Murder One – IAMNOTASTALKER

Last Thursday afternoon, before grabbing lunch at Pinches Tacos from The Hills which I blogged about on Tuesday, Mike, from MovieShotsLA, took me by a famous apartment complex in West Hollywood named the Harper House. Because the Spanish Baroque-style building was featured in Scream 3 (as well as countless other productions), Mike thought that I might be interested in blogging about it during my annual Haunted Hollywood month this upcoming October (and yes, I am already gathering locations for that!). After seeing the place in person, though, I became just a wee bit intrigued by it and started doing research immediately. So I figured that now was as good a time as any to do a post on the historic building.

The Harper House, which was built in 1929, was designed by Leland Bryant, the very same architect who also gave us the art deco-style Sunset Tower Hotel, one of my very favorite places in all of Los Angeles that I blogged about way back in September of 2008. The complex was originally constructed to provide housing for show business and studio professionals and such luminaries as silent film actress Norma Talmadge and silent film actor Gilbert Roland once called the place home. The four-story, 21-unit, L-shaped building, as well as the entire block that it is located on which is known as the North Harper Avenue Historic District, was added to the National Register of Historic Places on June 28, 1996.

Mike had actually just recently scouted the Harper House a few weeks before taking me there and was nice enough to share the above photographs that he snapped of the building’s elevated central courtyard area, which is absolutely idyllic. It is no wonder that so many movies have been filmed on the premises!

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The Harper House pops up twice in Scream 3. It first shows up at the very beginning of the movie as the building where Cotton Weary (Liev Schreiber) and his girlfriend, Christine Hamilton (Gossip Girl’s Kelly Rutherford), are murdered.

I am fairly certain that the real life interior of one of the apartments was also used in that scene. As you can see in these CurbedLA pictures of the inside of an actual Harper House apartment, the fireplace, doors, windows, and stairway railings all match up to what appeared onscreen.

The exterior of the Harper House next pops up in the scene in which Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) watches the news about Cotton’s murder on TV.

In the 1988 flick Cop, the Harper House was where Lloyd Hopkins (James Woods) investigated a murder at the very beginning of the movie.

The real life interior of one of the apartments was also used in the filming of that scene.

In 1989’s The Big Picture (which is a FABULOUS movie, by the way), the interior and the exterior of the Harper House stood in for the building where up-and-coming film director Nick Chapman (cutie Kevin Bacon – sigh!) moved after breaking up with his longtime girlfriend, Susan Rawlings (Emily Longstreth).

In 1991’s The Last Boy Scout, the Harper House is where murdered stripper Cory (Halle Berry) lived and where Joe Hallenbeck (Bruce Willis) and Jimmy Dix (Damon Wayans) go to investigate her killing.

Oddly enough, though, the interior of Cory’s apartment and her balcony were a different location entirely. As you can see in the above screen shots, the windows of Cory’s bedroom and the railings of her balcony do not match up with the actual building.

In the pilot episode of Murder One, which was titled “Chapter One”, the Harper House was where Jessica Costello (Collette White) was killed. Solving her case became the central storyline of the series’ first season, but the exterior of the building was actually only shown once, in the brief scene in which Ted Hoffman (Daniel Benzali) watched a news story about the murder while at home with his wife, Annie (Patricia Clarkson), and his daughter, Elizabeth (Vanessa Zima).

The real life interior of one of the units also appeared in that episode in the flash back scene in which Richard Cross (Stanley Tucci) recounts how he discovered the body.

And brief glimpses of the Harper House were also shown each week during the Murder One opening credits.

The Harper House was also featured in 1978’s The Big Fix, 1982’s Partners, and as the building where Alice Pieszecki (Leisha Hailey) lived on the Showtime series The L Word, but, unfortunately, I could not find copies of any of those productions with which to make screen captures for this post.

Big THANK YOU to Mike, from MovieShotsLA, for telling me about this location, for the photographs of the building’s courtyard and for making the Cop screen captures which appear in this post! Smile

Until next time, Happy Stalking! Smile

Stalk It: The Harper House, from Scream 3, is located at 1334/1336 North Harper Avenue in West Hollywood. Pink Taco, aka the former site of the Roxbury, is located just up the street at 8225 West Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood. You can visit the official Pink Taco website here. And Pinches Tacos, from the “It’s On Bitch” episode of The Hills, is located just around the corner at 8200 West Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood. You can visit the official Pinches Taco website here.

Because we are currently knee deep in the middle of the Christmas Season – which just so happens to be my favorite season 🙂 – I decided to focus my next few blog posts on locations featured in holiday movies. And what better way to start off those Christmas posts than to blog about Nakatomi Plaza, the main building featured in the 1988 movie Die Hard. OK OK, so yes, it can be argued that Die Hard is not your traditional holiday flick, but because the entire movie takes place on the night of Christmas Eve and because Christmas music is played throughout, I deemed the production to be holiday-blog-worthy. 🙂 As surprising as it may sound, I had actually never seen Die Hard until just this past October, when my friend Robin came to visit and pretty much forced me to sit through the movie in its entirety. And, let me tell you, after it was over, I was just itching to stalk the Fox Plaza building in Century City, which stood in for Nakatomi Plaza in the flick. Fox Plaza, which measures 492 feet tall and houses a whopping 900,000 square feet of office space!!!, is the current headquarters for the 20th Century Fox film corporation. The Plaza was designed in 1987 by architects William L. Pereira, Scott Johnson, and Bill Fain. Pereira was also responsible for designing such landmarks as the Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco, the Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim (LOVE IT!), and the Geisel Library – named after Theodore Geisel, aka Dr. Seuss – on the campus of UC San Diego, which just so happens to be my alma mater! 🙂 Geisel Library has actually been featured in several productions, including the movie Killer Tomatoes Strike Back, but I’ll save that information for a future post 🙂

Die Hard takes place, pretty much in its entirety, on location at Fox Plaza. For the movie, both the interiors and the exteriors of the building were used. I am fairly certain, though, that the interiors of the actual Nakatomi offices, where the holiday party scenes took place, were sets that were built on a studio soundstage on the 20th Century Fox lot.

Unfortunately, most areas of the building that were featured in Die Hard are not accessible to the public. In the second aerial image of Fox Plaza pictured above, the pink arrow depicts the entrance to the building that can be viewed from the street and from where I took the photographs featured in this post, while the purple arrow denotes where most of the filming of Die Hard took place. As you can see, they are on opposite sides of the property.

The areas of Fox Plaza used in Die Hard include the building’s porte-cochere,

the revolving front doors of the main entrance;

the front desk;

the elevator bay;

and the main lobby, which we were able to snap a few photographs of through the building’s front windows. While taking said photographs, my fiancé and I were confronted by a VERY angry security guard who was obviously wearing his underpants too tight that day, because he literally came running after us to inform us, not so politely I might add, that if we did not vacate the premises immediately, we would be escorted off the property and our camera confiscated!!! I’ll never understand why people like that get so bent out of shape at us stalkers! If you’re going to put your building in a movie – in what is arguably the most famous action flick of all time, no less! – then you’ve gotta expect that people are going to want to stalk the place! It’s only natural. Geez! 😉

And, while the roof of Nakatomi Plaza was completely blown off at the end of Die Hard, that, of course, did not take place in real life. A scale model was used during the filming of the explosion scene and I am happy to report that the real Fox Plaza roof is one hundred percent intact. 😉

According to Wikipedia, the lobby of the Fox Plaza building was also used in the beginning elevator scene from the movie Speed, but that information is actually incorrect. After recently re-watching Speed, it is clear that both the interior and exterior of the Gas Company Building in Downtown Los Angeles were used for that scene. If you compare the above pictured screen captures to these photographs of the Gas Company Building, you can see that they are a perfect match. I must say that I was more than just slightly peeved to discover this erroneous information on Wikipedia, being that the encyclopedia website has apparently banned my blog from being cited as a source, deeming me “unreliable”! LOL So let me get this straight – I’m considered unreliable, but the douche bag who put up the Speed information is completely credible! Nice job, Wikipedia! Way to sift through your sources! 😉 Also according to Wikipedia (so who knows if this information is correct), Fox Plaza was featured in the 1994 movie Airheads and a cartoon rendering of it was shown in the Season 7 episode of Family Guy entitled “Fox-y Lady”. The building was also used as the law firm where Anthony LaPaglia worked in the television series Murder One. And, in real life, Ronald Reagan set up his main offices in the 34th floor penthouse of Fox Plaza following his presidency.

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Until next time, Happy Stalking! 🙂

Stalk It: Fox Plaza, aka Nakatomi Plaza, is located at 2121 Avenue of the Stars in Century City. Please remember that Fox Plaza is private property, so if you decide to stalk this location, DO NOT trespass, or you will be escorted off the premises and your camera confiscated. Don’t say I didn’t warn ya! 🙂 The Gas Company Tower from the beginning of Speed is located at 555 West 5th Street in Downtown Los Angeles.

Tag: Murder One

The Harper House from “Scream 3”

Nakatomi Plaza from “Die Hard”