Last Action Hero | 1993

Despite mega-hype, mega-budget, mega-star, and an advertisement on the side of a NASA rocket, Last Action Hero still bombed in the head-to-head with Jurassic Park as 1993 became the year of dino-mania.

It seems that Arnold Schwarzenegger fans didn’t care for the movie buff jokes (Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal?), while cineastes turned their noses up at an Arnie action-fest.

Despite its reputation, it’s still plenty of fun as young Danny Madigan (Austin O’Brien) gets a magic ticket that opens up the world of the movies.

The interior of the ‘Pandora Theater’, where Danny uses the ticket to enter the world of action star Jack Slater (Schwarzenegger), is the Orpheum Theater, 842 South Broadway, downtown Los Angeles. This beautifully restored gem of a picture palace can also be seen in Tim Burton’s masterpiece Ed Wood, Kenneth Branagh’s flaky Dead Again, Oliver Stone’s The Doors, and more recently as the site of the movie premiere upstaged by Jack the terrier in The Artist. It’s also where Mary Jane (Kirsten Dunst) makes her ‘Broadway’ debut in Spider-Man 3.

The house where Jack Slater comes close to getting blown up is on the 1100 block of Angelina Street, downtown Los Angeles. In a re-run of Terminator 2’s road-into-flood channel leap, a car flies into the LA River channel at the First Street Bridge.

The premiere of fictitious actioner, Jack Slater IV, is held on the other coast, at the RKO Twin Theater, Times Square in New York, where a giant inflatable Arnie sways about on the sidewalk.

The vast, glass-walled police station is the atrium of Sony Pictures Plaza, Madison Street at Washington Boulevard, in Culver City. It’s where you’ll start out if you take the Sony Pictures Studio Tour – which covers the old MGM lot. Fans of TV series Angel will recognise it as the headquarters of interdimensional law firm ‘Wolfram & Hart’.

Danny’s school, ‘Lincoln Elementary’ is a standing set on the Sony lot, built during the Twenties, while ‘Elsinore’ in the Hamlet fantasy scene is the castle built for Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

The lavish seafront estate of Tony Vivaldi (Anthony Quinn), where Slater and Danny confront Mr Benedict (Charles Dance), the henchman with a penchant for wacky eyeballs, is 28824 Cliffside Drive, perched on a cliff on the south side of the Point Dume peninsula in Malibu.

Also in Malibu is the video store (remember video stores?), which was then a branch of Blockbuster – and is now now CVS Pharmacy – in Malibu Colony Plaza, 23805 West Malibu Road.

Leo the Fart’s lavish mob funeral filmed atop the roof of the Hyatt Regency Long Beach, 200 South Pine Avenue at Shoreline Drive in Long Beach, south LA. The ‘La Brea Tar Pits’, inconveniently miles away on Wilshire Boulevard in midtown, were recreated alongside the Hyatt. You can see the real tar pits in Curtis Hanson’s underrated 1990 thriller Bad Influence.

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