The
hit 2002 sci-fi epic "MINORITY REPORT,"
was set in Washington D.C., and filmed in part in Virginia and DC - but
a fair share of the filming was done right here in L.A.:
- For instance, take the futuristic-looking high-rise
where (in the precogs' visions) the movie's pivotal murder is supposed
to take place, where 'John Anderton' (Tom Cruise)
shoots and kills a man he has never met, sending the victim flying
back, smashing through a glass window. Near the end of the movie, Tom returns
to that same tower to confront his fate.
That high-rise is actually Angelus Plaza
at 255 S. Hill Street (between 2nd
and 3rd Streets), in downtown Los Angeles.
In real life, it's a condo building for the elderly.
- The garden scenes where 'John Anderton' (Tom Cruise)
visits the private garden of 'Dr. Iris Hineman' (Lois Smith),
the eccentric woman who invented the Pre-Crime system, were shot on location
at Descanso Gardens, a lush, public
oasis located at 1418 Descanso Drive,
in the city of La Cañada-Flintridge
- just northwest of Pasadena. (Of course, the garden's vines don't
really come alive and attack you. ;)
- Later in the movie, Tom Cruise takes the rescued
pre-cog, 'Agatha' (Samantha Morton),
to an indoor mall ("Mall City"), where a scuzzy friend of
his helps him download and rerun her visions of the lakeside murder. Afterward,
hoping to escape, Tom & Agatha make their way back through the
crowded mall, using
Agatha's precognitive advice to guide them past the police who are looking
for them there...
Those mall scenes were shot inside a real mall: the Hawthorne Plaza
Mall, located on Hawthorne Blvd
at 120th Street, in Hawthorne, California
(just southwest of L.A.) Although it looks busy in the film, the Hawthorne
Mall is actually a failed center which has been closed and vacant for several
years. The producers temporarily brought it back to life with faux
shop signs and facades, and a host of actors posing as shoppers. (But don't
bother going there, the mall is closed down and boarded up again. Plans
call for it to eventually reopen as a mixed-use office/retail building.)
- Much
of the movie was set in of what is supposed to be the decaying city core
of a future Washington, D.C. But actually, most of these exterior
urban scenes were shot on the east side of downtown
L.A, some near Skid Row, including the rocket-pack chase
scene and the scene where the robotic spiders invade a run-down rooming
house.
While I don't suggest venturing into that part of town, shooting locations
there included 433 Main Street
(*),
434 S. Spring Street (*),
320 Santa Fe Avenue (*),
900 Avila Street (*),
Harlem Place from 4th Street to
5th Street (*),
7th Street from Hill Street to
Broadway (*),
and St. Vincents Court from
7th Street north to its end (*).
They also filmed at the former El Dorado
hotel an historic, 12-story old high-rise
located at 416 S. Spring Street,
in the downtown's old Financial District. *
- Of course, much of the film was shot in the studio
on specially constructed sets, and enhanced with CGI. 20th Century Fox,
which co-made the film with DreamWorks, doesn't have much room anymore
on what remains of its back lot (having sold off almost all of it for the
Century City development). And DreamWorks doesn't even have a studio of
its own. So, for the rocket-pack chase scene up the brownstone, for instance,
they built a huge, multistory grid on the back lot of the Warner Bros
studio (in Burbank) where they could suspend Tom and the flying cops on
wires, next to an outdoor set of the righ-rise brownstones.
|