Beverly Hills Cop II | 1987
Beverly Hills Cop II location: ‘Beverly Hils City Hall’: Pasadena City Hall, 100 North Garfield Avenue at Holly Street, Pasadena
The locations for Beverly Hills Cop II are a bit tricksier as Tony Scott takes over directorial duties.
Axel Foley hares back to Los Angeles when police chief Bogomil is gunned down. Hang on – something’s changed.
Doesn’t Beverly Hills City Hall look just a little bit different? Not in the establishing long shots, but look take another look. When Chief Bogomil (Ronny Cox) drives away, it’s clearly a different building altogether.
Beverly Hills Cop II location: Axel Foley's Beverly Hills squat: 614 Walden Drive, Beverly Hills
All the scenes involving actors – and which therefore require expensive film permits – feature Pasadena City Hall, 100 North Garfield Avenue at Holly Street, Pasadena.
Los Angeles’s eastern neighbour is significantly cheaper to film in than swanky Beverly Hills, and though its city hall is smaller, it’s equally extravagant. Unfortunately, it looks nothing like the Beverly Hills City Hall building.
Pasadena City Hall crops up on screen regularly, in a variety of guises – as the palace of Adenoid Hynkel in Charlie Chaplin’s 1940 satire The Great Dictator; the site of a Wine Country festival in Alfonso Arau’s A Walk In The Clouds; the US Embassy in ‘Mexico’ in Sandra Bullock 90s cyber-thriller The Net; and as ‘Spain’ in American Pie II.
The jewellery store robbed by Karla Fry (Brigitte Nielsen) was once the magnificently kitsch Max Factor Museum (see the incredible Beauty Calibrator!), now the Hollywood Museum, 1666 North Highland Avenue just off Hollywood Boulevard, Hollywood, also seen in The Two Jakes, the Jack Nicholson-directed sequel to Chinatown.
The house undergoing renovation, where ‘Beverly Hills Building Investigator’ Foley squats for the duration of the movie, is not ‘1603 Hillcrest Road’, it’s 614 Walden Drive, which runs north from Santa Monica Boulevard to Lomitas Avenue, east of Los Angeles Country Club – and it is really in Beverly Hills.
The shoot-out restaurant where Taggart (John Ashton) passes himself off as Gerald Ford, however, is not. At the time it was French restaurant 385 North, but it’s now Mexican restaurant Acapulco, 385 North La Cienega Boulevard in Hollywood.
The ‘Beverly Hills Gun Club’ is once again the California Institute of Technology’s Athenaeum Club (seen in the original Beverly Hills Cop).
Beverly Hills Cop II location: the end of the chase: Playboy Mansion, Charing Cross Road, Beverly Hills
The concrete mixer chase does end at a real enough location: the bunnyman’s warren, Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion, 10236 Charing Cross Road off Mapleton Drive, running between the western reaches of Sunset Boulevard and Los Angeles Country Club (which you can see again in Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle) and of course, Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon A Time In Hollywood.
