Best Movies to Watch Before You Visit LA New
These are the movies to watch before visiting Los Angeles: films that don’t just show you Los Angeles, but help you understand it before you arrive so everything feels more familiar, more interesting, and a little less overwhelming.
When I was growing up in Northern California, to me LA was the long boring freeway part before you finally got to Disneyland. The few times I visited as an adult, I joined the holier than thou chorus: ‘LA traffic is terrible. It's too spread out, who would actually choose to live here?'
Then my daughter moved there for college. Suddenly I was visiting all the time. And I started noticing what I'd completely missed: the history, the creativity, the particular coolness that doesn't exist anywhere else.
Los Angeles isn’t a city you understand immediately. It’s kind of a city you learn. And one of the best ways to do that is through the movies that were made here. Go expecting freeway traffic and stay open to the vibe! These movies will help you get ready for your first visit.
*Tip: for musical inspiration as you enter LA listen to “I Love LA” by Randy Newman and “LA Woman” by the Doors! It sets the mood immediately.
LA Story (1991)
This is still one of my favorite movies! Steve Martin wrote this love letter to Los Angeles and it remains the most accurate film about the city ever made. A TV weatherman falls in love, takes life advice from a highway sign, and drives two blocks to visit a neighbor because walking is simply not done. It sounds ridiculous. It is ridiculous. And it is also completely, unmistakably LA. If you watch only one film on this list, make it this one. You will arrive in LA already knowing the rules.
What this movie does better than almost anything else is explain the feel of the city. The light, the space, the randomness, the way beauty and absurdity sit right next to each other like it’s perfectly normal. Watch this before your trip, and you’ll arrive already understanding that LA isn’t meant to make sense in the traditional way.
Featured LA Sights:
- Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)
- Griffith Park
- Tail o' the Pup restaurant
- Various freeway scenes that will feel immediately, personally familiar
Pretty Woman (1990)
Yes, it's a fairy tale. No, you will not meet Richard Gere on Hollywood Boulevard. (Well, probably not)
What you will find is Rodeo Drive, which is exactly as intimidating as advertised and considerably more fun to walk down once you've watched Julia Roberts get thrown out of a boutique and then return with bags. She won the Golden Globe for this role. The boutique employees did not win anything.
Featured LA Sights:
- Rodeo Drive, Beverly Hills
- The Beverly Wilshire Hotel (still there, still fancy, still not cheap)
- Hollywood Boulevard
- The Hollywood Bowl
Clueless (1995)
AS IF you needed another reason to watch this. Alicia Silverstone as Cher Horowitz is a full-blown cultural institution, and the film's Beverly Hills, with its mall, its enormous houses, and its astonishing confidence, gives you a very specific and completely accurate education in one particular flavor of LA life. It is also funnier than most comedies made in the thirty years since, which feels like it should not be possible but here we are.
Featured LA Sights:
- Rodeo Drive, Beverly Hills
- Circus Liquor in North Hollywood (with the creepy neon sign)
- Various Mulholland Drive-area neighborhoods where the houses have names
Beverly Hills Cop (1984)
Eddie Murphy arrives from Detroit, takes one look at Beverly Hills, and spends the next ninety minutes being baffled by it. Forty years later this is still funny, largely because Beverly Hills is still baffling. The contrast between his loud, magnificent energy and the city's manicured blankness is the whole joke. This film also gave the world the Axel F theme, which will be in your head for the duration of your trip whether you want it there or not.
Featured LA Sights:
- Beverly Hills Hotel
- Beverly Hill City Hall
- Beverly Hills Police Department (exterior, very photogenic)
- Various residential streets where nobody is outside
The Brady Bunch Movie (1995)
Genuinely clever premise: the Brady family is still living in 1970s sitcom-land while everyone around them has moved on to the cynical mid-nineties. The comedy is entirely the culture clash, and it holds up. More importantly for our purposes, the Brady house is a real house in Studio City that you can drive past and feel a disproportionate amount of satisfaction about. This is a legitimate Los Angeles activity.
*Tip: stay at my favorite LA hotel, The Garland, and you will be in walking distance of the Brady Bunch house! Dreams do come true!
Featured LA Sights:
- The Brady House, 11222 Dilling Street, Studio City (extremely drive-by-able).
- San Fernando Valley neighborhoods
- Paramount Studios
Father of the Bride (1991)
Steve Martin as a Pasadena dad being slowly destroyed by his daughter's wedding budget. This is a warm and funny portrait of a very specific kind of LA life, the comfortable suburban version where the houses are beautiful and the expenses are enormous and everyone acts like this is perfectly normal. The Pasadena locations are genuinely lovely. You will want to walk those streets. You will also probably start talking like Franck (Martin Short).
Featured LA Sights:
- Pasadena residential neighborhoods
- Pasadena City Hall (the church exterior, and a very handsome building)
- Huntington Library and Gardens area
Die Hard (1988)
Every December someone on the internet raises the question of whether this is a Christmas movie. It is set in Los Angeles at Christmas, which is already its own joke: palm trees, a Nakatomi Plaza office party, Bruce Willis in bare feet on broken glass. The Nakatomi Plaza is actually Fox Plaza in Century City, which you can walk past and feel unreasonably pleased with yourself about. Highly recommended as a tourist activity.
Featured LA Sights:
- Fox Plaza, 2121 Avenue of the Stars, Century City (the actual Nakatomi Plaza, very much still standing)
- Los Angeles International Airport (LAX)
- Various Century City locations Bruce Willis ran through without shoes
The Graduate (1967)
Dustin Hoffman drifting around a swimming pool while Simon and Garfunkel plays is one of the defining images of a certain kind of Los Angeles life: beautiful, comfortable, and completely without purpose. The film moves through the San Fernando Valley, Pasadena, and the Wilshire corridor, and the 1967 LA it captures is mostly gone, but the light is the same and the freeways are worse. Worth watching for the cinematography alone, and also for Anne Bancroft, who is extraordinary.
Featured LA Sights:
- Pasadena and San Marino residential neighborhoods
- UCLA campus
- The 110 Freeway, which has not improved since 1967
Sunset Boulevard (1950)
Required viewing, no exceptions. William Holden narrates his own story from the bottom of a swimming pool, which tells you something about where this is headed. Gloria Swanson as faded silent film star Norma Desmond is one of the great performances in American cinema. It was shocking to me that Norma is presented as this has-been aged movie star and late in the movie we find out she's only 50 years old! Aw, if only Norma was around now, she'd be practically a spring chicken! (Not by Hollywood standards, but general standards. OK, my standards.)
Norma Desmond's mansion is gone. Sunset Boulevard itself is very much there, and you will drive it completely differently after watching this.
Featured LA Sights:
- Sunset Boulevard (the actual street, Hollywood to the Pacific, all of it)
- Paramount Studios
- Various Hancock Park and Wilshire-area locations
Body Double (1984)
Brian De Palma's gloriously unhinged thriller is specifically for the architecture tourists. An out-of-work actor house-sitting in a spectacular modernist home in the Hollywood Hills becomes obsessed with a woman in a neighboring house. The Chemosphere, a flying saucer on a single concrete pole cantilevered over the hills, features prominently. It is an actual house where actual people live, and it is one of the strangest buildings in a city full of strange buildings. Worth a drive-by. Fair warning: this film earns its R rating with gusto!
Featured LA Sights:
- The Chemosphere, 7776 Torreyson Drive, Hollywood Hills
- Hollywood Bowl
- Melrose Avenue
- Tail o' the Pup restaurant
- Various Hollywood Hills locations that look exactly like this in real life
The Player (1992)
Robert Altman's Hollywood satire is the one to watch before any studio tour. Tim Robbins plays a studio executive who may or may not have committed murder, and the film opens with a single unbroken eight-minute tracking shot at a studio lot that is worth the price of admission on its own. It is also stuffed with cameos from real actors playing themselves at various levels of self-awareness. This is the insider LA film, and it has not aged a day.
Featured LA Sights:
- Paramount Studios
- The Ritz-Carlton Pasadena
- Hollywood Forever Cemetery
- Various studio lots and industry-adjacent Westside locations
A Few More Worth Adding to Your Pre-Trip List
That barely scratches the surface. Los Angeles has been the backdrop for more films than any city on earth, which makes sense since it is where most of them are made. A few more that will calibrate your expectations appropriately:
- Chinatown (1974): the definitive LA noir, the city as a conspiracy, Jack Nicholson at the absolute top of his game
- Mulholland Drive (2001): David Lynch's version of Hollywood, deeply unsettling, impossible to explain, genuinely unforgettable
- La La Land (2016): the Griffith Observatory, the Angeles Crest Highway, that freeway overpass opening number
- Heat (1995): for the coffee shop scene alone, plus the best shots of downtown LA ever put on film
- Speed (1994): you will never look at a Los Angeles freeway the same way again, which is saying something
Ready to See LA in Real Life?
Watch a few of these, make some notes, show up with reasonable expectations and comfortable shoes. Then come find me in the comments and tell me which one you're starting with, or which LA movie I inexplicably left off this list.
Planning your LA trip? Start here
- Where should I Stay in LA? Please see this post of the coolest hotels in LA, all personally vetted by yours truly.
- Does LA have any fun places to Eat? Why, yes! Take a look here for the most unique, fun restaurants in LA.
- Are there any interesting or cool Bars in LA? Look no further than this post of Unique Bars in Los Angeles
- Is there anything to Do in LA? What if you're on your own? I'm glad you asked! Please see this post of coolest things to do in LA.
Hooray for Hollywood, and all that!
