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The cornerstone went in on a Saturday afternoon in April 1927, with documents sealed inside it by the developer's wife. The master of ceremonies was Fred Niblo, who had directed Ben-Hur two years earlier. The hotel that Hollywood has been filming ever since was started off by a film director, nine months before it took a guest.
Half of what stands on the block is a National Register landmark and half of it officially is not. The listed half is the original hotel: steel-reinforced concrete under brick and terra cotta, laid out as a letter E, the heads of mythological beasts worked into the capitals of the columns. The tower next door, put up in 1971, was written out of the nomination by the two consultants who prepared it in 1986, as a separate building and an intrusion. The halves are joined by two bridges over a private cobbled street with a mission bell standing in it, cobbles out of Italy, gas lamps off a castle in Edinburgh.
Fox publicity in 1971 put Escape from the Planet of the Apes here, on a run of Beverly Hills exteriors that also took in Carroll & Co. and Giorgio's, the two dearest shops in town at the time, and the zoo. It is the older of the two titles on this page with a production record behind it. Beyonce shot 7/11 in a suite in 2014, hand held, patio to bathroom. Hell's Kitchen used the pool for a reward in 2009 and The Apprentice a bar for a cocktail party in 2007. Four more, Clueless, Sex and the City: The Movie, Valentine's Day and Entourage, come from the hotel and nowhere else we could reach: its press room names three of them in one sentence, and Ben Trodd, then running the hotel, gave the same list to The Hollywood Reporter in 2016 with Entourage added.
In the same interview Trodd, the general manager, said guests arrive looking to recognise parts of the building that may or may not have been used. He was hedging, and he was right to. Nobody in the hotel has published which rooms have had a camera in them, and the city's visitor bureau, which does answer the question, gets the famous one wrong. It tells people the lobby in Pretty Woman is this lobby. The outside of the building is. The lobby is a hotel further east on Wilshire Boulevard, and that one has been demolished.