Galaxy Quest | 2000
- Locations |
- Utah;
- Los Angeles, California
- DIRECTOR |
- Dean Parisot
Enjoyably wicked send up of the Star Trek series, with aliens recruiting the cast of a Seventies TV show as saviours of their planet.
The Galaxy Quest fan convention is held at the Hollywood Palladium, 6215 Sunset Boulevard (seen also in John Landis’ The Blues Brothers, in Clint Eastwood's Oscar-winning Million Dollar Baby and in John Schlesinger's Day Of The Locust.
Crew captain William Shatn – no, wait – Jason Nesmith (Tim Allen) seems to have done extremely well from the TV series with a beautiful steel and glass home in the hills overlooking Los Angeles.
In fact, his place is quite famous. The Stahl House, 1635 Woods Drive, just north of Sunset Boulevard, in the Hills immediately overlooking West Hollywood, is a classic 1960 design by architect Pierre Koenig. It’s one of what are called Case Study Houses, commissioned by Arts & Architecture magazine after WWII as experiments in building inexpensive and efficient model homes. The Stahl House is Case Study House 22 and something of a classic with its then-radical floor-to-ceiling glass walls, though I’d question ‘inexpensive’.
It’s not surprising that it’s been used as a regular backdrop for numerous films, photoshoots and music videos (including several episodes of Columbo). Although there’s nothing to see from the road, and the house is not generally open to the public, if you’re a keen student of modern design, you can book ahead for one of the regular tours.
The alien planet is the quirky, knobbly landscape of the tiny (one mile by two) Goblin Valley State Park, 450 Green River Boulevard, Green River, northwest of Moab in Utah. The park is southwest from Green River, five miles west of Highway 24, and seven miles south on a dirt road. This is the same inhospitable terrain across which Sean Penn wanders in Terrence Malick’s The Tree Of Life.
