CREDITS TRUE ROMANCE, 1993 dir: Tony Scott Christian Slater Patricia Arquette Gary Oldman Val Kilmer Brad Pitt Christopher Walken Tom Sizemore

“ If you gave me a million years to ponder, I would've never guessed that true romance and Detroit would ever go together. ”

Tony Scott’s film of Quentin Tarantino’s script shamelessly rips off the musical style and flat narrative voiceover of Terrence Malick’s Badlands. Well, if you’re going to steal, steal from the best.

The movie opens in Detroit, and indeed this is where you’ll find Clifford Worley’s (Dennis Hopper) trailer park, on the Detroit River.

He works at the Packard Plant, East Grand Boulevard at Mount Elliott. The cop station is at 1300 Beaubien, and Clarence Worley (Christian Slater) and Alabama Whitman (Patricia Arquette) marry at the Wayne County Building, 600 Randolph.

But the Sonny Chiba Street Fighter triple bill, where Clarence and Alabama first meet, is in LA, at the beautifully-restored Vista Theater, 4473 Sunset Drive, Los Feliz (tel: 323.660.6639), which was also seen in Christopher Guest’s underrated The Big Picture (1989), and was used for the premiere of Stab in Scream 2.

True Romance location: Clarence and Alabama at the 'Detroit' cinema: Vista Theater, Sunset Drive, Hollywood

The exterior of the theatre is Spanish Revival, but its 1922 construction coincided with the hysteria surrounding the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb, and the interior is wonderfully kitschy Egyptian.

Also in LA is the diner, where the couple eat pie afterwards: the fifties-style Rae’s Restaurant, 2901 Pico Boulevard, at the corner of 29th Street in Santa Monica (tel: 310.828.7937), seen also in the Eddie Murphy-Steve Martin satire Bowfinger and in 2004’s Win a Date With Tad Hamilton!.

True Romance location: Clarence and Alabama enjoy pie: Rae's Restaurant, Pico Boulevard, Santa Monica

Other locations include the mansions of Pasadena; Hollywood bungalows; downtown LA; the beach at Malibu and the desert at Palmdale. The construction site is alongside the landing strips of Los Angeles International Airport.

The roller-coaster is the Viper, at Six Flags Magic Mountain, Magic Mountain Parkway, off I-5, Valencia, north of LA.

Movie producer Lee Donowitz’s lavish ‘Beverly Ambassador’ suite filmed in the old (now demolished) Ambassador Hotel, 3400 Wilshire Boulevard, midtown LA (seen in many, many films including appearing as the ‘Taft Hotel’ in The Graduate).

True Romance location: the 'Beverly Ambassador' hotel: Ambassador Hotel, Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles

The fabulously kitsch motel, where Clarence and Alabama hide out, is the Safari Inn, 1911 Olive Boulevard (tel: 818.845.8586), near Buena Vista, just north of the Disney Studios in Burbank – though the leopardskin interior isn’t for real. You can also see the Safari in Ron Howard’s Apollo 13.

There was also filming at the Athenaeum, the dining club of the California Institute of Technology, at 551 South Hill Avenue in Pasadena, seen in the original Beverly Hills Cop.