The Green Hornet - Filming Locations (part 2)

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Part 2

The Southern California locations where 2011's
"The Green Hornet" was filmed.

After Britt decides to become a crimefighter, they go out cruising for trouble, and come across
a group of gang members/drug pushers hanging out on a corner, in a bad neighborhood.
They pick a fight, and manage to win it - learning the name of the guys' supplier in the process.

Pushers on street corner

This scene was shot at the southwest corner of Huntington Drive South & Tourmaline Street,
on the border between the Lincoln Heights & El Sereno neighborhoods of East L.A.

The lot with the building seen above is at 4285 S. Huntington Drive.

That's about 2 1/2 miles east of Dodger Stadium, and about 3 1/2 miles northeast of downtown L.A.

Here is a matching Google StreetView panorama of the corner.

( Thanks to Mike of MovieShotsLA.com for this tip. )

They then drive through the side of a residential home housing a meth lab (in a residential house),
intimidate the lab geek there, then blow the place up as they leave. (The lab geek makes it out alive.)

Frat House party

They shot that scene in (of all places) an abandoned neighborhood of former U..S. Naval housing,
or to be more exact, at one of the many identical houses on USS Princeton Court, in San Pedro, CA.

USS Princeston Court is only one of several streets in this neighborhood named after historic Navy ships.
Nearby are USS Missiouri Street, USS New Jersy Street, etc.

Doing some research on the area, it appears to be part of the Defense Fuel Support Point (DFSP),
which stores jet fuel and waste oil for military use. The homes (formerly known as San Pedro Housing)
were constructed in 1962 by the Navy to house personnel stationed at the Long Beach Naval Shipyard.
But for some reason, the Navy housing facility was closed in 1999, and it has now gone to seed.

In the screencap above, it appears that they have added a fake room to the side of the house,
which is where they staged the crash & the explosion. They also added a fake security door with
iron bars, to make it look more like a meth lab (the real door is just to the left of the fake one).

[ Update: in 2014, they began demolishing these Navy homes, in preparation for a new
'Ponte Vista' housing development that will be built on the San Pedro property. ]

Here is a matching Google StreetView of one of the houses.

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.

Frat House party

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.

Frat House party

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.

Frat House party

That empty lot is supposedly at "5th & Union". But that's not where they filmed the scene.

The lot can actually be found in the mid-Wilshire district of Los Angeles, bounded by:

the 4500 block of W. Pico Blvd (on the north),
the 4600 block of Venice Blvd (on the south),
and the 1300 block of West Blvd (on the east).
and the Pico-Rimpau Transit Center (on the west).

It's about half-way between Wilshire Blvd and the Santa Monica (10) Freeway.

(Warning: Google photos seem to indicate that something is being
built on that lot. So it might not stay empty for long...)

( In the screencap above, the camera is looking south/southwest.
The houses seen in the background are around 4561 W. 16th Place. )

(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.

funeral

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.

Dad's house

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.)

The photos on this page are stills from "The Green Hornet"
(which you can buy by clicking here) and are copyright Sony Pictures.