristin Milioti). I thoroughly enjoyed the pilot and plan on adding the series to my television line-up, although I do have a fear that the storyline will wind up akin to that of the ultra-depressing (500) Days of Summer. Fingers crossed that I’m wrong on that count.
[ad]
On A to Z, which is set in Los Angeles, Andrew lives in a Craftsman-style home with his quirky roommate/co-worker, Stu (Henry Zebrowski).
Owen managed to track down Andrew and Stu’s house – as well as all of the other locales that appeared in the pilot – before I had yet to even watch the episode. So, since he had already done most of the heavy lifting, I decided to run right out and stalk a few of them while I was in L.A. earlier this week.
In real life, Andrew’s residence is located in Los Feliz and looks much the same in person as it does onscreen. The pad measures three bedrooms, one bath and 1,416 square feet.
I am fairly certain that the property’s actual interior was used in the pilot episode and that a set modeled after it will be built for all subsequent filming.
In an unexpected twist, the Laverne & Shirley apartment building (which I blogged about here) was used as Zelda’s apartment in the episode.
A to Z is set to premiere on Thursday, October 2nd at 9:30 p.m., but you can watch a full episode preview of the pilot now on NBC.com.
On a side-note – I had an absolute blast being a guest on The Bill Feingold Show Featuring Kevin Holmes yesterday! For those who missed it live, you can listen to the show On Demand here.
For more stalking fun, be sure to follow me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Los Angeles magazine online. And you can check out my other blog, The Well-Heeled Diabetic, here.
Big THANK YOU to Owen, from the When Write Is Wrong blog, for finding this location! 
Until next time, Happy Stalking!
Stalk It: Andrew’s house from A to Z is located at 4431 Melbourne Avenue in Los Feliz. Zelda’s apartment building from the series can be found at 419 North Sierra Bonita Avenue in L.A.’s Fairfax District.
Latest Scene It Before Post – About Joe Jost’s from “License to Wed”
I pay my respects to Robin Williams today with a Los Angeles magazine post about Joe Jost’s bar, where he filmed the movie License to Wed. You can read it here. My columns typically get published in the late morning/early afternoon hours.
And don’t forget that I’ll be on “The Bill Feingold Show Featuring Kevin Holmes” today at 8 a.m. PST. You can listen in here.
The Ritz-Carlton, Rancho Mirage
The Ritz-Carlton, Rancho Mirage recently re-opened after what amounted to countless delays and an almost eight-year closure. A few years prior to its shuttering, when it was known as The Lodge at Rancho Mirage, the resort hosted the nuptials of Bachelorette Trista Rehn and Ryan Sutter, and I had been itching to stalk it ever since. The Grim Cheaper and I had actually stayed at the property a couple of times, long before Trista and Ryan’s wedding and long before I ever had a blog, but, unfortunately I never took any pictures, so, for me, the grand unveil could not come soon enough. When the hotel finally did re-open a few months ago, I ran right out to stalk it. Sadly though, it no longer looks anything like it did when Trista and Ryan tied the knot there a little over a decade ago.
[ad]
The 24-acre resort located at 68900 Frank Sinatra Drive was originally constructed in 1988 as the seventh hotel in the Ritz-Carlton chain. In 2001, it was sold to Vail Resorts, Inc. and was renamed The Lodge at Rancho Mirage. The décor and design largely remained the same as it was during the Ritz days. During that time, the property was awarded several distinctions, including one of the Top 500 Hotels in the World by Travel + Leisure, one of the Top 100 Golf Resorts in North America by Condé Nast Traveler, and Highest Rated Resort, Palm Springs Area by ZAGAT. Despite the success, Vail Resorts sold The Lodge to Gencom in 2005. The site was shuttered the following year and arrangements made to fully renovate it and re-open it once again as a Ritz. Things did not go according to plan, though, and the project was halted in 2008 when Lehman Brothers, which was backing the renovation financially, filed for bankruptcy. The property was subsequently left vacant for the next five years until a new development company stepped in. Construction resumed in 2013 and, after several delays, the redesign was finally unveiled this past May.
That redesign turned out to be a complete gutting. Sadly, the resort no longer resembles its former self in the slightest. And while the remodel is undeniably beautiful, I much preferred the look of the place in its old state.
I am of the opinion that a hotel should embrace the city it is located in. If I am staying in a hotel in New York, I want to know I’m in New York. If I check into a resort in Seattle, I want to know I’m in Seattle. While some desert elements were incorporated into the new design of the Ritz, nothing about it says “Palm Springs” to me. The place has more of a generic feel. Walking through the lobby, I felt as if I could have been anywhere – Arizona, Pasadena or even Hawaii for that matter.
I was completely obsessed with the hardwood flooring, though. Gorge!
The outside remodel was also disappointing. The resort’s exterior space used to be much more open, with green rolling lawns as far as the eye could see. Today, the property is partitioned into several different areas and, while each section is beautiful, I prefer a sprawling look.
One thing that hasn’t changed, though, is the view. The Ritz, which sits atop a 650-foot bluff, still boasts some of the best panoramas in the entire Coachella Valley.
Trista and Ryan’s wedding, which was televised by ABC (of course), took place on December 6th, 2003. The lavish affair cost a reported $4 million, with some 30,000 roses flown in from Ecuador and Holland for the occasion. The Lodge was shut down to the public for a whopping four days during the event. You can check out some photographs of the nuptials here.
The couple was married on The Lodge’s east lawn, in a spot adjacent to the resort’s popular wedding gazebo. Sadly, that gazebo, and the entire lawn area, in fact, were dismantled during the renovation. The former location of the gazebo is denoted with a pink arrow in the image below and the area where Trista and Ryan’s nuptials took place is denoted with a pink “X.” You can check out some photographs of what the east lawn used to look like here.
That same spot post-remodel is pictured below. While it used to consist of a large sprawling lawn, today it is made up of a pool . . .
. . . and a large AstroTurf (I know, gross!) lounge area.
It is also now surrounded by hotel wings on three sides (one of the wings is a new addition) and, therefore, not as open as it once was.
Trista and Ryan are hardly the only celebs to have stayed at the resort. A few of the other luminaries who have walked the halls include Brad Pitt, Jennifer Aniston, Jennifer Lopez, former president Gerald Ford, John Travolta, Bruce Springsteen, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Kathy Ireland.
On an exciting side-note – this Thursday morning at 8 a.m. PST, I will be a guest on my favorite desert radio show, “The Bill Feingold Show Featuring Kevin Holmes” on K-News 94.3. (That’s me with Bill “Bulldog” Feingold below.) You can listen to it live online here.
For more stalking fun, be sure to follow me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Los Angeles magazine online. And you can check out my other blog, The Well-Heeled Diabetic, here.
Until next time, Happy Stalking! 
Stalk It: The Ritz-Carlton, Rancho Mirage, aka the place where Trista Rehn and Ryan Sutter got married, is located at 68900 Frank Sinatra Drive in Rancho Mirage. You can visit the resort’s official website here.
WeScoutLA – Episode 2
Mike, from MovieShotsLA, and I just completed our second filming locations video – about locales in the Simi Valley area. You can watch it by clicking above or on our YouTube channel here. Enjoy!
The Racquet Club of Palm Springs
On July 24th, while waiting in line for my morning coffee, my eyes wandered over to a nearby newspaper stand and landed on the headline Historic Racquet Club Hotel Destroyed in Fire. My heart immediately sank as the now vacant Racquet Club of Palm Springs is not only steeped in Hollywood history, but is rumored to be the spot where Marilyn Monroe was discovered in 1949. The thought that it had been decimated was devastating. My mom and I finally made it over there to survey the damage while we were in the area last week and found that the headline had been a bit exaggerated. Thankfully, the destruction was not nearly as bad as had been reported.
[ad]
I first stalked the Racquet Club in October 2008 (you can read that post here) and, despite the fire which gutted one structure and harmed three others, it looks much the same today as it did back then. In fact, while I was there with my mom, I could not figure out which of the buildings had been lost in the blaze. It was not until I got home and compared aerial views to news photographs that I was able to pinpoint it. The edifice destroyed was a two-story structure comprised of hotel rooms that had been built years after the Racquet Club initially opened. It is denoted with a pink arrow below. Thankfully, the property’s pool, its infamous Bamboo Room restaurant (where the Bloody Mary was invented), the bungalows and the Albert Frey-designed Schiff House remain intact.
That being said, the structures that do still stand are not in great shape and haven’t been for years.
The members-only Racquet Club of Palm Springs was founded by actors Charlie Farrell and Ralph Bellamy (who played James Morse in Pretty Woman) in 1934. At the time, the 53-acre site consisted of two tennis courts and a snack bar. Bellamy and Farrell sold off a majority of the land shortly after the club’s opening, leaving behind 11 acres. A pool was added to the property in 1935, the Bamboo Room in 1937 and 35 guest cottages in 1946.
Due to the fact that the public was kept out, the Racquet Club became an instant celebrity hot spot. Such stars as Audrey Hepburn, Lucille Ball, Desi Arnaz, John Barrymore, Natalie Wood, Robert Wagner, Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, Debbie Reynolds, Eddie Fisher, Elizabeth Taylor, Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn, Carole Lombard, Clark Gable, Rita Hayworth, Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh all spent time there. Their goings-on were reportedly quite raucous – so much so that The Charles Farrell Show, a television program based upon the club’s revelries, soon hit the airwaves. (The pictures below were taken during my 2008 visit.)
Legend has it that my girl Miss Marilyn Monroe was discovered by the Racquet Club of Palm Springs’ pool. (You can see the pool in the pictures below, which were also taken during my 2008 stalk.) As the story goes, photographer Bruno Bernard brought a blue bikini-clad Marilyn to the club as his guest and snapped images of her standing in heels on the property’s diving board. It did not take long for William Morris agent Johnny Hyde to sit up and take notice. He became enamored with the young starlet and quickly took her under his wing. The rest is history. You can read a story about the Racquet Club encounter, told by Bernard’s daughter, here.
The Racquet Club went through a succession of different owners in its later years and, though its popularity had waned, it continued to be successful for the most part. In 1977, the site was purchased by M. Larry Lawrence, the same real estate developer who in 1973 restored San Diego’s Hotel Del Coronado (another Marilyn Monroe locale) and turned it into a premiere destination. Lawrence did not have the same luck with his Palm Springs acquisition. In 1986, he decided to open the property to the public. The club’s heyday had long since passed, but its loss of exclusivity delivered the final blow. The bungalows were eventually auctioned off to individual buyers. The public areas were then sold in 1999 to developer Bernard Rosenson who planned to turn the premises into a gay and lesbian retirement community. Rosenson spent three years and millions of dollars restoring the historic club, but his idea never took off and the site was shuttered in 2003. At some point thereafter, it went into foreclosure and was taken over by the bank.
New owners purchased the club from the bank in 2011 and, while there were talks of restoring it, it has been left untouched ever since, sitting vacant and dilapidated with no sign as to what its future holds. I sincerely hope someone steps in soon to rehabilitate the historic property. I, for one, would love to sip a Bloody Mary in the very room where the drink was created and jump off the very diving board on which Marilyn Monroe was discovered.
For more stalking fun, be sure to follow me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Los Angeles magazine online. And you can check out my other blog, The Well-Heeled Diabetic, here.
Until next time, Happy Stalking! 
Stalk It: The Racquet Club of Palm Springs is located at 2743 North Indian Canyon Drive in Palm Springs.
New “Los Angeles” Magazine Post – About Magic Mountain’s Colossus
Be sure to check out my latest Scene It Before post – about Colossus roller coaster from Step by Step – on LAMag.com. My columns typically get published in the late morning/early afternoon hours.