The Mask | 1994
- Locations |
- Los Angeles, California
- DIRECTOR |
- Chuck Russell
Jim Carrey is perfectly cast, at his most hyperactively manic, in what amounts to a live action cartoon. The setting of ‘Edge City’ is, of course, Los Angeles.
The ‘Edge City Bank’ in which nerdy Stanley Ipkiss (Carrey) works, is the familiar old Bank of America Building at 650 Spring Street, downtown Los Angeles. The long-empty property has been used for countless productions including Marathon Man, Se7en, Ghost, The Prestige, The Wedding Singer and Spider-Man 2.
The ‘Coco Bongo Club’ is a combination of two Los Angeles hotels, one of which is no longer with us.
The exterior is the canopied entrance to the Cocoanut Grove nightclub of the old Ambassador Hotel, which stood at 3400 Wilshire Boulevard in midtown. The Ambassador – site of Oscar ceremonies in the Thirties and of Bobby Kennedy’s assassination in 1968 – stood empty for many years, until finally succumbing to the wrecker’s ball in 2006.
The NOW (New Open Wolrd) Academy now stands on the hotel's footprint and elements of the circular entrance have been incorporated into the design.
Among the hundreds of films shot here are The Graduate, Se7en, Rocky, S.W.A.T., Apollo 13 and Old School.
The interior, though, beneath the dressing of fake palm trees, deco light fittings and the violet waterfall, is the Terrace Room of the Park Plaza Hotel, 607 South Park View Street, overlooking MacArthur Park, downtown. The grandiose structure is still there, no longer functioning as a hotel but often used for filming. Its Plaza Room is more usually seen – in the likes of Barton Fink, New York New York and Chaplin.
The ‘garage’ from which Ipkiss picks up his loan car is the disused Firestation No.23, 225 East Fifth Street, downtown LA, which also has the distinction of having provided the interior of the famous New York firehouse for Ghostbusters.
The troublesome mask is finally returned to the river from the, now demolished, Sixth Street Viaduct over the Los Angeles River, east of downtown – another popular site seen in S.W.A.T. and Repo Man.
