A stadium, three museums and a sunken rose garden sit inside one 160 acre park.
What Exposition Park looks like
Exposition Park is a 160 acre park south of downtown. It is bounded by Exposition Boulevard, Figueroa Street, Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and Vermont Avenue. 's curved white roof and the Coliseum's red seating bowl and peristyle arches stand side by side at the park's south end, with the three museums and the rose garden spread across the north side.
The Coliseum's peristyle end is a colonnade of paired columns under an arched entrance, the Olympic rings and a torch tower fixed above it since the stadium's 1932 expansion. Red seating fills the bowl in tiered rings around the field, and a low pergola with climbing vines runs along the park side of the peristyle.
Inside the , a domed rotunda rings marble columns around a bronze fountain statue, with a coffered ceiling overhead and a balcony circling the second level. Darkened diorama halls lead off the rotunda, lit habitat scenes glowing along the walls in rooms kept otherwise dark.
The sunken spreads across seven acres on the far side of the park, its lawn and rose beds set below street level around a central fountain. Four marble statues, added in 1936, stand at its corners. A long building with an arched glass roof rises behind the trees at one edge.
Space Shuttle Endeavour stands nose up inside the 's new Samuel Oschin Air and Space Center, set to open to the public in November 2026. Outside the EXPO Center, concrete hand and footprints signed by actors from old medical television shows are set into the sidewalk.
Shot in Exposition Park
The park has turned up on screen more than once, playing itself for concerts and championship games. Its natural history museum has stood in for a genetics lab, an opera house lobby and a government building under a shark filled flood.
Wattstax, 1973
Played Itself, for the 1972 Wattstax concert
The Stax Records concert this documentary covers filled the bowl on August 20, 1972, drawn to mark the anniversary of the Watts riots. The crowd of 112,000 was called the largest gathering of African Americans outside a civil rights event to that date.
Two-Minute Warning, 1976
Played Championship X, 1976
This film sets its entire story inside the Coliseum during a fictional championship it calls Championship X, a professional football final. The wide shots of a packed stadium reuse real footage from a Stanford versus USC game played the previous November, and the rest was shot on site over three months in early 1976.
Alias, 2001
Played Berlin, Germany
In the episodes "Parity" and "A Broken Heart," the Coliseum stood in for a fictional Berlin stadium in this series. Characters meet there to examine a document in the first episode and race to decode it in the second.
Spider-Man, 2002
The Natural History Museum rotunda
Played a Genetic Research Institute
The museum's domed rotunda is its original 1913 entrance hall. In this film it played a fictional Genetic Research Institute, in a scene where Peter Parker's class tours the lab.
Pretty Woman, 1990
Played an opera house lobby
This film used the same rotunda only for the lobby of its fictional opera house, where Edward and Vivian walk past an usher and up a flight of stairs. The opera house exterior seen in the film is a different building, in Pittsburgh. The theater interior was built on a soundstage.
Sharknado 3, 2015
Played a government building
Visual effects turned the museum's Level 1 staircase into a government building under attack, with a wave of CGI sharks pouring down the steps. The museum includes the scene on its own self-guided filming tour, alongside the Spider-Man rotunda and the Honda commercial.
Sheryl Crow, "If It Makes You Happy", 1996
Played Itself
Sheryl Crow filmed the music video for this song in the museum's Endangered Species Hall. It is posted to her official channel and has been watched more than eighty million times.
Honda, "Matthew's Day Off", 2012
Played Itself
This Super Bowl commercial is a nod to Ferris Bueller's Day Off. It used the museum's North American Mammal Hall for a scene where Matthew Broderick's character makes friends with the walrus diorama.
Pearl Harbor, 2001
The Rose Garden
Played the White House Rose Garden, Washington, D.C., 1942
This film used the Rose Garden for its White House Rose Garden scene. Franklin Roosevelt, played by Jon Voight, is briefed there on the Doolittle Raid's return. The same production separately filmed a hospital entrance scene on the Natural History Museum's east steps.
Runaways, 2019
Played Itself
The Hulu series used the garden in its episode "Kingdom" for a scene at the edge of the park. One character arranges there to trade a kidnapped character for a million dollars.
Fair Park was built for the 1936 Texas Centennial Exposition and still combines an outdoor stadium, the Cotton Bowl, with Art Deco exhibition halls along its reflecting pool. The carved friezes and murals on buildings like the Hall of State date the whole complex to the 1930s, close to the Coliseum's own 1932 expansion. The Hall of State's carved friezes and murals give Dallas away in any shot that lingers on a facade. Try searching Art Deco exposition halls now.
Balboa Park in San Diego, California
Balboa Park went up for the 1915 Panama-California Exposition, and its Spanish Colonial Revival museum buildings along the El Prado ring formal gardens much the way the Natural History Museum and the Rose Garden sit together here. The same buildings were reused for a second exposition in 1935, so the district still dates to one period, the 1910s into the 1930s. The ornate plasterwork and tiled domes are more decorated than Exposition Park's plainer facades, so a tighter frame on a single doorway holds the match better than a wide shot. Try searching Spanish Colonial museum buildings now.
Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California
The Rose Bowl opened in Pasadena in 1922, a decade before the Coliseum's own Olympic expansion. Its long concrete oval matches a similar period stadium bowl in a tight interior shot. It has no peristyle, no Olympic rings and no torch tower, so anything wider than the seating rings themselves gives away a different concrete stadium bowl interior. Try searching concrete stadium bowl interior now.
.jpg)
