Multilingual signage covers Art Deco storefronts along Wilshire Boulevard. A handful of buildings nearby have played other decades and other cities on screen for years.
What Koreatown looks like
Wilshire Boulevard through Koreatown runs past mid-century buildings with signs stacked two and three deep in Korean, English and other languages. Many of the buildings underneath are older than the signs. Their Art Deco and terra-cotta fronts survived the area's economic decline in the late 1960s because they stayed cheap, and Korean-owned businesses filled them.
Korean residents had not always been free to live this far north. A racial covenant confined the community to a zone between Adams Boulevard, Slauson Avenue, Western Avenue and Vermont Avenue. The Supreme Court's Shelley v. Kraemer decision ended such covenants in 1948. A larger wave of Korean immigration moved into the streets around Wilshire and Olympic through the 1960s and 1970s. Residents lobbied the city for the first official Koreatown street sign, put up in 1982.
Some of the boulevard's older landmarks kept their grandeur through that change. The , an Art Deco tower at Wilshire and Western, sat damaged for years before its restoration in the 1980s. , a few blocks east, still has its 1929 Gothic tower. In 2008 the city designated the boulevard a special graphics district, allowing digital signage the rest of Los Angeles doesn't permit.
The Ambassador Hotel once stood on this same boulevard, at 3400 Wilshire. Robert Kennedy was shot in its kitchen pantry in 1968, after his California primary victory speech. It closed to guests in 1989 but kept hosting film crews until it came down in stages between 2005 and 2008. The Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools now stand on the site.
Films shot in Koreatown
The Ambassador Hotel hosted six Academy Awards ceremonies between 1930 and 1943, and its own screen credits ran from Bombshell in 1933 to Pretty Woman. It kept hosting film crews even after it stopped taking overnight guests in 1989. Bobby was the last production to shoot there, given access in late 2005 to film establishing shots while parts of the hotel were already coming down. An episode of Angel was the last thing filmed in its kitchen. Three other buildings on this same stretch of Wilshire are still standing, and still turning up on screen.
Get Crazy, 1983
The Wiltern is the theater inside the Pellissier Building, an Art Deco tower Stiles O. Clements designed in 1931 for the southeast corner of Wilshire and Western. Preservationists stopped two demolition attempts in the late 1970s, and developer Wayne Ratkovich and architect Brenda Levin restored the building between 1981 and 1985. Before that restoration, the theater had fallen into disrepair. The 1983 film Get Crazy used it as its main location during those years, reportedly causing the building further damage.
Helena (So Long and Goodnight), My Chemical Romance, 2005
was built in 1929 in the French Gothic Revival style, designed by architect Chauncey Fitch Skilling. Marc Webb shot the funeral scene of My Chemical Romance's 2005 video for Helena (So Long and Goodnight) inside the church. The video, posted on the band's own channel, has been watched more than 280 million times. Webb returned to the church in 2012 to film part of The Amazing Spider-Man. The building has also turned up in John Wick, Sister Act 2 and Legally Blonde 2.
Mad Men, episode "Indian Summer"
The occupies the ground floor of the Gaylord, a 1924 building that was once the tallest in Los Angeles. The bar has operated under several names since 1948 and has been the since 1962. Its back room stood in for a Manhattan seafood restaurant called La Trombetta in the Mad Men episode Indian Summer, where Peggy Olson goes on a bad blind date with a truck driver.
Collateral, 2004
The Building held a nightclub called Cafe Bliss. Its exterior supplied the Fever club in Collateral, where Vincent kills a Korean gangster. The interior was built on a soundstage roughly seven times the size of the real room. The building sits at Sixth Street and Kenmore Avenue, its arched colonnade lined with storefronts today.
What Koreatown can double for
Koreatown can stand in for a 1960s Manhattan restaurant in Mad Men and a Washington DC lobbyist bar in Thank You for Smoking.
