World Film Locations: Los Angeles

Fifty synopses of film scenes alongside insightful location essays and evocative full-color film stills.

This is an engaging and highly visual citywide tour of well- and lesser-known films shot on location in the birthplace of cinema and screen spectacle. The heart of Hollywood’s star-studded film industry for more than a century, Los Angeles and its abundant and ever-changing locales—from the Santa Monica Pier to the infamous and now-defunct Ambassador Hotel—have set the scene for a wide variety of cinematic treasures, from Touch of Evil to Chinatown, They Live! to the coming-of-age classic Boyz n the Hood.

With its meandering and beautifully fractured topography, Los Angeles continues to lure filmmakers into its clutches, affording an endless panoply of locations to prop up both character and story. This second volume of World Film Locations: Los Angeles expands the careful curation of the first volume to further reveal both the famed and hidden parts of a city in constant flux. Since the first volume’s publication in 2011, thousands of new productions have made the most of what the city has to offer, using, reusing, and uncovering places that will surely become sites of pilgrimage in years to come.

Insightful essays and interviews throughout turn the spotlight on the important directors, iconic locations, thematic elements, and historical periods that provide insight into Los Angeles and its vibrant cinematic culture. The book demonstrates how motion pictures have contributed to the multifarious role of the city in our collective consciousness and underscores how key cinematic moments reveal aspects of its life and culture that are otherwise largely hidden from view. Further, the book features city maps with information on how to locate key sites and photographs that show locations as they appear now.

A guided tour of the City of Angels conducted by the likes of John Cassavetes, Robert Altman, Paul Thomas Anderson, Emerald Fennell, and John Carpenter, this concise volume reveals how Los Angeles captured the imaginations of filmmakers and audiences worldwide.