There isn't as much filming going on in Los Angeles right now due to the ongoing actors' strike and only recently resolved writers' strike. But for decades, cities east of downtown L.A. — including Pasadena, South Pasadena and Altadena — have been a big draw for film and TV productions.
Veteran location scout and manager Rick Schuler says the "denas," with their wide variety of single-family homes and tree-lined streets, are most often used as stand-ins for the Midwest or East Coast.
Schuler recently took the How To LA team on a tour of some filming locations, used in movies like Halloween, Back to the Future and Mr. & Mrs. Smith.
The city of South Pasadena, Schuler says, is often a go-to destination when a film crew wants a location that has the feel of a small, Midwestern town.
And interestingly, the city does have a historical connection with the Midwest — the Anglo founders of South Pasadena and Pasadena, back in the 1870s, were from Indiana.
Probably the most well-known filming location in South Pasadena is the “Michael Myers” house at 1000 Mission St., which was featured in the 1978 horror classic Halloween. In the film, and subsequent sequels, it’s the home of the killer, Michael Myers.
The Victorian-style home, built in 1888, is one of several South Pasadena houses featured in the film and is meant to be the fictional town of Haddonfield, Illinois.
“But they chose South Pasadena,” Schuler says, because “South Pasadena is like an everywhere American city, basically from the Midwest or the East Coast. And what makes it that are the tree-lined streets, the type of architecture that's here. And it feels like a small town.”
Schuler says there’s also a good number of brick buildings in South Pasadena, which you don’t see too much of in L.A., and lots of big camphor trees that form canopies over streets.
The only tree that’s a problem? Palm trees — a dead giveaway that you’re in L.A.
“Palm trees can be the bane of our existence,” Schuler says. Or at least, they used to be. “In the age now of CGI and all that kind of stuff, they can quickly now say, ‘Oh, we can remove that.’”
There are other workarounds too that don’t involve computers. For example, near the Pasadena home that Schuler found for the 2005 movie Mr. & Mrs. Smith, which was set on the East Coast, the film crew disguised the tree trunks of some palm trees that line the street.
“We wrapped them with two semi-cylinder, oak-looking or camphor-tree-looking shells,” Schuler says. “And so we did like 10 feet of that” because only the tree trunks could be seen in the frame.
Being from the Midwest himself though, Schuler says South Pasadena and Pasadena aren’t exact matches for the region.
“I think we've created kind of a movie version of the Midwest with a white picket fence, dormers [on the house] and wood shingles. And that kind of thing does exist there, but there's all kinds of other styles there too.”
Another big challenge to filming in residential neighborhoods, Schuler says, is getting the support of a homeowner to use a specific house.
The first step is knocking on the door, then explaining why you’re there, but also not giving them too much information too quickly.
“What we would have to do is talk to the people [about] whether they want to do it,” Schuler says, “and then eventually [explain that] yes, we need to move you out into a hotel, we want to take all your stuff out and put it in storage, we want to bring our stuff in…”
And depending on what city you’re in and what time of day or night you want to film, productions also need to get sign off from a certain number of neighbors.
In the case of the Colonial-style Mr. & Mrs. Smith house on San Pascual Avenue in Pasadena, which was only used for outdoor shots, the owners also agreed to let the film crew drive a car up onto their lawn, build a temporary garage in the backyard, and even set off a small explosion.
Robbie Leslie, whose parents own the home, and who was 7 years old at the time of filming, remembers it as a great time.
“We were put up in the Ritz Carlton a couple miles away and I remember putting it to good use,” Leslie says. “I would always go down to the bar after school and ask for a bowl of cereal, which they would always provide. And it was fun.”
“Now it's kind of like every icebreaker thing that I ever need. I can be like, ‘Oh, have you ever seen Mr. & Mrs. Smith? That's our house … [and] no, it didn’t really get blown up.’”
Another draw for film location scouts are the variety of homes in the “denas.”
Just down the street from the main Mr. & Mrs. Smith house is a Tudor-style house that was also used for a short scene.
And it’s just a short drive across the city to the iconic Craftsman Back to the Future home (or Gamble House) which is a popular tourist destination with architecture buffs and film-lovers alike. It was designed by the renowned architectural firm Greene and Greene.
Though, in the case of the Gamble House, Schuler says it now may be too well known now to use in other films. “Not so much because it’s the Gamble House, but more because it was in Back to the Future.”
And even though having a house become somewhat “off limits” isn’t a great thing for location scouts like him, Schuler says: “in some sense that's good, because we showcase certain things that people sort of get interested in preserving.”
