CREDITS SPEED, 1994 dir: Jan De Bont Keanu Reeves Sandra Bullock Dennis Hopper Alan Ruck Jeff Daniels

“Pop quiz, hotshot. There's a bomb on a bus. Once the bus goes fifty miles an hour, the bomb is armed. If it drops below fifty, it blows up. What do you do?”

The appealingly simple premise was turned into mega-blockbuster by cinematographer-turned-director Jan De Bont’s high-octane direction – though his subsequent track record (Speed 2, The Haunting, Lara Croft: The Cradle of Life...) seems to indicate this was a one-off. Rewrites by (an uncredited) Joss Whedon probably helped.

The office block where the embittered Howard Payne (Dennis Hopper) is foiled in his attempt to bomb the elevator is the 52-storey Gas Company Towers, 555 West Fifth Street at the northwest corner of Olive Street, downtown LA (see it as the venue for the party in in Charlie’s Angels, and as the ‘United States Courthouse’ outside which Jamie Foxx picks up Tom Cruise in Michael Mann's Collateral).

Speed: the bomb in the lift: Gas Company Tower, 555 West Fifth Street, downtown LA

Jack Traven (Keanu Reeves) celebrates his award at The Derby, 4500 Los Feliz Boulevard. The old Brown Derby Restaurant, it was renovated and reinvented as a swing venue in 1993. It’s a major location for Doug Liman’s Swingers. The Derby, like so many priceless LA landmarks, was under threat of redevelopment, but in May 2006, it was finally declared a Historic Cultural Landmark.

Speed: Jack Traven celebrates receiving his award: The Derby, 4500 Los Feliz Boulevard

Traven chats to the bus driver at the Firehouse Restaurant, 213 Rose Avenue at Main Street, Venice, opposite the Koo Koo Roo Californian Kitchen, with its landmark, love-it-or-hate-it clown-ballet dancer sculpture (I think it’s kitschy fun).

Speed: The bus blows up: Main Street at Rose Avenue, Venice, LA

The bus blows up on Main Street, just south of Rose Avenue, and this is where Traven receives the sinister phone call from Payne.

Spunky Annie Porter (Sandra Bullock) boards the bus at Ocean Park Boulevard and Main Street. Much of the bus ride was filmed on the I-105 in South Central LA around Watts. The spectacular bus jump on the unfinished freeway used the recently completed Glenn Anderson Freeway (Century Freeway). The yawning gap was added later with computer- generated imagery. The bus is finally diverted to the airstrips of ‘Los Angeles International Airport’. Kind of. The airport actually used for the filming is Mojave Airport and Spaceport, at Mojave in Kern County, seen also in S.W.A.T., Die Hard II and Clint Eastwood's Flags of Our Fathers.

The money drop is at Fifth and Hill Streets, by the steps at the northeast corner of recently renovated Pershing Square, downtown Los Angeles. Here too is the station of, what was then, the recently completed first section of the long-awaited LA subway, Metrorail Red Line at Pershing Square Station.

Most of the underground sequences were filmed on studio mock-ups, but it’s on the real Hollywood Boulevard, at the near-completed Hollywood Metrorail Station just outside Grauman’s Chinese Theater between Highland and La Brea Avenues, that the train finally explodes into daylight.