The film says Chicago. The camera says Los Angeles

Finding the Street Behind Some Like It Hot's Opening Chase

When Some Like It Hot opens, Billy Wilder wastes no time establishing the dangerous world of Prohibition-era Chicago.

It is February 1929. A funeral procession moves through the city streets. A hearse travels ominously through the winter landscape, apparently carrying a coffin.

It is not.

The hearse is transporting illegal liquor.

A police car pursues it. Gunfire erupts. The respectable-looking funeral procession turns out to be a bootlegging operation, and within minutes the audience has been plunged into the violent world of Chicago gangsters.

It is a remarkable opening for a comedy. It is also a remarkably interesting scene for a film-location detective. Because the Chicago we see on screen was not filmed in Chicago.

And for years, the precise location of this street sequence has been surprisingly difficult to pin down.

The Location Mystery

The problem begins with the geography of the film itself.

Some Like It Hot was produced primarily in California, with Hotel del Coronado and its surroundings standing in for the fictional Seminole-Ritz resort in Florida. The opening Chicago material likewise relied on California locations and studio work.

The problem is that knowing a scene was filmed in Los Angeles is not the same thing as knowing where in Los Angeles the camera was standing.

Existing references to the opening street sequence have generally been much less precise, placing it somewhere around East 4th Street in downtown Los Angeles.

That is a useful starting point — but it is not enough for a Location Detective.

The real question is:

Where exactly was the camera?

For a film-location enthusiast, that distinction matters.

A general neighborhood can tell us where to begin searching. But identifying the actual street corner, the direction of the camera, and the buildings visible in the frame transforms a vague location into a documented piece of cinematic geography.

Reading the Background

The breakthrough came not from the cars, the actors, or the action. It came from the buildings.

During the chase, the camera captures a surprisingly useful stretch of streetscape. On the left side of the frame are several buildings with distinctive architectural characteristics.

The clues include:

• · the number of storeys;

• · the arrangement and shape of the windows;

• · the spacing between architectural elements;

• · distinctive arched entrances;

• · the alignment of the façades;

• · and, most importantly, the way the street continues into the distance.

These details are easy to overlook while watching the scene at normal speed. The eye naturally follows the hearse and the police car.

But for a location detective, the background can be more valuable than the foreground.

Buildings do not improvise.

They occupy fixed positions, have fixed proportions, and often preserve architectural details for decades. A film frame therefore becomes a kind of historical photograph — sometimes unintentionally recording information that the filmmakers themselves never considered important.

In this case, those details provided the first major set of clues.

Turning the Camera Around

Once the buildings visible in the film were compared with the surviving downtown Los Angeles streetscape, the possibilities began to narrow.

The decisive evidence came from matching several characteristics simultaneously rather than relying on a single building.

• The window patterns correspond.

• The number of floors corresponds.

• The distinctive entrances correspond.

And, crucially, the overall relationship between the buildings fits the perspective seen in the film. It is one thing to say:

"That building looks similar."

It is another to demonstrate:

"These buildings have the same floor count, the same window arrangement, the same architectural features, the street has the same perspective, and the historical reference point is in the correct position."

That is the difference between a guess and a reconstruction. And this makes it possible to establish not merely the street, but the direction of view.

The El Rey Hotel Clue

There was another important piece of the puzzle.

The former El Rey Hotel provides an additional geographical reference point. Its illuminated sign is seen in distant background of the chase scene.

The El Rey Hotel itself is long gone as a hotel, but its former building at 566 S. San Pedro Street, at the corner of 6th Street, still survives. This proved to be an important geographical clue. In the film, the distant building associated with the former hotel appears with a distinctive row of approximately ten illuminated vertical elements. The surviving building at 566 S. San Pedro Street presents a remarkably compatible pattern, providing an additional reference point for establishing the direction of view.

The El Rey reference also helped rule out the previously suggested East 4th Street area, because that location does not fit the geographical relationship between the camera position, San Pedro Street, and the former hotel site.

In the modern view, the former hotel location corresponds to the distant portion of the streetscape, helping confirm the southward perspective toward 6th Street.

This is particularly valuable because location identification becomes much stronger when several independent clues converge.

San Pedro Street and Winston Street

A city as large as Los Angeles contains thousands of potentially similar streets and buildings. Searching every façade in the city would be impractical. The key was therefore to find a reliable geographical reference point that could narrow the search before comparing the architecture in detail.

So, we needed to find a reasonable starting point, which would allow to dramatically narrow down the search.

Position of El Rey Hotel as a piece of evidence allows us to reconstruct the filming position as San Pedro Street at Winston Street, with the camera looking south toward 5th Street.

Standing there today produces one of the great pleasures of film-location research.

The location does not immediately announce itself as the opening of Some Like It Hot.

There is no sign saying:

THIS IS WHERE THE HEARSE CHASE WAS FILMED.

Instead, the connection has to be reconstructed.

You look at the street.

You look at the surviving buildings.

Then you look back at the film frame.

Suddenly the geometry begins to make sense.

What began as a broadly described downtown Los Angeles location could therefore be narrowed to a specific street corner, a specific direction of view, and a set of identifiable buildings — a reconstruction that was not apparent from the film's production information alone.

The film has not transported us to Chicago. It has transported us to another city and persuaded us to believe that we are somewhere else.

Hollywood's Geographic Deception

That is one of the most fascinating aspects of Some Like It Hot.

The film repeatedly plays with geography.

The story begins in Chicago, but the streets we see were filmed in Los Angeles.

Later, the story moves to Florida, but the principal resort environment is Coronado, California.

The result can be expressed surprisingly simply:

• Chicago → Los Angeles

• Florida → Coronado

These are not merely production substitutions. They reveal something fundamental about classic Hollywood filmmaking.

Filmmakers did not always need to reproduce a location literally. They needed to find a place that could convincingly become another place on screen.

For the audience watching in 1959, the question was not whether the buildings were actually in Chicago. The question was whether they felt like Chicago.

And they did.

Why the Discovery Matters

For a casual viewer, identifying the exact street corner may seem like a small detail.

For anyone interested in cinematic geography, it is much more significant.

This is particularly significant because it is one of only two known outdoor filming locations for Some Like It Hot that can be identified with such precision.

Hotel del Coronado is the obvious example. Its architecture, beach, and surroundings remain strongly recognizable, allowing visitors to stand in places that appeared on screen more than six decades ago.

The downtown Los Angeles location is different.

Here, the attraction is not a famous surviving film landmark.

It is the act of discovery.

The location demonstrates how much information can be hidden in a film frame — information that may survive even when the film itself never tells us where the camera was.

It also provides a useful lesson for anyone undertaking their own location research.

Do not look only at the obvious landmarks.

• Look at the background.

• Look at windows.

• Look at doors.

• Look at street angles.

• Look at rooflines.

• Look at the relationship between buildings.

And always ask: What direction is the camera looking?

That final question can be decisive.

A building that appears to be "on the left" in a film frame may suddenly make sense when you discover that the camera was looking south rather than north, or toward a particular intersection rather than away from it.

From Film Frame to Map

Once the location has been established, another rewarding step becomes possible: reconstructing the scene on a modern map.

The positions of the hearse, police car, and camera can be related to the street layout, while the surviving buildings provide fixed reference points.

The result is more than a pin on Google Maps.

It is a reconstruction of the filming geography.

The fictional geography says:

Chicago, February 1929.

The production geography says:

Downtown Los Angeles, California.

Both are true within their respective worlds. And that distinction is exactly what makes film-location research so fascinating.

A Location Hidden in Plain Sight

The opening of Some Like It Hot is famous for many reasons: the fake funeral, the bootleggers, the police pursuit, the gunfire, and the wonderfully abrupt transition from gangster drama to comedy.

But there is another story hiding behind the action.

The streets themselves are telling us where the filmmakers really were.

Once you know what to look for, the background stops being scenery and becomes evidence.

• A window becomes a clue.

• An arched doorway becomes a reference point.

• A distant building becomes a directional marker.

And an apparently anonymous downtown street becomes a piece of Hollywood history.

That is the essence of the Location Detective approach.

The question is not simply:

"Where does the story take place?"

It is:

"Where was the camera actually standing?"

In the case of Some Like It Hot's opening chase, following that question leads us away from Chicago and into downtown Los Angeles — to San Pedro Street and Winston Street, looking south toward 5th Street.

And suddenly, the first few minutes of Billy Wilder's famous comedy reveal an entirely different story: the story of how Hollywood made one California street become Chicago in 1929.

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