CREDITS L.A. CONFIDENTIAL, 1997 dir: Curtis Hanson Russell Crowe Guy Pearce Kevin Spacey Kim Basinger James Cromwell Danny DeVito David Strathairn

“A hooker cut to look like Lana Turner is still a hooker.”

The house where the prostitute is being held, supposedly ‘Avalon Street’, in South Central, was on Avenue 28 in the Lincoln Heights district. Vincennes and Exley (Guy Pearce) pump boxer Leonard Bidwell for info with a bogus promise at Bellevue and Marion, in the Echo Park district, opposite Bobís Market, seen in The Fast and the Furious.

Before deciding to check on the actor-cum-hustler, Jack Vincennes downs a drink at Bob's Frolic Room, 6245 Hollywood Boulevard (tel: 323.462.5890), a surviving thirties neon-lit bar alongside the Pantages Theater. The walls are decorated with Al Hirschfield cartoons, and they've got a great jukebox.

He subsequently finds the body of the murdered actor in room 203 of the Hollywood Center Motel, 6720 Sunset Boulevard, an original twenties motel, enlarged in the 1950s.

Jack finds the body of the murdered actor: Hollywood Center Motel, Sunset Boulevard, Hollywood

The other Hollywood bar, festooned with celebrity photos, where White and Exley hassle Johnny Stompanato and the ‘real’ Lana Turner, is another famous landmark, the Formosa Cafe, 7156 Santa Monica Boulevard near La Brea Avenue. This Chinese restaurant was a regular hangout for Humphrey Bogart, Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable, among others. And it’s still going strong, just over the road from the old Goldwyn Studios. Stompanato, by the way, was the underworld hood stabbed to death in the bedroom of Turner’s Beverly Hills mansion in 1958 – allegedly by her daughter Cheryl Crane. You can see the Formosa in Frank Darabontís Hollywood blacklist drama The Majestic, with Jim Carrey.

Ooops! – that's the ‘real’ Lana Turner: Formosa, Santa Monica Boulevard, Hollywood

Mrs Leffert’s house, where a body is found in the crawl space, is in Elysian Park, while Lynn Brackenís 1927 house is on Wilcox Avenue, next to the Wilshire Country Club in the Rossmore district of Hollywood.

Navarette’s hide-out, supposedly on the now-redeveloped Bunker Hill, filmed on San Marino Street near the intersection of Olympic Boulevard and Hoover Street west of Macarthur Park.

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