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Seeing Stars: Where the Movies Were Shot (on Location)
1987
- Mel & Danny
get a call that takes them to a tall white building where a man
is threatening to jump off the roof.
Mel goes up to try to talk him down, but crazy Mel ends up handcuffing
himself to the guy and forcing him to jump off the roof with him (fortunately,
they land safely on a police air bag).
That white building
that they jumped from was the Emser Building,
at 8431 Santa Monica Blvd,
in West Hollywood.
(That’s at the northeast corner of Santa Monica and Olive Drive, two blocks
east of La Cienega Blvd.)
[ Emser,
by the way, is a company that sells tile and natural stone. ]
In the photo above, the camera is looking
east - and they jump west, towards N. Olive Drive.
- After that stunt,
we see poor Danny off to the side of the road, on a
freeway overpass, talking on the
phone (about crazy Mel) to the police psychologist .
That overpass is actually the Universal
Studios Boulevard overpass, spanning the
Hollywood (101) Freeway,
as the freeway cuts through the Cahuenga Pass from Hollywood to the
Valley, next to Universal Studios Hollywood.
In the photo
above, the camera is looking west/northwest.
- Our heroes decide
to talk to the witness, a hooker who they encountered outside the crime
scene, so they go to Dixie's house,
in a poor neighborhood. After talking with some kids playing on the corner,
they walk towards the small, white house, when it suddenly explodes!
That exploding
house was located at 4251 111th Street
(at the northeast corner of 111th & Larch Avenue), in Lennox, CA.
Unfortunately,
that small white house no longer exists (which shouldn't come as a big
surprise). The house, and all the other houses on the block (to its
east and north), were torn down to make room for a new school: Moffett Elementary
School, at 11050 Larch Ave,
in Lennox.
Likewise, the
houses across the street (on the south side of 111th Street), where
the kids were playing, were also torn down, to make way for the school’s
parking lot. The location is just one street north of the Century (105)
Freeway. *
- The next location
is a sea change... going from the tiny house in Lennox to a
mansion perched on a cliff overlooking the Pacific.
This is the home of the victim’s father Michael Hunsaker, a wealthy
man, who, it turns out, is involved in running the drugs that killed
his daughter. While Mel and Danny are there, they are attacked by a
gunman in a helicopter who strafes the house with bullets, killing the
father.
This cliff-top
mansion is located on the coast, at 2817 Via Segovia,
atop the hills of Rancho Palos Verdes.
That's at the tip of Via Segovia, just
west/southwest of Paseo Del Mar (and north of the Point Vicente lighthouse and south of Rocky Point.
[ Warning: This
is a private home. Do not trespass on their property, knock on their door,
or do anything else that might disturb the residents. ]
- Mel & Danny
escape the helicopter attack, but the bad guys keep gunning for them.
Mel goes to interview
another hooker (at night, in the rain) on a city street corner, and a bad
guy in a car speeds past and shoots him in the chest, knocking him back
through a store’s plate glass window. (Mel survives because he was wearing
a bullet-proof vest.)
That drive-by
shooting scene was filmed at the intersection
of 3rd Street &
S. Sweetzer Avenue,
in West Los Angeles. (That’s five blocks east of the Beverly Center
mall, and about seven blocks west of Farmers Market
& The Grove.)
Here's how the action played out:
- When we first
see Mel, he's walking east on the north side of 3rd Street,
just west of Sweetzer Ave.
- He stops
at the northwest corner of 3rd & Sweetzer to talk to the
hooker.
- Suddenly, a
car comes from the south down Sweetzer, heading north through
the intersection.
- A gunman in
the back seat of the car shoots Mel with a shotgun, blasting him back through
the glass window on the east side of the corner store at 8303 W. 3rd Street.
(At last check, that address currently houses an interior design gallery
named OK.)
- The car then
U-turns and heads back south up Sweetzer.
- After Danny
gets Mel to his feet, they begin walking back west down 3rd Street.
Click
here for
a map of the various action points in this scene.
- Believing that
Mel is dead, the bad guys go after Danny, and kidnap his teenage daughter,
forcing Danny to go out to the middle of the desert to meet them and make
an exchange - his life for hers. The bad guys show up with several cars
and a helicopter. A fire fight breaks out, but in the end, Mel, Danny and
his daughter are all captured.
This desert fight
scene was the only scene in Lethal Weapon shot outside of greater
Los Angeles.
They filmed it at El Mirage,
a huge dry lake bed northwest of Victorville, California,
which is about 100 miles northeast of Los Angeles.
Click
here for more Lethal Weapon Locations
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* Locations marked by an asterisk
(*) may be located in areas with high crime rates.
Exercise reasonable caution.
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