The hotel where Harry (Robert Downey Jr.) stays - and where he finds the
dead body planted in his room - is actually The Standard, located at
550 S. Flower St., in downtown L.A., at the east corner of S. Flower & W. 6th.

This unique rooftop scene was also shot at The Standard downtown,
up on the hotel's popular roof bar & pool area.

And if you're wondering about that sunny yellow cafe, where Harry and Harmony
(Michelle Monaghan) talked and watched a TV news broadcast, that was also
shot at The Standard downtown, in the hotel's lobby restaurant.

Don't worry - not everything in the movie was shot at The Standard.

Take that Hollywood house where the Christmas party was going on, for instance -
the one where Harry meets Harmony and Gay Perry (Val Kilmer)...

In the director's commentary, Val Kilmer tells us that the party house was located in
the town where Val grew up: Chatsworth, CA (in the N.E. San Fernando Valley),
across the street from the old Roy Rogers ranch house.  Roy's house is located
on the south side of (the aptly named) Trigger Street, just west of Andora Ave.,
near Oakwood Cemetery (where Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers are buried).

When the police are closing in, Harry and Perry throw the corpse (which was
planted in Harry's hotel room by the bad guys ) out the window.  When they go to
recover the body, they are spotted by the cops (leading to that funny kissing scene).

But the alley where they retrieve the body isn't really outside of the Standard Hotel.
In fact, it's about four blocks southwest of the hotel.

The screencaps here show that the Los Angeles Theatre is at one end of the alley,
and "A.A. Jewelry Tools & Findings" is at the alley's other end.

The Los Angeles Theatre is located at 615 S. Broadway, in downtown, while
"A.A. Jewelry Tools & Findings" is located at 319 W. 6th Street. So that
alley appears to be between Broadway and Hill, and 6th and 7th Streets, which
would make it St. Vincent Place, just south of 6th Street, in the Jewelry District.

Believe it or not, this ratty looking alley has some historical significance in L.A.
From 1868 to 1887, it was the site of St. Vincent's College, the first college in all
of Southern California (it later became Loyola-Marymont University, and
is now located near Marina Del Rey).

In the photo above, the camera is looking north / northeast.
In the photo below, the camera is looking south / southwest.
*

Harmony's apartment, where she is surprised by an intruder, then sees the "Protocop"
costumed character fall out of her window, was filmed in one of the ocean-facing
apartment houses on Ocean Front Walk between Washington Blvd
and Venice Blvd, in Venice, CA, just north of the Venice Pier.

The park scenes, where Harmony goes at night to warn Perry about an ambush,
(and where she beats up a would-be hit-man), were shot at MacArthur Park
("is melting in the dark..."), located just west of downtown L.A.

The park is between 6th and 7th streets, bounded on the west by Park View St.,
and on the east by Alvarado St.  The official address is at 2230 West 6th Street.
*

When Harmony is seen leaping the fence (in her Santa outfit), that wide street she
crosses is Wilshire Blvd, which runs right through the middle of MacArthur Park.
In the photo above, it appears that we are looking south, across Wilshire to the lake.

The underpass that we see Perry walk through passes below Wilshire Blvd.

Warning: In the past, MacArthur Park has been the scene of drug selling and gang activity.
There have been efforts made to clean up the park and make it safe, but exercise reasonable caution
(and don't even think about walking through that park underpass after dark...)

*

While Harry and Harmony are in the yellow cafe, they see a TV news broadcast
showing Harlan Dexter (Corbin Bernsen) and his daughter coming out of a courthouse.

That brief scene was shot in front of the Santa Monica County Building,
at 1725 Main Street, in Santa Monica.

The climactic chase & shoot-out scenes at the end (with the car crashes, the coffin, and
Harry dangling from a freeway overpass sign) were all filmed in Long Beach, CA,
in that beach city's southwest corner. (If you've been to the Long Beach Aquarium
of the Pacific or to Shoreline Village, you know the general area.)

In the photo above, the camera is looking north up Queensway Branch, just south
of Ocean Blvd. (Queensway Branch is the south end of Magnolia Avenue.)

In the photo below, Harry hangs from a traffic sign above the eastbound lanes of west
Shoreline Drive. The bridge he's hanging from is the southbound Queensway Branch,
where it spans Shoreline Drive. (The signage has since been changed.)

That overpass is just south of the California Bank & Trust building, and just before one reaches
(west of) the Long Beach Aquarium and the white roller-coaster bridge that spans Shoreline Drive.

*  Locations marked by an asterisk (*) may be located in high-crime areas.
Exercise reasonable caution.

More movie locations!

Most of photos on this page are stills from the DVD of "Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang"
(which you can buy by clicking here) and are copyright Warner Bros.

The rest of the page is Copyright © 1999-2024-Gary Wayne/ Seeing-Stars.com