Austin Powers in Goldmember | 2002
- Locations |
- Los Angeles, California; Utah
- DIRECTOR |
- Jay Roach
With an irritatingly unfunny and irrelevant new villain, this is the weakest of the Austin Powers movies, but there are still plenty of silly laughs.
The spectacular action sequence which kicks off the movie is the unmistakable landscape around Moab in Utah, with the ’copter flying between the jagged peaks of Fisher Towers.
The rest is, naturally, California. The opening credits musical number is on the lot of Paramount Studio, 5555 Melrose Avenue, in Hollywood. You need to peer through the Melrose entrance to see the famous gate (cheekily rebranded as ‘New Line Pictures’), which no longer fronts directly onto the street as it did in the days of Sunset Boulevard.
There’s a stock shot of London’s Buckingham Palace as Austin Powers (Mike Myers) is summoned by the Queen to be knighted, but the palace interior, where daddy Nigel Powers (Michael Caine) fails to turn up for the investiture, is the familiar Crystal Ballroom of the Millennium Biltmore Hotel, 506 South Grand Avenue.
The magic of movie FX puts Powers' pad on the roof of the old County Hall – now the Sealife London Aquarium – on London’s South Bank (see the real thing in Alfred Hitchcock’s Frenzy).
Austin’s graduation from the ‘British Intelligence Academy, 1958’ takes place at the Greystone Mansion, 905 Loma Vista Drive in Beverly Hills. The estate grounds are open to the public, though not the house itself. You can see more of Greystone onscreen in films as diverse as Spider-Man, Ghostbusters, The Big Lebowski, Phantom Of The Paradise and The Prestige, as well as All Of Me, The Disorderly Orderly, Death Becomes Her, Indecent Proposal and There Will Be Blood.
Dr Evil's submarine (created by CGI) is berthed in the docks at San Pedro, south Los Angeles.
The premiere of Austinpussy appears to be at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, 6925 Hollywood Boulevard in Hollywood. And it’s on the cinema’s famous forecourt that Austin and Foxy Cleopatra (Beyoncé Knowles) kiss, the beautiful interior is actually that of the Orpheum Theater, 842 South Broadway, downtown Los Angeles. The Orpheum’s beautifully restored interior often stands in for other theatres, see Dead Again, The Doors, Ed Wood, Last Action Hero and, of course, The Artist.