99% Invisible - 172- On Location

Episode Date: July 15, 2015

So many classic movies have been made in downtown Los Angeles. Though many don’t actually take place in downtown Los Angeles. L.A. has played almost every city in the world, thanks to its diverse landscape and architectural variety, but particular … Continue reading →

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. So many classic movies have been made in downtown Los Angeles, even if they didn't take place in downtown Los Angeles. It's always fun when you're watching a movie that takes place in New York and you spot a palm tree. It's like, I gotcha! Palm trees are just one of the factors that a location scout has to worry about. For most films, they really have to avoid them. Laurie Bolton is a location scout in LA.

She's worked on Inception, Heat, a river runs through it, a whole lot of movies. She was the first ever location professional ever asked to join the Academy. You're not the only one. I am the only one the first and the only one, yeah. On location with Lori is producer Avery Troubleman. Lori's job is to find interesting, plot- conducive locations, lots of them. I frequently will show someone over a hundred different options for one location, you know, before they get a sense of what they want. But Scouts also have to make sure that the locations they find are actually usable. So a big part of Lori's job is convincing property owners to say yes,

a part which she is really, really good at. I have a question. Maybe I'll have a ride answer. Okay, the ride answer is yes. Yeah, that's your first one. I just want to show her that she's from Oakland. I want to show her. Lori sweet talked our way up to the top floor of City Hall,

up to a panoramic view of Los Angeles. So great, River. So LA has its problems, but I think any location person you talk to is just really proud of the city and the variety of locations and how much fun it is to drive around and discover things. From the top floor balcony, we could see the massive city unfurling around us. And Lori pointed out all of her favorite locations.

There's so much variety here, it's amazing. But even with all the architectural variety of Los Angeles, some buildings just keep coming back on screen, again and again. Those architectural gems are very particular and very kind of binding. It's someone's watching it for like you know 10 minutes going my god this feels so familiar. What is this location? I know I know it and then all of a sudden it's like oh my god that's the Brad very building. The Bradbury building.

Arguably the biggest architectural movie star of Los Angeles. It's one of Lori's favorite locations. It can be modern, it can be period. It's kind of upscale steampunk. The iron work, the open balconies, it's just a beautiful building. The Bradbury made its first on-screen appearance in 1943 in the movie China Girl when it played a Burmese hotel. It played a London military hospital in Whitecliffs of Dover.

It was the background of the film noir style thriller D.O.A. in 1950. Is the Marlowe? Yes. In the 1969 movie Marlowe, Bruce Lee steps into an office of the Bradbury and kicks all the furniture apart. It played an office again in the final scene of 500 days of summer. Nice to meet you. I'm Autumn. It was a movie studio in the artist.

It was a chocolate factory in a recent commercial for Twix. But the Bradbury's most famous role of all was as the Toy Makers house in the 1982 movie Blade Runner. I love it when it's filling up my stuff. movie Blade Runner. In Blade Runner the Bradbury is a dark moody ruin, which seems like some real Hollywood magic when you see what the building actually looks like. From the outside the Bradbury just looks like a brick office building, at the corner of third and Broadway downtown. Kind of unremarkable, but then you step inside and it's like, ah, there's this great biblical shaft of light shining through it. It's basically a tall narrow courtyard, walled in with terracotta covered with a glass

ceiling and flanked by two iron clanking hydraulic powered elevators, the kind that are still run by human operators. Avery wrote in one when she visited the building. Thank you. There's a reason the Bradbury isn't so many films. For one, it's really beautiful. Its floors are tile, its steps are marble, and each floor rims the atrium with a layer of ornate, wrought iron balcony.

But it's not just aesthetics. You have the balcony as in all of the different levels and you can shoot a cross and down in a catty corner. The balcony is allowed the crew to shoot at many different angles and create a whole range of different moods for various genres. The romantic comedy would probably be straight on. The horror movie would be more shooting up, shooting down, maybe that sense of vertigo. And the Bradbury can accommodate all the film gear.

They just have to get in so many toys, you know, the lights and the boom arm and this and that. But look at the ceiling height, this is great. Also, the Bradbury is near a parking lot, which is surprisingly crucial, because a film shoot involves vans and trailers and tons of people and tons of equipment and the parking lot is the place to put it all.

It's also nice that the Bradbury is close to downtown and the crew can just go grab lunch. There's nothing like it in Los Angeles and I'm so glad it's still here. That's Kim Cooper, architectural historian. She brought me back to the Bradbury, along with her husband, Richard Schaeve. We are founders of Esaturk, which is a bus tour company that gives tours of Los Angeles, focusing on architecture, true crime, and literature. Three elements which all come to a head in the Bradbury building. The Bradbury opened in 1893, way before the movie's ever came to LA. And for the record, it's not named after the sci-fi novelist Ray Bradbury.

It's named for Lewis Bradbury, a gold mining millionaire. In the mid-1890s, Mr. Bradbury decided he was going to build building. But his name on it, because he was an important man that built up the city. So, in 1892, Bradbury commissions this big, the old famous architect, Sumner Hunt, to design his building. But Bradbury didn't like any of the plans that Hunt showed him.

Bradbury, disappointed, turns to leave Hunt's office. But as he goes out, for some reason, his eyes caught by one of Hunt's draftsmen, this young guy named George Wyman. He's 2930. He has no professional training yet. He has an architect and no one knows why. But Bradbury takes Wyman, pulls his sleeve, and says, I have an offer to make to you.

Well, that offer is completely impossible and inappropriate. He wants to hire this kid, who isn't an architect, to build this very important half-million-dollar-off his building. And this young guy, George Wyman, is a bit weirded out, understandably, because he is totally unqualified for this job.

And he didn't want it to seem like he was taking business away from his boss. But on the other hand, this opportunity was incredible. It's a near-resistible offer, but George Wyman is an ethical man, and he's also scared to death. And so he does what any good Angelina will do in the very late 19th century, which is he will consult dead relatives. Spiritualism was huge at this time, and George Wyman thought that his deceased brother, Mark, might have some wisdom to offer from the afterlife.

So Wyman sits down with a planned shed, a precursor to a Ouija port, which wrote out sentences with a pencil when you rested your hands on it. Planchettes would typically be consulted when someone had an issue that they wanted some guidance on. So he and his wife were sitting together saying, what on earth should I do about Mr. Bradbury's wonderful terrifying offer? The planchette overcome with the spirit of Wyman's dead brother began to lose.

And it wrote, take Bradbury in a very childish script hand. You will be... Just this nonsense script. And Wyman and his blah, blah, blah, blah. Just this nonsense script. And Wyman and his wife were like, what? And it was when one of the two of them walked around the other side of the table and read it upside down, this palm or type script actually said successful. Take Bradbury. You will be successful.

That was a clear enough message for Wyman. He says yes to Bradbury. The design of the Bradbury was directly inspired by a novel, looking backwards by Edward Bellamy, which was written in 1887. But in it, there is a description of a building in the year 2000. The future! What Wyman was trying to do with this building, I think we can answer just simply by reading the passage, a vast hall full of light, received not alone from the windows on all sides, but from the dome. So that's what this building does. And that's why even though the breadberry is quite old by

California standards, it feels current. It was designed for the year 2000. It's this blend of styles that makes it an architectural gem. But aside from the occasional film shoot, the building spent a lot of its life totally ignored. This building by late 40s, early 50s is once described as a chicken coop. And that just refers to the dustiness and the sort of untightiness. By 74, this place has really fallen apart. So when Ridley Scott shot Blade Runner in its central atrium, it wasn't actually that hard to make it look so shabby.

A Blade Runner, that was just amazing. That was before we'd actually fix it up, and you can tell that from the movie. This is Adele Yellen. I no longer own the building, but my husband bought the building in the late 80s and he retrofitted it. Adele's late husband, Ira Yellen, spearheaded LA's downtown revival by restoring old historic buildings and turning them into housing and businesses. But the Bradbury was just a jewel and he wanted to work on it and he felt if you build it they will come. So I don't know, they ultimately came, but he did have to use the city to help him.

Ira Yellen asked if the city of Los Angeles could find a steady tenant for the Bradbury. He ended up getting the police department. Most of the office space in the Bradbury building belongs to the Internal Affairs Division of the LAPD. Yeah, they're there all the time and they don't mind the filming generally. That's Eric Bender. He now handles all the filming requests for the Bradbury.

Well, we do a police drama. We take extra precaution to make sure they know that we're filming and the person running around with a gun, type of thing is not. I get very concerned about that. But filming isn't the priority for the property anymore. Since it's renovation, the tenants needs come first. We try not to bother the tenants too much, so we try to do the filming or not do more than one or two filming projects per month. And generally, this is the case throughout buildings downtown.

Now that people live and work there, they don't want production crews periodically taking over. These days, film crews can't blow up cars in the street or have 300 zombies stampied down Broadway in the middle of the work day. The downtown revival is a part of why filming is leaving Los Angeles. It laughed.

I mean, there's no feature film shooting here. I've, uh, uh, uh, it's scary. Because as I said, I love living here, and I would like to continuously think in my bed if possible. Location Scout Laurie Balton just spent almost a year scouting and shooting in Atlanta, Georgia, which might just become the new Hollywood. Because I've spent so much time in Atlanta, it's like, I'll look at a movie and go, oh yeah,

that's Atlanta, you can't fool me. Atlanta, like a lot of other cities in the South, Midwest, and Canada, is offering major incentives to encourage filming. These tax breaks can save producers millions of dollars. I don't understand how these places are not going broke giving the incentives that they are. Cities like Atlanta are also developing state-of-the-art studios and attracting good production talent. We really need to do everything we

can to keep filming in LA, which would mean making the public more open to the disruptive film shoots and keeping the costs of permits down and adding new tax incentives and to stop developing so rapidly. What's happening in LA is we're losing a lot of our parking lots. They'll tear them down and book-putting buildings up. So that's so funny to hear people bemoan the loss of parking lots. Not people.

Location people. There's a difference. We're kind of a weird breed. But however, state-of-the-art studios in Atlanta, Toronto, or Chicago are becoming, there are elements of Los Angeles that cannot be replicated, even on the finest sound stage, like the experience of entering the Bradbury building. It's a place so unique, so remarkable, that after it was built, the draftsman, George Wyman decided to take some classes and actually become an architect. 99% Invisible was produced this week by Avery Troubleman with Katie Mingle,

Sam Greenspan, and me Roman Mars, Special thanks this week to Linda Dishman, head of the LA Conservancy. We are a project of 91.7 local public radio KALW San Francisco and produced out of the offices of Arxine, an architecture and interiors firm in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. You can find this show and like the show on Facebook, all of us are on Twitter, Instagram, and Spotify, but to find out more about this story including cool pictures and links and listen to all the episodes of 99% invisible. You must go to 99i.org Radio Tapio. From PRX.

Thanks.