Sarah Jessica Parker filming locations

May 3, 2013May 3, 2013

The California Colonic Institution from “L.A. Story”

When I began my search for all of the missing L.A Story locations a few weeks back, I emailed about a million-and-a-half screen captures to fellow stalker Mike, from MovieShotsLA, in the hopes that he would be so inclined to help me out with the hunt. Thankfully, he was. One locale that we found at the exact same time (we literally texted each other with the address at the same moment!) was the California Colonic Institution, where SanDeE* (my girl Sarah Jessica Parker) took Harris K. Telemacher (Steve Martin) for a high colonic, aka an enema, in the 1991 flick. While I had known that the site was located somewhere along Venice Beach and had tracked it down by looking up and down the coastline using Google Maps, Mike had actually recognized the place immediately thanks to the fact that, unbeknownst to me, it had also appeared in the 1993 thriller Point of No Return. How random is that? So, while in SoCal this past weekend, I ran right out to stalk it. (I am amazed that I was able to snap the above photograph sans any people, by the way! Anyone who has ever experienced the hustle and bustle of Venice Beach knows what a feat that was!)

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In real life, the California Colonic Institution from L.A. Story is known as the Blu House (or the Nike Blu House, as Nike, Inc. used the site as office space for many years) and, at over a century old, is one of the most historic residences still standing in Venice Beach. The two-story bungalow was originally built in 1901 and since that time it has served as everything from an event venue (one fete was even hosted by Jerry Springer, apparently!) to a clothing store to an art gallery to a medical marijuana facility. And while several websites have also stated that both Jim Morrison and Charlie Chaplin lived on the premises at different points in time, I believe that information is actually incorrect.

The beachfront house, which boasts three bedrooms, one bath, 2,656 square feet of living space, a 1,500-square-foot deck, and a tiny 0.10-acre plot of land, currently serves as the headquarters for Snapchat – at what is apparently a rate of $20,000 a month!

The California Colonic Institution only shows up once in L.A. Story and very briefly at that, in the scene in which SanDeE* takes Harris on a date . . . for an enema. Romantic, huh? It is there that SanDeE* says of the experience, “God, it really clears out your head!” To which Harris says, “Head? Head? You should go back in there and tell them they’re doing it wrong.” LOL

Only a very tiny portion of the property, namely the front porch area, was shown during the scene.

That front porch in its current state is pictured below. As you can see, while the front doors have changed from a single door to double doors, the site still looks pretty much exactly the same today as it did in 1991 when L.A. Story was filmed.

Because so little of the residence was shown, I was only able to pinpoint its location due to the fact that it was apparent from the filming that the front door was situated at an angle diagonal to the boardwalk, as you can see below. Thankfully, only one property in Venice fit that description.

I also matched up the buildings that were visible in the background of the scene. Ironically enough, while doing research on the Blu House, I learned that the brick building located just north of it is known as Gingerbread Court and was apparently built by none other than Charlie Chaplin.

It was not until making screen captures for today’s post that I spotted an address number of 523 behind Steve Martin in the scene. D’oh! Would have made my search so much easier had I realized that earlier!

I am fairly certain that the same location was used for the brief montage scene in which SanDeE* attended a spokesmodel class in the movie. The palm trees visible through the windows and the framing of the interior French doors seem to match up to those of the Blu house. That is just a hunch, though.

In Point of No Return, the Blu House was where assassin Maggie Hayward (Bridget Fonda) rented an apartment upon arriving in Venice Beach.

As you can see below, the property still had a single front door at the time of the filming.

I am guessing that the interior of Maggie’s apartment was just a set and not the actual interior of the Blu House.

According to the Venice-Mar Vista Patch, the Blu House was also the setting of an MTV summer reality series, although I am unsure of which one.

You can find me on Facebook here and on Twitter at @IAMNOTASTALKER. And be sure to check out my other blog, The Well-Heeled Diabetic.

Big THANK YOU to Mike, from MovieShotsLA, for helping me to find this location! Smile

Until next time, Happy Stalking! Smile

Stalk It: The Blu House, aka the California Colonic Institution from L.A Story, is located at 523 Ocean Front Walk in Venice Beach.

April 15, 2013April 12, 2013

Now! Clothing from “L.A. Story”

My second most-wanted location from the 1991 classic comedy L.A. Story was Now!, the ultra-hip clothing store with unisex dressing rooms where SanDeE* (my girl Sarah Jessica Parker) worked. (My first most-wanted was, of course, the iconic freeway sign that I blogged about last Thursday.) So I was floored to see that the locale was included in “The L.A. of L.A. Story” special feature on the movie’s 15th Anniversary Edition DVD. In the feature, which was lensed in 2006, production designer Lawrence Miller said, “This was a clothing store at the intersection of La Cienega and Santa Monica Boulevard and is now, regrettably, a Sav-on drug store.” I was shocked to learn this information as Now! had always looked like a Venice Beach-type shop to me and I had even spent quite a bit of time looking for it in that area. D’oh! Well, believe you me, once I had the correct address, I immediately added it to my To-Stalk list and ran right out there just a few days later, while in L.A. for a brief visit. It was not until I started doing research for today’s post, though, that I discovered what a ridiculously vast history the place has – such a vast history, in fact, that while I had intended on publishing this column last Friday, I was still compiling information at 8 p.m. on Thursday night and had to postpone it until today.

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Now! clothing is currently a CVS pharmacy. (CVS Caremark acquired all Southern California Sav-on drug stores in 2006.) Amazingly enough, though, it still looks almost exactly the same today as it did 22 years ago when L.A. Story was filmed! But more on that later.

The location has gone through many different incarnations during its lifetime, each of them quite unique and notable. It was originally constructed in 1940 as a 22-lane bowling alley named La Cienega Lanes, which you can see a photograph of here.

La Cienega Lanes, which was owned at one point by Art Linkletter, was featured numerous times in the 1956 thriller Man in the Vault, as the hangout of locksmith Tommy Dancer (William Campbell). Both the exterior . . .

. . . and the interior of the alley appeared in the movie.

La Cienega Lanes closed sometime in the late 1970s. In July 1979, music producer Denny Cordell opened a private, members-only “roller boogie palace” named Flippers at the site. The exclusive club, which had a cap of 1,000 members who paid $200 annually plus a $7 entrance fee for each visit, boasted a bar, a restaurant, a custom skate shop, and a skating floor made of polyurethane. You can check out a photograph of the exterior of the rink in all of its bright blue and purple glory here. By February 1980, the tropical-themed club ceased being a members-only institution and was opened to the public. It also became a popular concert venue at that time, with such legends as The Go-Go’s, John Cougar, The Ramones, and Prince on the line-up. The band Cerrone even featured the exterior of the rink on the cover of their 1984 album Club Underworld. Flippers was also a major celebrity hot spot and in its heyday such stars as Cher (who was rumored to be part-owner of the place), Olivia Newton-John, Cheryl Ladd, Loni Anderson, Robin Williams, Jane Fonda, Aretha Franklin, Jacqueline Bisset, Patrick Swayze, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar all got their skate on there.

Flippers has a bit of a filming history, as well. The club was featured in the Season 4 episode of Charlie’s Angels titled “Angels on Skates”, in which the Angels – Kelly Garrett (Jaclyn Smith), Kris Munroe (Cheryl Ladd), and Tiffany Welles (Shelley Hack) – investigated the kidnapping of a young skater named Rita Morgan (Lory Walsh).

The interior of the roller disco was also used in the episode.

Fellow stalker Mike, from MovieShotsLA, let me know that Flippers was also featured in the Season 3 episodes of CHiPs titled “Roller Disco: Part 1” and “Roller Disco: Part II”. Unfortunately, Season 3 of CHiPs has not yet been released on DVD, nor is it available for streaming on iTunes, Amazon, or Netflix, but I was able to make the grabs below thanks to the Melissa Sue Anderson Fan website.

According to both Wikipedia and IMDB, the roller disco set from Skatetown, U.S.A. (which was built inside of the Hollywood Palladium) was based on the real life interior of Flippers, but I think that information is actually incorrect. Flippers opened its doors in July 1979 and Skatetown was released just a mere three months later, in October 1979. Being that movies typically take at least eight months to edit, even if they had done a rush job on the flick, the timing simply does not add up. Not to mention that the Skatetown set looks nothing at all like Flippers.

And while a few websites have stated that 1979’s Roller Boogie was filmed at Flippers, that information is also incorrect. The exterior roller rink scenes from the movie were shot at at Moonlight Rollerway in Glendale, which I blogged about back in October 2010.

I am unsure of where the interior scenes were filmed, but, as you can see below, it was not Flippers. According to a poster named “Wanda Pr of Arlington” on Flickr, who was in the movie, the interiors were shot at “an old dance hall on Sunset.”

For whatever reason, Flippers did not last long. In 1983, the space was purchased by Doug and Susie Tompkins, owners of the popular San Francisco-based Esprit de Corp. clothing brand. The site was to become the company’s first freestanding retail store. The couple quickly began a $15-million, 15-month renovation of the building and hired famed designer Joseph D’Urso to carry it out. He remodeled both the interior and the exterior of the property and added a three-story, 150-space parking lot (pictured below). The 32,000-square foot store, which became Esprit’s flagship, opened in December 1984.

According to a 1985 Milwaukee Journal article, D’Urso designed a swirling ramp at Esprit’s entrance to provide handicapped access as well as a “ceremonial route” to the double front doors.

He also designed a small “tree-shaded plaza” in the hopes that “people would feel more protected from the traffic” cruising by on the busy Santa Monica and La Cienega Boulevards.

It was during its time as an Esprit store that the building was used in L.A. Story. The location popped up twice in the movie, first in the scene in which Harris K. Telemacher (Steve Martin) went shopping with his girlfriend, Trudi (Marliu Henner), and wound up meeting SanDeE*, who sold him a pair of white pants. Only the interior of the store was shown in that scene.

In “The L.A. of L.A. Story”, Lawrence Miller stated that the interior, which featured Zolatone walls, metal catwalks, and black waxed cement, was left pretty much as-is for the shoot. He also said they were “blessed” to such a find such a perfect interior in which to film and that it worked perfectly as “part of the build-up” to Harris and SanDeE* meeting in an environment that “shows how inappropriate she is”. Man, what I wouldn’t give to have seen that interior!

Harris later returns to Now! to pick up his pants, which were being altered, and it is in that scene that the exterior of the building is shown. As you can see below, aside from a few very minor changes, the site stills looks exactly the same today as it did then!

As you can imagine, I could hardly contain myself when I arrived at CVS and saw how much it still looked like Now! SO INCREDIBLY COOL! It was all I could do not to start spinning out in front of the store like SJP did in the flick. Winking smile

Despite immense popularity among the teen set, Esprit de Corp. suffered a major downfall in the late ‘80s, due in large part to Doug and Susie’s messy divorce, and the flagship store closed its doors in 1994. The site sat vacant for a decade, despite talks of the city of West Hollywood purchasing it to use as their City Council chambers and a library. Sometime in 2004 or 2005, the building was turned into a Sav-on. Thankfully, though, the exterior was left intact for all of us stalkers to appreciate. And, according to this April 2013 article on the WeHoVille blog, the shadow of the Esprit sign is STILL visible on the side of the building! I so wish I had known that before stalking the place! For those who are interested, the shadow is located on the eastern-most side of the parking structure. You can just barely see it in the Google Street View image below.

You can find me on Facebook here and on Twitter at @IAMNOTASTALKER. And be sure to check out my other blog, The Well-Heeled Diabetic.

Until next time, Happy Stalking! Smile

Stalk It: Now! Clothing from L.A. Story, aka CVS pharmacy, is located at 8491 West Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood.

January 9, 2013January 8, 2013

El Pollo del Mar from “L.A. Story”

One location that I had been dying to find for years was El Pollo del Mar (yes, that translates to The Chicken of the Sea LOL), aka the supposed Santa Barbara-area resort featured in the 1991 flick L.A. Story. Try as I might, though, I just could not seem to track the place down. So, when a fellow stalker named Scott wrote a comment on my L.A. Story gas station post informing me of the site’s location, my head just about exploded from excitement! In reality, the Mediterranean-style hotel is an absolutely gargantuan private residence that overlooks the Pacific Ocean in Long Beach. Never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined that El Pollo del Mar was a) someone’s home (!!!) and b) located in the LBC. I honestly would have bet money on the fact that it was an actual hotel in Santa Barbara. Mind officially blown! And while I was chomping at the bit to stalk the locale just as soon as Scott told me about it, because I do not get down to the Long Beach area very often, I was not able to do so until this past December.

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Sadly, the El Pollo del Mar house is located on a gated street, so only a small portion of it is visible to the public. Man, what I wouldn’t give to see the inside of that thing!

In real life, the gargantuan residence, which was originally built in 1926 and is named Casa Oceana, boasts three bedrooms, five baths, 7,576 square feet of living space, and a 1.28-acre plot of seaside land.

El Pollo del Mar pops up towards the end of L.A. Story as the charming resort where disgruntled weatherman Harris K. Telemacher (Steve Martin) takes his girlfriend SanDeE* (my girl Sarah Jessica Parker) for the weekend. While there he runs into his dream girl, Sara McDowel (Victoria Tennant), who is on a reconciliation trip with her ex-husband, Roland Mackey (Richard E. Grant). Drama, of course, ensues. As you can see below, the property is absolutely huge and can easily masquerade as a hotel. In fact, I am surprised that it hasn’t been used more frequently in productions.

And, as I mentioned, while the majority of the residence cannot be seen from the road, I was BEYOND floored to discover that the front gate . . .

. . . and archway that appeared in the movie were visible. Yay!

And for the rest, there’s always Bing Aerial Views! I still can’t believe the place is a private house! I mean, look at that thing!

I am kicking myself for not having walked down to the beachside of the property while we were there because it, too, appeared in L.A. Story, in the scene in which Harris and Sara get into a fight over their respective significant others.

All of the interior El Pollo del Mar scenes were filmed (I believe) twenty miles north of Long Beach at the now-defunct Ambassador Hotel, which used to stand at 3400 Wilshire Boulevard in Koreatown.

You can find me on Facebook here and on Twitter at @IAMNOTASTALKER. And be sure to check out my other blog, The Well-Heeled Diabetic.

Big THANK YOU to fellow stalker Scott for finding this location! Smile

Until next time, Happy Stalking! Smile

Stalk It: The El Pollo del Mar hotel from L.A. Story is actually a private home located at 20 37th Place in Long Beach.

September 4, 2012September 3, 2012

Molly Malone’s from “Patriot Games”

Way back in mid-June, while trying to track down the Irish pub that masquerades as Scully’s bar on fave show Parks and Recreation (a location that I still have, maddeningly, yet to find, by the way), I came across a website for a Fairfax District-area watering hole named Molly Malone’s. The website mentioned that the historic establishment had been featured in several movies over the years, including Patriot Games, Leaving Las Vegas and Life Without Dick. And even though I am not particularly a fan of any of the three flicks, I just about died of excitement upon reading the news and immediately added the place to my To-Stalk list. Why, oh why, do more bars and restaurants not post similar such information on their websites? It would make my job so much easier! Winking smile And while I was not able to drag the Grim Cheaper out to stalk Molly’s until two Saturdays ago, I have to say that the place was most-definitely well worth the wait.

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Molly Malone’s, which is located at 575 South Fairfax Avenue, was originally founded sometime (I believe) during the 1960s. In 1970, the place was taken over by a Dublin-born homemaker named Angela Hanlon, who had come to Los Angeles via Baltimore with her entertainer husband. Finding herself homesick for her native land, Hanlon one day ventured in Molly’s and quickly became a regular. And although there are several differing reports as to how Hanlon came to own the watering hole, the story I like best, which was chronicled in a 1997 Los Angeles Times article, is that, on one very fateful day, Hanlon loaned Molly’s then-owner money and when he skipped town shortly thereafter, the place wound up in her hands. Molly Malone’s has been owned and operated by the Hanlon family ever since.

The space at 575 South Fairfax housed bars long before Molly Malone’s was ever founded, though. According to a 1995 Los Angeles Times article by Hillary Johnson, legend has it that the 575 Club, one of the many watering holes to precede Molly’s, was actually one of the first to be given an alcohol license after Prohibition.

Molly Malone’s dark walls are covered with over seventy original paintings – almost all of them renderings of the bar’s regular customers – created by legendary oil painter Neil Boyle, who was a loyal patron of the drinkery for decades until he passed away in 2006. Lorraine Devon Wilke writes in a 2011 Huffington Post article, “For an artist whose pieces command phenomenal fees, who was always in demand for murals and commissioned work, and whose work hangs in galleries and museums around the country, the prestige of showcasing such valuable art was undeniable to Molly’s. Some patrons came in simply to view Neil’s paintings. It was a draw. Literally.”

In the 1995 LA Times article that I mentioned above, author Hillary Johnson states, “A sign on the wall says, ‘Dublin, 40 km.’ Some would say it’s closer.” And I would have to agree with that sentiment. As soon as we walked through Molly Malone’s dark wooden front door, we were welcomed like old friends. And when I asked the bartender on duty about the various movies filmed on the premises, he came out from behind his post, grabbed me by the hand and proceeded to take me on a tour of the place. And he even introduced me to Molly’s former longtime manager, who just happened to be on site that day, to see if he could answer any more of my questions! Talk about hospitality! Love it!

Besides being a filming location, Molly Malone’s has also long been popular with the Hollywood set. According to the former manager that I spoke with, Lenny Kravitz, Daniel Day-Lewis, Liam Neeson, Mickey Rourke, and Ralph Fiennes have all been spotted there. The place is also a live music venue and boasts a large back room, complete with a stage, where many young musicians have gotten their start.

The band Flogging Molly not only cut their teeth at the bar, but named themselves in honor of it. Of the name, front-man Dave King said, “We used to play there every Monday night and we felt like we were flogging it to death, so we called the band Flogging Molly.” Love it!

In 1992’s Patriot Games, Molly Malone’s was the Irish pub where Jack Ryan (Harrison Ford) threatened to destroy Paddy O’Neil (Richard Harris) after O’Neil refused to tell him the whereabouts of Sean Miller (Sean Bean) and Kevin O’Donnell (Patrick Bergin).

While numerous websites state that either Boardner’s of Hollywood (which I blogged about here) or Cock ‘N Bull British Pub in Santa Monica was the bar featured in the opening scene of 1995’s Leaving Las Vegas, that information is actually incorrect. The bar in question was actually Molly Malone’s and it popped up twice in the flick, first in the scene in which Ben Sanderson (Nicolas Cage) rather aggressively purchases a random woman named Terri (Valeria Golino) a drink before inviting her home with him.

It next appeared in the scene in which the “L.A. Bartender” (Graham Beckel) urged Ben to stop drinking once and for all.

Molly Malone’s also popped up twice in 2002’s Life Without Dick. It first appeared in the scene in which hitman Daniel Gallagher (Harry Connick Jr.) asked his friend Rex (David Cross) to get rid of a gun. Both the exterior . . .

. . . and the interior were used in that scene.

Molly’s next popped up in the scene in which Daniel finally admitted to his new girlfriend, Colleen Gibson (my girl Sarah Jessica Parker), that he was a hitman.

The exterior of Molly’s also appeared in that scene, as well.

You can find me on Facebook here and on Twitter at @IAMNOTASTALKER. And be sure to check out my latest post – about a nightmare experience at the DMV – on my other blog, The Well-Heeled Diabetic.

Until next time, Happy Stalking! Smile

Stalk It: Molly Malone’s, from Patriot Games, is located at 575 South Fairfax Avenue in the Fairfax District of Los Angeles. The bar is a 21-and-over establishment, so, if you are going to stalk it, you will have to leave the kiddies at home. You can visit Molly Malone’s official website here.

July 20, 2012July 19, 2012

The Venice Beach Cotel – aka SanDeE*’s Apartment from “L.A. Story”

One location that I have been dying to track down ever since first moving to Southern California in 2000 was the apartment building where SanDeE* (my girl Sarah Jessica Parker) lived in the 1991 classic comedy L.A. Story. (And yes, that is the correct spelling of her name – as she says in the movie, “Big s, small a, small n, big d, small e, big e, and there’s a little star at the end”. LOL) I knew that the building was located somewhere in Venice, but because I do not know the area very well and rarely venture out there, I had a hard time tracking it down. So imagine my excitement when, a couple of years ago, I came across a blurb about the place in fave stalking book Hollywood Escapes: The Moviegoer’s Guide to Exploring Southern California’s Great Outdoors. As it turns out, SanDeE*’s apartment building is none other than the Venice Beach Cotel on Windward Avenue. And while I immediately added the address to my To-Stalk list, I was not able to get out there until this past Saturday afternoon when Mike, from MovieShotsLA, and I were doing some stalking in the area.

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Venice Beach actually has a very interesting history – one which involves the Cotel. The city was dreamed up by a wealthy tobacco heir/real estate developer named Abbot Kinney, who wanted to establish “The Venice of America” right here in Los Angeles. In the early 1900’s, he purchased some coastal acreage, most of it marshland, south of Santa Monica and proceeded to create a replica of the Italian city. The marshes were drained and transformed into eight miles of canals (a popular filming location, which I will be blogging about soon), complete with imported gondolas and singing gondoliers. A 1600-foot fishing pier was also constructed, along with carnival rides, a large beachside pool, and an indoor saltwater pool known as “The Venice Hot Saltwater Plunge”. The focal point of Kinney’s city, which was opened to the public in 1905 and was nicknamed “The Playland of the Pacific”, was Windward Avenue, a main street lined with beautiful neo-Italianate, columned buildings and sweeping archways as far as the eye could see. The buildings housed everything from luxury restaurants and shops to hotels, one of which was the ritzy St. Charles. Today, that site is known as the Venice Beach Cotel and it is the city’s oldest hotel.

Sadly, while St. Charles was once luxurious and upscale, it fell into decline, along with the rest of the city, shortly after Abbot Kinney’s death in 1920. And while Venice Beach has experienced a resurgence of sorts in recent years, the property is still a bit seedy. And what does the word “Cotel” mean, you ask? According to the hostel’s website, “The name Cotel comes from the prefix ‘co’, meaning getting together (people), which is what we are all about!”

The infamous mural that dominates the west side of the Cotel is named “Venice Reconstituted” and it was originally painted in 1989 by muralist Rip Cronk. It looks quite a bit different today than it did in L.A. Story, though, because in 2010, Cronk restored the huge painting, renamed it “Venice Kinesis”, added and deleted a few figures, and moved it up an entire story in a futile attempt to keep it out of reach of taggers.

There is also a 102-foot by 50-foot mural that covers the east side of the Venice Beach Cotel, but it, too, has been re-visioned. The piece was originally painted in the early 1900s by Terry Schoonhoven and was a view of what Windward Avenue looked like at the time. You can see a historic photograph of it here. Sadly, the work deteriorated and faded considerably over the years, so, in early 2012, artist Jonas Never covered over it with a new mural named “Touch of Venice” that was inspired by Touch of Evil, Orson Welles’ 1958 film which was shot in its entirety in the beachside city.

In L.A. Story, the Venice Beach Cotel is where SanDeE*, the dimwitted, colonic-loving girlfriend of wacky weatherman Harris K. Telemacher (Steve Martin), lived. The building and Rip Cronk’s mural popped up a few times in the flick.

I cannot tell you how absolutely devastated I was when I saw that SanDeE*’s front doorway had since been removed, as I had so wanted to reenact the image below. Sad smile

As I later discovered, though, SanDeE*’s (and I cannot express what a pain in the a** it is to type that name out repeatedly! Winking smile ) doorway was never actually there, but was a façade that was added solely for the movie. You can check out some pictures of the building from the same time period that L.A. Story was filmed here, here, and here, which show that the doorway never actually existed. BOO!

L.A. Story was hardly the first film to shoot at the Cotel. In 1958’s Touch of Evil, which as I mentioned above, was shot in its entirety in Venice, the building stood in for the Ritz Hotel in the fictional border town of Los Robles, where Susan Vargas (Janet Leigh) was threatened by drug kingpin “Uncle” Joe Grandi (Akim Tamiroff) while on her honeymoon.

As an homage to Touch of Evil, the Cotel doubled as The Ritz Hotel once again in the opening scene of the 2001 flick Double Take.

As you can see below, an exact replica of the “Ritz Hotel” sign from Touch of Evil was created for Double Take. So cool!

In 1968’s I Love You, Alice B. Toklas!, Harold (Peter Sellers) shops at what he calls a “hippy supermarket” set up in front of the Venice Beach Cotel.

In the opening scene of 1992’s White Men Can’t Jump, Billy Hoyle (Woody Harrelson) parks in front of the hotel and then throws his basketball up against Rip Cronk’s mural as he walks by.

In 1993’s Point of No Return, Maggie Hayward (Bridget Fonda) walks by the building upon first arriving in Venice.

Rip’s mural showed up very briefly in an establishing shot in 1992’s Venice/Venice . . .

. . . which starred a very young David Duchovny.

According to Hollywood Escapes, the Venice Beach Cotel is also visible in the 1983 remake of Breathless, but, unfortunately, I could not find any copies of it with which to make screen captures for this post.

And on a Sarah Jessica Parker side-note – My good friend Steffi, who lives in Switzerland and is even more Sex-and-the-City-obsessed than I am (if that’s possible), texted me the below picture yesterday. Um, LOVE IT, LOVE IT, LOVE IT!

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 don’t forget to take a look at my other blog, The Well-Heeled Diabetic, here.

Until next time, Happy Stalking! Smile

Stalk It: The Venice Beach Cotel, aka SanDeE*’s apartment building from L.A. Story, is located at 25 Windward Avenue in Venice. You can visit the hostel’s official website here.

October 1, 2009November 15, 2009

The Vera Wang Flagship Salon

While I realize that today should really be the start of my annual, month long “Haunted Hollywood” theme, since I am on a plane right now headed to Manhattan, I decided to write a post about New York, my favorite city in the world, instead. 🙂 And since I’ve had weddings on the brain ever since getting engaged this past May, what better way to start my New York blogging than to write about the bridal salon that puts all other bridal salons to shame- the Vera Wang Flagship Store on Madison Avenue. 🙂 Even though there is no way in heck I could ever afford to purchase a Vera Wang wedding gown (let’s face it, I probably couldn’t even afford the sleeve of a dress in that store! LOL), I deemed the location to be blog-worthy since it appeared in a Season 3 episode of fave show Sex and the City. So, here goes! (Please excuse the above photograph, as it was taken on a particularly windblown New York City day a few years back, and my hair is a bit, um, ruffled.) 🙂

In the episode, which is entitled “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”, Carrie and the girls head to the Vera Wang Flagship Salon to try on some absolutely gorgeous bridesmaids dresses for Charlotte’s upcoming nuptials to Dr. Trey MacDougal. It is while trying on the dresses that Carrie laments over whether or not to tell Aidan about her recent affair with Mr. Big. As the girl discuss the pros and cons of coming clean with Aidan, Samantha, of course, resorts to using foul language, causing Charlotte to whisper “Could you please not use the ‘F word’ in Vera Wang!” LOL LOL LOL

Even though Charlotte specifies in the scene that they are at Vera Wang, I wasn’t sure if filming had actually taken place at the legendary Madison Avenue salon until I was able to verify it in the locations section of fave book Sex and the City: Kiss and Tell. And once I knew for sure, I, of course, immediately dragged my then-boyfriend out to the Vera Wang Flagship Store to snap a quick picture. 🙂 Unfortunately, though, because the store is a ” by appointment only” establishment, I wasn’t able to venture inside. 🙁 And being that I stalked the place LONG before I was engaged and had any sort of need for a wedding dress, there was really no reason for me to make an appointment. LOL Such a bummer, too, because I so wanted to see the spot where Carrie and the girls tried on their dresses. I did manage to grab the above photograph of the interior of the Madison Avenue store off of the company’s website, though, and you can kind of catch a glimpse of where filming took place. 🙂

You can also sort of see the store’s interior in the above photograph that I took last December.

Until next time, Happy Stalking! 🙂

Stalk It: The Vera Wang Flagship Salon is located at 991 Madison Avenue in Manhattan. You can visit their website and make an appointment to try on wedding gowns here.