Most of *Blade Runner* was shot on a stage. The film's cinematographer said so in print the year it came out, and it is the useful thing to know before you go looking for the city: the street that made the film famous is a studio backlot, and the skyline above it is a rack of models. What is real fits into a few blocks of downtown Los Angeles, plus one house on a hill above Los Feliz.
6
places on the route
Five of the six stand within a kilometre of each other downtown. Click a point to jump to its entry.
The film opened on 25 June 1982, did modest business in North America and split the reviewers. Eleven years later the Library of Congress selected it for the National Film Registry. Somewhere in between, its wet, crowded, over-signed city became the default picture of the future and gave cyberpunk its look.
Three of the six addresses stand at a single intersection.
The same corner today. The ground floor turns over every few years; the brick above it has not changed.
Photo: Eden, Janine and Jim from New York City · CC BY 2.0 · Wikimedia Commons
304 South Broadway
Inside is a five-storey court under a glass roof: open-cage lifts, wrought iron stair rails, pink brick and a great deal of light. This is the building where the genetic designer J. F. Sebastian lives, and where the last confrontation of the film is played out, up the stairs and along the galleries.
It is not where the film ends. The closing rooftop sequence was meant to be shot on real downtown roofs, was judged impractical, and was built instead as two movable rooftop units roughly thirty feet high on a studio backlot, where the crew spent over two weeks turning them to get fresh backgrounds behind the actors. Anyone who comes to the Bradbury for the roof is looking for something that was never here.
The building opened in 1893. Sumner Hunt delivered the design and George Wyman supervised the construction, and which of the two it belongs to has been argued about ever since. It is a National Historic Landmark. Shops on the ground floor change every few years; the court does not.
Across the intersection, five storeys of brick and terracotta. In the film it is a hotel.
It went up in 1894 for Margaret Irvine of the Irvine Ranch. Sumner Hunt designed it and George Wyman supervised the building work, which is to say the same two men were responsible for both of the Blade Runner buildings on this corner, at almost the same moment. It is the second-oldest commercial building in the historic core, after the Bradbury. It has also been called the Irvine Block, the Byrne Building and the Giant Penny Building, and it now contains flats under the name Pan American Lofts. Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument number 544, and a contributing property in the Broadway Theater and Commercial District.
The theatre's marquee turns up in street shots, and it is carrying its real bill. In 1981 the Million Dollar was a Spanish-language house, and what glows on the front of it in the film is what was genuinely booked on Broadway that year: the bandleader Mazacote, Los Mimilocos, and a screening of the Mexican melodrama Mamá Solita. The year of the shoot can be read off the front of the building.
The future in this film is famous for being multilingual and over-lit. Here a piece of it is downtown Los Angeles in 1981, photographed without alteration.
Sid Grauman opened the theatre in 1917, his first picture palace, before the Egyptian and the Chinese took him to Hollywood Boulevard. From 1949 it ran Spanish-language film and live music under Frank Fouce, and most major Mexican releases premiered here. It is on the National Register of Historic Places.
Opened in 1924 and driven under Bunker Hill, the tunnel is lined end to end in white glazed tile. The tile is the point. Headlights hit it and smear, and a car coming through arrives inside a tube of reflected light, which is what the spinner does here.
Crews have been back constantly since, for features and for what looks like every car advertisement of the last thirty years. Stand at the Hill Street portal today and Walt Disney Concert Hall is directly above you.
The ticket concourse played the police station of 2019. Office sets were put up inside the hall for the shoot and taken out again when it finished, so what is there now is what was there before: a long room with wooden ticket counters down one side, tall arched windows, inlaid marble in the floor and chandeliers hanging off a beamed ceiling.
Union Station opened in 1939, the last of the great American railway terminals, and it is still a working station. It is also the most reused place on this list. The same building appears in [Catch Me If You Can](/movie/catch-me-if-you-can/), and Bugsy, Pearl Harbor and The Way We Were were all shot here as well. Most productions that come here want the station to be a station, in one decade or another. This one wanted a police department thirty-eight years after the cameras were in the room.
The outside of Deckard's apartment building. It appears briefly and it carries the whole idea of where he lives.
Frank Lloyd Wright designed it for Charles and Mabel Ennis and it was finished in 1925, the largest of the four textile block houses he built around Los Angeles in the 1920s. The blocks were cast on site from decomposed granite dug out of the hillside, mixed with sand, gravel and water and poured into moulds, then knitted together with steel rods. The pattern is a stepped, perforated square, repeated until it stops reading as ornament and starts reading as a wall.
Glendower Avenue is narrow and winds, and the house sits above it on three sides. It is a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument, a California Historical Landmark and on the National Register of Historic Places. Film crews have been coming to it since the 1950s, and it has been known locally for decades as the Blade Runner house.
What is not on the map
The 2019 street belongs to Warner Bros. in Burbank. The production took over New York Street, a standing backlot street built in 1930 that had already been used for 42nd Street in 1933 and would be used for The Dark Knight in 2008, and hung it with pipework, ducting and rented neon until it read as a future. Interiors went up on stages 4, 24 and 25. When Zhora is chased through a shop window, that shop was built on the same backlot street, and the neon in its windows was pulled off the street set and moved indoors because the first two attempts at dressing it were rejected.
The buildings above the street are models. The Tyrell pyramids were built as miniatures and lit from the inside by a single bare bulb on a smoke stage, with their thousands of windows scraped out of painted plastic by hand. The opening sweep over the burning refineries, the shot people remember before any actor has appeared, is rows of acid-etched brass silhouettes laid out in forced perspective on lit tables, threaded from underneath with seven miles of fibre optics. The silhouettes were traced from photographs of the refinery at El Segundo, so the shape of that skyline is real even though nothing was ever filmed there.
The theatrical ending of 1982, with its green hills and open sky, is not this film's footage at all. It is surplus aerial photography shot for The Shining and handed over by Stanley Kubrick. Where those helicopters were flying, we have not been able to establish.
One more thing to watch for in the model city, since the crew admitted it afterwards: the skyline was assembled out of whatever the workshop had lying about. Among the towers there is a building shaped suspiciously like the Millennium Falcon, and a four-foot replica of the ship from Dark Star standing on end.
