A funny moment that made it into the movie trailers is when they are speeding in the Black Beauty,
and realize that their photo has been taken by a red light camera at an intersection.
Kato pushes a button, firing a missile that blows up that camera.
That intersection is actually the corner of Hawthorne Blvd & Lennox Blvd, in Lennox, CA.
They are traveling north on Hawthorne Blvd, and have just passed Lennox Blvd when
they stop and destroy the camera. That's just north of the Century (105) Freeway.
The car wash you see behind the explosion is the Lennox Car Wash, at 10709 Hawthorne Blvd.
Here is a matching Google StreetView panorama.
Later, we see Lenore's (Cameron Diaz's) home. Or at least part of it.
From what we can see, it appears to be a Victorian, with a white picket fence and a porch.
This 1911 Victorian cottage is located at 1333 6th Avenue, in Venice, CA.
It's on the west side of the street, just north of California Avenue. But the front porch
we see is tucked away in a garden behind the main home at that address.
If you'd like, you can actually rent it for a few nights.
You can find the details (and some good photos) here.
( Thanks to Mike of MovieShotsLA.com for this tip. )
The bad guys arrange a meeting with the Green Hornet at an empty lot.
Thanks to Britt's stupidity, they walk right into a trap. Two cement mixers pin the car
between them, then a truck rams them into a deep hole, and a bulldozer buries them with dirt.
They escape when Kato fires all of the car's missiles, literally blowing them out of the grave.
(Here is a Google
StreetView of the lot.)
Eventually, the crooked D.A. invites Britt to a meeting at a Japanese restaurant,
having already hired the Green Hornet to kill him (not knowing they are one and the same).
The D.A. confesses to having murdered Britt's father, before Kato shows up.
That's a real restaurant. They even used its real name in the movie.
It's called Gonpachi, a restaurant specializing in sushi & soba, located at
134 N. La Cienega Blvd, on Restaurant Row in Beverly Hills.
That's just north of Wilshire Blvd, next to Lawry's Prime Rib.
[They have their own website here.]
(Here
is
a
Google
StreetView panorama of the restaurant.)
The movie climaxes with a very long chase/battle between the main bad guy
and the Green Hornet & Kato.
In the screencap below, they have fired upon the bad guy's truck, and he crashes into a bus.
They shot that bus crash scene in the 2600 block of Riverside Drive,
where the street runs right next to (south of) the Golden State (5) Freeway.
(In fact, a sign on that freeway can be seen above the bus in the screencap.)
That's about midway between Dodger Stadium and the L.A. Zoo,
and about a mile southwest of Forest Lawn Glendale.
The truck is traveling southeast on Riverside Drive in the screencap above.
Here's a
Google StreetView of that street, including the freeway sign.
The cleverest use of a location that I've seen in a while comes during the movie's long freeway chase scene.
Not many people would guess that these scenes weren't shot
on a freeway at all, but on the roof of a mall garage!
That's right, what we're seeing in the screencaps above isn't a freeway, it's the roof of a very
long parking structure at the Hawthorne Mall, at 12000 Hawthorne Blvd, in Hawthorne, CA.
Now, at first, that may sound impossible. But bear in mind that when they film on an actual freeway,
they are often limited to using only about a quarter mile of it - and only for a short time.
The Hawthorne Mall is a particularly long mall, running along the east side of Hawthorne Blvd
from 120th St to Broadway - about (you guessed it) a quarter of a mile in length.
Behind the mall, to its east (along Birch Ave) is the equally long parking structure.
Its roof is flat, and it's three levels high, so all they needed to do was add a center divider
and some cars, and (voila!) you have a quarter mile of "freeway" - to use as long as you want.
The Hawthorne Mall was built in the 1970's, in a low-income area. Economic conditions
worsened with the construction of the 105 freeway nearby, and with the 1991 riots.
The mall closed in the 1990's and has sat empty ever since, except for occasional
filming. They filmed part of Tom Cruise's "Minority Report" there in 2002.
(It's just over a mile south of the intersection where they filmed
the scene of Kato blasting the red-light camera.)
(Here
is
a
Google
StreetView of the old mall, as seen from Hawthorne Blvd.)
They also used the ground-level driveway between the Hawthorne mall and its parking structure for
several other scenes in the movie. In the screencaps below, the mall is to the left, while the parking garage
is to the right. (Note the spiral ramps, and walkways leading between the mall and the parking structure.)
