![]() … A director wants the right locations, obviously, but I’ve never worked with a director who spent time scouting on his own.” He would drive from the Marina into Hollywood, and he would take different routes and look for things. “I will say that I’ve never worked with a director on any project that had his head in the locations more than Curtis - not even close. I think he carried that with him his whole life,” Panzarella says. “Curtis was so into the illusion of the image versus the reality of Los Angeles. writer James Ellroy, the film, co-written by Hanson - for which he earned an Oscar for screenwriting - races with the pulse of someone infinitely infatuated with Los Angeles, its architecture, glamour and, equally so, its rancid, late-night underbelly. While the movie is based on the 1990 crime novel by L.A. Confidential, in particular, has the mark of a filmmaker in love with the city in which he grew up. Though Hanson was not a household name like some of his contemporaries and never achieved auteur status in the traditional sense of the word, he directed a wide range of popular films, including Losin’ It (1983) with Tom Cruise, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (1992), The River Wild (1994), Wonder Boys (2000) and the Eminem vehicle 8 Mile (2002). native Curtis Hanson, who in 2016 died of natural causes at age 71. After all, they were working with a master filmmaker: L.A. Confidential is a touchstone in their careers. The truth is both Panzarella and Thorson recognize that L.A. She won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress. Kim Basinger makes an iconic turn to camera as Lynn Bracken. Once in a while someone says Midnight Run and I’m like, What?!,” says Panzarella, laughing about the 1988 action-comedy starring Robert De Niro and Charles Grodin. “It’s funny, when I meet people, every once in a while somebody will say, ‘Oh, you worked on my favorite movie,’ and I always expect them to say Confidential. However, Panzarella says that you’d be surprised which of his films people mention most often. I interviewed Panzarella in 2014 about the Hancock Park house of Lynn Bracken, the film’s glamorous Fleur-de-Lis hooker made up to look like movie star Veronica Lake. 19, 1997, you might think that Panzarella and Thorson could be tired of rehashing old stories about the film’s locations. Confidential cut hair for a living and today works out of a barber’s chair set up in the living room of the Gramercy Place house that was immortalized in a scene known as “the Movie Premiere Pot Bust.” It turns out that the contact at one of the locations used in L.A. They’ve been going to only one person over the last 20 years, and it all goes back to the seminal L.A. Panzarella, the veteran location manager of nearly 50 films spanning four decades, including Lethal Weapon, Jason Bourne and Hail, Caesar!, and Thorson, Panzarella’s key assistant location manager since 1993’s My Life, have coincidentally joined me in West Hollywood after getting haircuts by the same hairdresser. Thorson and Panzarella arrive within minutes of each other and it’s easy to see that they have a great relationship, cultivated over years of driving up and down streets trying to pinpoint the perfect locations for the two dozen–plus films they’ve worked on together. ![]() Confidential came along at just the right time. A few years later and the film might not be the landmark picture that it is. and ultimately renamed the Lot in 1999) being the most visible buildings on the block at the time, the filmmakers could actually shoot this West Hollywood street and pass it off as the 1950s. The landmark Formosa Cafe and the old United Artists studios (later part of Warner Bros. Nor did the modern, blocklike apartment buildings across the street. ![]() film of all time, this expansive shopping complex didn’t exist. It’s Saturday afternoon in the City of Angels, and while I wait for location managers John Panzarella and Leslie Thorson at the corner of Santa Monica and La Brea, decent citizens run their weekend errands at Target, grab lattes at Starbucks and eat lunch at a variety of chain restaurants at West Hollywood Gateway shopping center. As some tourists snap selfies on the corner and top-40 tunes play over the mall’s sound system, I’m reminded that more than 20 years ago, when Panzarella and Thorson were amassing the filming locations for what is considered by many to be the greatest L.A. Confidential's location manager, John Panzarella, and key assistant location manager, Leslie Thorson, at the Formosa Café in West Hollywood. ![]()
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