Sweet digs: Tarantino scouted Hawthorne to find just the right apartment for his title character, a stewardess making $16,000 a year.
-- Geoff Boucher
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L.A.'s story is complicated, but they got it
The city has been a main character in many films of the last 25 years. Our film crew picks the best. It's a tough list to crash.
MOVIES
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Wednesday, September 03, 2008 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 1 inches; 55 words Type of Material: Correction
Los Angeles movies: An article in Sunday's Calendar about the best films of the last 25 years set in the Los Angeles area said of "The Big Lebowski" that Lebowski's mansion was on the Westside. The movie locates it in Pasadena. Also, it said "Training Day" was released in 1991. It was released in 2001.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Sunday, September 07, 2008 Home Edition Sunday Calendar Part E Page 2 Calendar Desk 1 inches; 51 words Type of Material: Correction
Los Angeles movies: An article last Sunday about the best films of the past 25 years set in the Los Angeles area said of "The Big Lebowski" that the millionaire Lebowski's mansion is on the Westside. The movie locates it in Pasadena. Also, "Training Day" was released in 2001, not 1991.
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4 "Boyz N the Hood" (1991)
Arriving with a shotgun blast in the same year as the Rodney King beating, "Boyz N the Hood" captures a uniquely Angeleno experience that no mainstream movie before it dared touch -- the first all-African American feature about South-Central L.A.'s urban strife to be bankrolled by a major studio. A cinematic counterpart to gangsta rapper Eazy-E's slice-of-ghetto-life anthem "Boyz-N-the-Hood" (penned by rap icon Ice Cube, who, sporting an extravagant Jheri curl, also plays one of the movie's dramatic leads), "Boyz" helped cast the city's national identity in the buildup to the 1992 L.A. riots. That is to say, the coming-of-age drama distilled certain cultural touchstones to their representational essence: the incessant overhead hum of police helicopters, the weekend ritual of cruising Crenshaw Boulevard (and resulting gang tensions) and L.A.'s hard summer sunlight bearing down on South-Central's sleepy, manicured bedroom community -- not to mention vividly rendering the terror and post facto misery of a drive-by shooting.
Phone check, homie: According to John Singleton, executives for Columbia Pictures, the studio distributing the film, stopped dropping by the set in South-Central after he told them horror stories about drive-by shootings and murders in the neighborhood.
-- Chris Lee
5 "Beverly Hills Cop" (1984)
Who can forget Eddie Murphy tooling down Beverly Drive in his "crappy blue Chevy Nova," flirting with a girl in a tan convertible? Or discussing art with a marbled-mouth gallerist (Bronson Pinchot)? Just listening to the soundtrack with the synth-tinged instrumental "Axel F" and "The Heat Is On" can bring back visions of Reagan and suits with giant shoulder pads. This Oscar-nominated film (yes, really) presents L.A. as glossy studio fantasy with a fish-out-of-water twist, where a street-wise hustling cop from the mean streets of Detroit can outsmart, outtalk and outmuscle the lily-livered cops of the Beverly Hills Police Department. And yes, Murphy's Foley can talk himself into a suite at the Beverly Hills Palm (actually, downtown's Biltmore Hotel) by claiming to be a reporter from Rolling Stone there to interview Michael Jackson. When rebuffed by officious staff, Murphy retorts, "I was gonna call the article 'Michael Jackson Is Sitting on Top of the World,' but now I think I might as well just call it 'Michael Jackson Can Sit on Top of the World Just as Long as He Doesn't Sit in the Beverly Palm Hotel 'Cause There's No . . . Allowed in There!' " (OK, so Murphy's R-rated diatribe is a little too spicy for this family-friendly paper. To hear his full speech, you'll have to rent the DVD.)
