As a location scout, I love taking a closer look at older movie locations, so here’s the first part of a deep dive I’ve been working on for you Philly fans: Brian De Palma’s Blow Out, comparing 1981 Philadelphia to what it’s become 45 years later…

The movie opens with a scene that fills me with anxiety as a scout, because it would be extraordinarily difficult to pull off today. We see John Travolta out recording ambient sounds on a pedestrian bridge…

This was shot under the Henry Avenue bridge alongside Lincoln Drive, and the pedestrian bridge is still there to this day:

We then see a man next to a bench, apparently out for a stroll. Except look closely – there is BARELY enough room for the bench (it’s basically pressed against the wooden fence). That’s because it’s not really a sidewalk so much as a curb against traffic whizzing by on Lincoln.

My assumption is that the production closed all of Lincoln Drive, from Rittenhouse to Ridge, for the shoot over the course of several long nights, which allowed them to play it as more of a quiet park location with a transverse. We see a car smash through the fence…

And plunge into the Wissahickon Creek. Today, I can’t even imagine how many environmental studios alone would need to be conducted to get permission, let alone a laundry list of other concerns. Back in the 1980s? Chances are, that car is still down there.

Miss my day trips from NYC to Philly dearly since moving to LA. I’ll post more from Blow Out in the coming weeks.

Every time I scout this corporate office park in Irvine, I have to do this. As the architect intended, I’m sure.

I love when businesses near an airport tip their hat to aviation in some way. The all-timer is the Air Line Diner sign at the Jackson Hole a few minutes from LaGuardia (better known as the Goodfellas diner!)…

I also love Jet Stream Liquors near Burbank Airport in North Hollywood.

If you know of others, please share!

I recently posted about how Columbia University’s wood-paneled lecture hall is THE go-to lecture hall for filming locations; for libraries, it’s the Brooklyn Historical Society.

As a location scout, you walk in and just go: “OK. We’re done.”

I was scouting a liquor store once, and as I was leaving the owner said, “I hope you decide to film here,” and shook my hand with a sly wink – and slipped me one of those tiny bottles of Jack Daniels.

I sometimes wonder if this was smallest attempted bribe in Hollywood history.

“It’s Friday night and I’m driving down Alimony Road” sounds like the start to a bad country song…and is also what I’m literally doing right now.

I was scouting an old military fort once to get some creepy tunnel locations for a horror movie.

The first tunnel (one of the best in the NYC area imo) was well lit…

But after a point, the electricity didn’t work, and we were left in total darkness as we explored the maze of rooms.

I’d only brought a small flashlight, and did my best to overexpose. Then, my hand brushed something papery on the wall as we were passing through a small connecting tunnel, and I trained my light on it: just a foot from my head, the walls were crawling with thousands of insects.

My guide assured they were just crickets (“probably”). But sometimes, when the lights are off, it’s better to leave them that way.

I think I love scouting the desert so much because, while it seems like a lot of nothing, there’s >always< something interesting to find if you keep looking. Case in point from this morning: nothing, nothing, nothing, wait is that a phone booth under a Joshua tree?

This is a good example of why it was actually quite hard to scout options for The Neighborhood Where All The Houses Look The Same for filming outside NYC. Because most of those tract developments date to the 40s-60s, restrictions on changes had long since lapsed…

So you’d find a few homes down a cul-de-sac that, once-upon-a-time, had been identical, and you’d get excited – FOUND IT! FINALLY! Then you look closer and, oh wait: different roof, different garage doors, different paint color, different shutters, different front door.

And on film, EVERYTHING needs to be identical for it to read as “soulless cookie-cutter conformist neighborhood.” Once you get any differentiations, it just comes off as “Anywhere USA Suburb.” Definitely alike, but different enough to make a huge change as to what it signifies.