CREDITS BLADE RUNNER , 1982 dir: Ridley Scott Harrison Ford Rutger Hauer Sean Young Edward James Olmos M Emmet Walsh Daryl Hannah

Somehow, Ridley Scott’s film of Philip K Dick’s Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? has mutated in critical opinion from so-so spectacle to a classic of modern cinema. More to do with 20/20 hindsight than the release of the, admittedly far superior, Director’s Cut which restores the equivocal unicorn while removing Harrison Ford’s deliberately dirgy voiceover (he hoped it would prove unusable) and the tacked-on happy ending (which consists of second unit footage from Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining).

And now another Philip K Dick story gets a respectable big-screen treatment, with Steven Spielberg’s terrific Minority Report.

Harrison Ford is Deckard, a Blade Runner (a title taken from William Burroughs, replacing Dick’s box-office killer), a tracker-down and eliminator of very human looking replicants. Rutger Hauer is Batty, the replicant in love with life.

The polluted, rainswept, Orientalised LA futurescape, which has provided the pattern for countless dystopian fantasies, is the old Warners’ backlot gangster street transformed with miles of neon and acres of glass. The excellent model shots incorporate existing LA landmarks including the cylindrical towers of the Bonaventure Hotel (itself a fave LA location) at 404 South Figueroa Street, downtown LA (seen in Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days and in This Is Spinal Tap).

Blade Runner: Deckard is taken to the cop station: Union Station, South Alameda Street, downtown LA

The cop station of the future, to which Deckard is hauled, is an office set built within the vast concourse of another favourite LA location, the 1939 Spanish Revival-style Union Station, 800 North Alameda Street, downtown, seen in many films, including The Way We Were, The Driver, The Replacement Killers (which shares many of Blade Runner’s locations), Pearl Harbor, Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle and Steven Spielberg’s Catch Me If You Can.

The waterlogged home of toymaker Sebastian, where Deckard is menaced by androids and has the final showdown with Batty, is the Bradbury Building, 304 South Broadway at Third Street. Outside, it’s an unremarkable red-brick block, but the central courtyard, illuminated by skylights (through which the illuminated blimp is seen in the movie), is a joyous fantasy of wrought-iron grillwork, marble and brickwork surrounding open-cage elevators. It was a bit decrepit when Blade Runner was filmed, but it’s since been lovingly restored and now houses offices. The ground floor is open to the public.

The exterior of the Bradbury Building filmed at the junction of Broadway and Third Street, but there’s plenty of set dressing so don’t look for the massive pillars.

Blade Runner: The interior of the scuzzy ëYukon Hotelí: the Pan Am Building, South Broadway at Third Street

The interior of the scuzzy ‘Yukon Hotel’ is the Pan Am Building, South Broadway at Third Street, opposite the Bradbury Building, downtown LA. You may recognise it as the apartment of the comatose ‘Sloth’ victim in David Fincher’s Seven.

The tunnel through which Deckard approaches his apartment is the Second Street Tunnel, running between Figueroa Street and Hill Street, downtown LA.

Blade Runner: Deckard's apartment: The Ennis-Brown House, Silverlake

His home turns out to be Frank Lloyd Wright’s terrific Ennis Brown House, 2607 Glendower Avenue, Silverlake, below Griffith Park. A few storeys were added optically, and casts taken from the building’s trademark concrete blocks to be used for the interior studio shots. See William Castle’s classic fifties schlocker The House on Haunted Hill for details of the house.