We had packed a lot of activity into the last five days, so on Wednesday, February 14 – Valentine’s Day – Jimmy and I spent a leisurely day traveling to and fro around Culver City, the Silverlake area, Hollywood, and Los Angeles scouting a select group of Laurel and Hardy locations. It had always been my desire to actually be involved in the finding of a new location. So we literally spent some of the day driving up and down in an area where we had reason to believe that one of the Laurel and Hardy films were made.
But before we began this quest, we visited some of the tried-and-true locations. Once we set out (with the obilgatory copy of John DeSanto’s So What About Fin? in hand, of course), our first stop was around noon at the newly-discovered (by Jimmy) building that served as a prison in two Laurel and Hardy films, The Hoose-Gow and The Second Hundred Years. From there we went to USC to do a walking tour of the campus where many building can be seen in Hog Wild (we had visited this area before during my 2005 visit, but Jimmy had subsequently made some further discoveries there). After USC, we went to the alley that was seen at the end of two L&H films, Block-Heads and We Faw Down. Of course I had to swing by the famous flight of stairs from The Music Box, so we arrived there as it was nearing 2:00 pm.
At the Music Box stairs
One effort we made was to find the builidng that served as the hangar in the film The Flying Deuces. We found one that could certainly fit the bill at the General Studios in Hollywood, but we did not find enough conclusive evidence to warrant announcing it to the world. This really put us in the mood to find something new, so that’s when we sought out to find a film location that would be hugely newsworthy.
The ‘hangar’ in question, actually a soundstage
This particular film was the silent Their Purple Moment – and our friend Randy had a filming ledger from the Hal Roach Studios that indicated that scenes were filmed at 28th and Congress. We were looking for the house that had served as Stan Laurel’s home in the film. Visual clues in the movie itself actually showed the street number of the house as being 1750. The intriguing fact was that 28th and Congress didn’t actually intersect – so we came up with a number of hypotheses as to where the location might have actually been. Although we found numerous houses that looked similar, we never came across the house in question – which was quite a disappointment.
The elusive house from “Their Purple Moment”
We gave up finally and headed to Culver City where the first order of business was to grab a very late lunch at Quizno’s followed by a Frosty from Wendy’s. The reason we ended up at a second fast food joint was because Quizno’s toilet was out of order. I offered to simply pee in the sink, but the clerk refused to give me the bathroom key. We quickly glanced over Main Street and the Culver Hotel and then headed to Madison to look for further homes that could be seen in Hog Wild.
As we got into the cool evening hours, we did have some luck pinpointing a few locations that were actually visible in the film. Granted, they were all along the same street as the known locations, but this was rather exciting to us that we had actually found some homes visible in the film that had never been documented before. Further down the street, we found one house that can be seen in both Hog Wild and Towed in a Hole.
By this time, it had become too dark to do much else but head back to the Wiley residence. There we ordered a pizza and called it a night. Driving around in the car for the bulk of the day had actually seemed rather relaxing after the earlier part of the week that had been greeted at breakneck speed. We needed more rest though. We would be meeting David at Disneyland on Thursday.
To be continued…
For further details on the locations, click here…
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