Fans of the hit new Netflix docuseries “Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel” who hoped to patronize the downtown Los Angeles landmark will have to wait, as the hotel was bought in 2017 and remains shuttered while it undergoes a luxury upgrade. If you’re itching to step into some Hollywood history, here are 10 other hotels that became famous for their on-screen time or as an inspirations for films but that are open for business.
Jack Nicholson’s creeptastic “Herrrrrre’s Johnny!” was filmed on a sound stage near London, but the externals for “The Shining” were shot at the Timberline Lodge on Mount Hood east of Portland, Oregon. Rooms are ample and a 100-inch snow pack is the norm.
Stephen King created Jack Torrance and “The Shining” from inspiration drawn during a stay at the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado. Jack, who holed up in the dead of winter with his wife and son as the Overlook Hotel caretaker, had only been a three-hour drive from the best skiing in North America. But if you do check in, keep your eyes open for spooks because word is that the place is haunted…
By late morning, the Caesars Palace roof in Las Vegas might as well be the surface of the sun. But that’s where a trio played by Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms and Zach Galifianakis unwittingly left their soon-to-be-married friend and would-be brother-in-law during a bachelor party weekend featured in the 2009 comedy classic “The Hangover.”
Cast adrift in the bright lights and dark shades of night during a work trip to Japan, a subdued Bill Murray could only be stirred by a game Scarlett Johansson in Sofia Coppola’s “Lost in Translation,” shot at the Park Hyatt Tokyo.
The Beverly Wilshire, A Four Seasons Hotel off Rodeo Drive was used for external shots throughout 1990’s “Pretty Woman.” Hoping to renew nostalgia, the hotel launched a $300,000 promotional package last year for which guests could similarly experience the high life — and times — of Julia Roberts’ character, Vivian Ward.
Though she sometimes required dozens of shots for one take, Marilyn Monroe turned in one of the most memorable performances of her career in Billy Wilder’s “Some Like It Hot.” Released in 1959, the classic comedy was filmed on-location at the beachside Hotel del Coronado on Coronado Island in the San Diego Bay.
The Mountain Lake Lodge in the Appalachian town of Pembroke, Virginia, is a tribute to outdoor adventure and now a museum to indoor pursuits. Fans of “Dirty Dancing” flock to the hotel that played the fictional Kellerman’s Resort set in the New York Catskill Mountains.
The 2014 sci-fi thriller “Ex Machina” was shot on-location at the Juvet Landscape Hotel in “a remote part of a remote village in a remote region of Norway,” according to the hotel website. Rooms in undoubtedly familiar spaces range from “bird houses” to “landscape rooms” to a “writer’s lodge.”
The atrium-exposed lobby elevators of the Hyatt Regency San Francisco delivered enough background suspense in the 1970s to be featured in Mel Brooks’ “High Anxiety,” Steve McQueen and Paul Newman’s “The Towering Inferno,” as well as in the amusing sci-fi adventure “Time After Time.”
The Biltmore was Hollywood’s go-to film location in the 1970s and ’80s when an opulent hotel was called for. It was used in “The Sting” (1973), “Chinatown” (1974), “Ghostbusters” (1984), “Beverly Hills Cop” (1984), “Bachelor Party” (1984), “Splash” (1984) and “The Fabulous Baker Boys” (1989). It evokes the Cecil Hotel architecturally and sits six blocks north in downtown L.A. But it’s a long six blocks.
