Safety Last | 1923
- Locations |
- Los Angeles, California
- DIRECTOR |
- Sam Taylor,
- Fred Newmeyer
Silent comedian Harold Lloyd’s stock-in-trade was a series of dizzying stunts involving dangling from the outside of tall buildings. In Safety Last he’s a smalltown boy trying to impress his girlfriend by winning a skyscraper-climbing contest.
The ‘De Vore Department Store’ in the ‘Bolton Building‘ is a combination of several structures in downtown Los Angeles.
The clockface, from which he dangled in his most famous sequence, was atop 908 South Broadway, at East 9th Street. Although he is many storeys above the streets of LA, the stunt is not quite as dangerous as it looks. The clock was built on a platform on the building’s roof, and for some longshots, Lloyd hired ‘human fly’ Bill Struthers to climb the building.
The final rooftop is that of the Brockman Building, 530 West 7th Street at South Grand Avenue.
