We’ll Fake Manhattan

It’s possibly his last night on Earth, and Rockhound, a greasy oil driller with a penchant for underage companionship, isn’t going to spend it alone. Fueled with booze and $50,000, he and his dimwitted buddies hit a lavish strip club whose interior owes a great debt to the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles: 14-foot-tall chandeliers, a luxurious crystal fountain, white marble fish statuary. Naturally, a beer brawl and arrest ensue, getting in the way of the oil boys’ plan to save the world the next morning.

No, Richard Klotz didn’t happen upon the world’s most extravagant strip club when he scouted a location for the aforementioned scene in this summer’s hit film, “Armageddon.” The location manager merely found the Los Angeles Theater on Broadway an intoxicating locale.

“We had talked about theaters, got our inventory, and the director, Michael Bay, immediately zeroed in on the Los Angeles Theater as one fantastic room,” says Klotz. “The Louis XIV interior was far better than any existing strip club--I don’t want to sound like I’m talking from experience, but I’ve scouted a few.”

Built with funds from Charlie Chaplin for more than $1 million to premiere “City Lights” in 1931, the Los Angeles Theater stopped screening films in 1994; now the forlorn movie palace sees up to 170 production days a year for features, music videos and commercials. The camera loves the overblown lobby, the ornate ballroom and the downstairs ladies’ room, which some describe as “a religious experience.”

The Los Angeles Theater isn’t the only downtown location featured in “Armageddon.” What’s even more astounding than the houseboat-sized meteors of molten rock showering Manhattan in the film’s opening sequence is that the city isn’t Manhattan at all, but the corners of 4th and Main streets in downtown L.A. The tenants of the Barclay Hotel prominently displayed in the scene’s background probably didn’t find the sight too unusual, since the year before they might have spotted actor Ron Rifkin’s being dangled by his ankles above Main Street from the nearby Pacific Electric Building in “L.A. Confidential,” or extras portraying New York cabbies zooming in and out of the Pacific Electric garage while filming “Godzilla.” Where studios would once construct elaborate, costly sets on the back lots of Hollywood, Culver City and Burbank, or fly to other cities to capture that San Francisco loft or Lower East Side tenement, they now save tremendous expense and time by filming in L.A.’s old downtown--the failed one, so frozen in time that it readily conjures the atmosphere of any metropolis in any era. The feeling is, why totally re-create downtown, circa 1932, when an entire downtown, circa 1932, already exists?

For Curtis Hanson, the director of “L.A. Confidential,” the challenging appeal of filming in a downtown landmark rather than a sound stage is attributable to a deep, visceral connection. “The tiles on the floor, the molding in the hallway, the frames on the windows,” Hanson says, “it’s organic and real.”

Realism is not in short supply in downtown L.A. There’s so much of it, in fact, that the blighted streets and conveniently vacant buildings way east of Bunker Hill are enjoying a newfound stardom. Directors, production designers and location managers turn to them, drawn by all the built-in glamour and elaborate, decaying detail, for a ready-made, post-apocalyptic mise en scene. The run-down area bordering skid row is, on nearly any weekday, a de facto sound stage, crowded with movie trailers, catering trucks and hovering choppers capturing generic action shots. It even stretches to the 2nd Street Tunnel, which seems closed more nights than open, run amok with movie extras fleeing alien invasions in “Independence Day” or serving as a subterranean tunnel for “Con Air” until Las Vegas gets around to building one itself. Follow the wrong signs off the 110, goes the joke, and you’ll end up mooching off the craft services table for “The X-Files.”

Location filming in Los Angeles is up 75% since the formation of the L.A. Film Office three years ago, which many location managers say has aggressively encouraged filming to stay here, as well as streamlined the permit process. An estimated third of the film permits handled by the office are for downtown, and the income that shooting generates for these otherwise empty buildings--one building representative quotes anywhere from $5,000 to $10,000 a day for a major studio project--helps not only maintain the empty building but also cover property taxes and electric bills.

The desertedness of the streets sure beats dealing with those fussy homeowner groups. “It serves for just about anyplace, USA,” says Kenneth Fix, the location manager for “Godzilla.” The film spent 22 nights last summer illuminating downtown L.A.’s otherwise near-empty sidewalks--the make-believe life is just about the only life the streets enjoy after midnight. “It was very expensive filming in New York, putting everybody up, per diem,” Fix explains. “A great deal of downtown L.A. not only looks like New York but other major cities.”

So who are the downtown stars, and what are their resumes?

* The Subway Terminal Building, 4th and Hill streets: The handsome leading man, its numerous acting credits include “Primal Fear,” “Absolute Power” and “Escape From L.A.”

* The Post Office Terminal Annex, Alameda Street: A gorgeous ingenue who began serious study three years ago, it was the primary location for “Dear God,” “EZ Streets” and “City of Angels,” where it so convincingly portrayed a hospital that crew members regularly had to redirect would-be patients from off the streets--including gunshot victims and a man with a severed finger--to a real emergency room.

* The Pacific Electric Building, 6th and Main streets: The action-adventure star, it dazzled in “Face/Off,” “L.A. Confidential” and the upcoming Nicolas Cage thriller “8-Millimeter.”

* The Alexandria Hotel, 5th and Spring streets: This aging silent film star, with its haunting hallways and empty ballrooms--one with a roof of stained Tiffany glass--is the featured backdrop in anything from “Seven” to “America’s Most Wanted” to a score of music videos by the likes of Bush, Amy Grant and Fiona Apple.

* The seedy alley behind the Alexandria: That scruffy character actor you always recognize but never can identify, it regularly substitutes for a particularly lurid backdrop, as it did playing Chinatown in Chow Yun-Fat’s “The Replacement Killers.”

* The Unocal Building, 5th Street: An industrious TV actor, with “Melrose Place,” “Dangerous Minds” and “Murder One” to its credit, though it does cross over to film, as in “The Game,” where it co-starred with Michael Douglas and Sean Penn, and in “The X-Files: Fight the Future,” when, thanks to computer graphics, it was blown up in a terrorist attack.

* The Los Angeles, Orpheum, State, Tower and Palace theaters, Broadway: Those snooty British stage actors who desperately need the money and aren’t above doing a film every now and then.

* The Herald Examiner Building, 11th Street and Broadway: Perhaps the hardest-working B-movie star in show-biz, it has shone in “The Usual Suspects,” “Baywatch Nights,” “Babylon 5” and “Unsolved Mysteries,” a minute sampling of his works. Finally, a cruel joke goes, the Herald is showing a profit.

Stars, directors and screenwriters need agents to pitch their wares; as it happens, the buildings do too. These new types of agents call themselves “building reps,” and they market their properties with the passionate zeal of a Swifty Lazar, lunching location managers, sending out glossy photos of their stars with accompanying resumes that tout each building’s acting experience. Like any good agent, they know the art of the deal, cutting smaller indies a break on fees, going for the jugular with the majors who can afford it.

Pete Brosnan is one such broker. He’s a vice president for Hollywood Locations, which manages filming requests for the Herald building, the Federal Reserve Building and the old Robinsons-May. He pitches a client’s versatility like that of an actor capable of doing Shakespeare or Mamet on a dime.

“A very institutional look,” he boasts of the Unocal Building, “or it also looks like office centers, or it could be any county building. This stuff looks great on film. That’s the beauty of downtown. There’s so much within this area--opulent to modern to old to gritty.” (In fact, Hollywood Locations, in partnership with two investment groups, is currently developing the Los Angeles Center Studios--a full-fledged downtown movie studio adjacent to the Unocal Building that will encompass six 18,000-square-foot sound stages.)

Though its offices and lobby are impressively preserved, the basement of the Subway Terminal Building, which Brosnan formerly repped, would certainly fall into his gritty category. Incoming Red Cars from Glendale and Hollywood converged in the building’s subterranean tunnels until they closed up in 1955. Today, mossy stalagmites, water that slowly drips, drips, drips from somewhere down the chute and a near-total darkness envelop the dank and creepy tunnel. “You turn on MTV and they’re after that natural grit,” says Brosnan of the building. “Things that would take a lot of money to create are already there. You hook up the lights and put the band in front of them, and let’s go.”

Another building rep, Nick Latimer, is the general manager of the Los Angeles Theater. The money filming generates is “our primary source of income,” says Latimer in a soothing British accent. The negotiation process, based on a production’s budget, is “totally predictable. They say, ‘We’re a major studio, but we don’t have much money.’ That’s a hell of a contradiction in terms. I hit them with a high figure.” And if anyone creates “damage that wasn’t there” for effect, like John Carpenter and crew did to evoke a futuristic hell in “Escape From L.A.,” Latimer says he’s never had a problem getting it all put back together again.

Without the profits filming creates, one questions what would happen to these striking though deserted buildings so steeped in Los Angeles history. Ken Bernstein, the Los Angeles Conservancy’s director of preservation issues, says “filming activity at these buildings definitely provides cash flow to keep many of them alive.”

While he acknowledges that some property owners use filming revenues to make desperately needed improvements and renovations--the Los Angeles Theater recently laid down its first new carpet since 1967--Bernstein notes, “regular revenue can stifle creativity about alternative reuses for those sites.” Let’s not forget the Bradbury Building--which, before its impeccable restoration, was so downtrodden it served as a stunningly bleak backdrop to Ridley Scott’s “Blade Runner.” “That’s a negative worth living with,” Bernstein says, “given the large upside of funds coming into these historical properties.”

Filming at the Palace, State, Tower and Orpheum theaters on Broadway has “certainly helped bring in supplemental revenue to theaters which are struggling financially,” says Jon Olivan, who oversees their full schedules. Only the Orpheum and State still screen movies, and shooting at the Tower brings in enough revenue to keep it up solely as a filming location. “The owner has not had to resort, at this point,” Olivan says thankfully, “to using it as a retail site,” the fate of more than one empty old movie palace-turned-swap meet in L.A.

‘I like the huge, old buildings in the middle of the city,” says “Face/Off” director John Woo tenderly as he recalls the shoot. “You can see and smell and feel everything so closely. If you’re on a real location, the structure, the character of a building will give you a lot to work with. It gave me a great feeling, you know?”

Woo and crew took over the Pacific Electric Building for a few weeks, shooting up its grand penthouse (formerly home to the tony Jonathan Club) to bits, obliterating ceiling-high arched windows, shattering century-old skylights and spilling buckets of blood.

The building, which opened in 1905 as headquarters for Henry Huntington and his Red Cars, served as the bustling hub to the largest interurban rail system in the world until the last Red Car departed in 1961. After Southern Pacific--the building’s last tenant--left in 1989, no one company pounded down the door to fill 400,000 square feet of office space, so the owner, after receiving some inquiries, opened up to the idea of filming. Where no one could find an actual purpose for the empty building, its dramatic possibilities are endless, as a tour of the grandiose nine-story structure reveals.

The hallways are long and evocative in an oh-so-noir way, with marble wainscoting, sooty mosaic floors and frosted-glass office doors suitable for Philip Marlowe. On the third floor, you’ll find the moody, dark-wood detective headquarters built for David Fincher’s “Seven,” and later altered for “L.A. Confidential.” On the fifth floor, there’s a startlingly realistic New York City apartment set from “Grace of My Heart.” There’s the chemistry lab featured in DreamWorks’ “Paulie”; a ninth-floor office converted into a whimsically painted children’s bedroom for a Fox TV pilot; and some polished-wood, ballet practice barres left over from “Fame L.A.” in the loft where “Face/Off” was shot. Hallways are strewn with extension cords and Klieg lights and more than one grip’s tool belt. The only thing the impromptu studio lacks is a commissary, and for that you can visit the oft-filmed Cole’s restaurant downstairs, the scene of a New Year’s Eve bash in “Forrest Gump.”

Filming one recent summer night, Kenneth Fix, the location manager for “Godzilla,” found himself taking a hard look at the neighborhood around 8th and Main. “You know, when I look at this area right now, I see three alternatives,” he told his assistant. “It stays like this forever until it becomes great ruins, or it gets demolished, or the studios buy it and it gets turned into the biggest back lot in the world.”

Woo admits that he “would love to set up my office there. We got great support from police and the Fire Department, and that makes everything so much easier. You can shoot anything. I was so happy. It was hard in Hong Kong. If you ever have a camera in the street or a busy area, the police would come in to throw you out.” Could he have ever choreographed those same loud and violent ballets of exploding grenades and rat-a-tat-tat machine guns and flying bodies in the middle of the afternoon in Hong Kong? Or, for that matter, Times Square? “No way,” Woo responds.