OMG, I so want to watch 500 Days of Summer, coming out today and starring Angelenos Joseph Gordon-Levitt and the ever-so-lovely Zooey Deschanel, and even more so after finding out that downtown Los Angeles is the backdrop for the story.
Yes, downtown has been used in probably every other commercial, television show, and movie you see, and as probably every single city you can imagine (New York is the most popular, but it has masked as Chicago and even Portland). In this movie, it is quintessentially and realistically playing itself, a REAL CITY, separate from Hollywood.
According to this LA Times article, the movie was originally supposed to take place in San Francisco (*yawn*), but after Joseph Gordon-Levitt and director Marc Webb took a walking tour of downtown, it was deemed a more perfect fit. Here’s a video where the cast and crew talk about downtown Los Angeles as the setting for the movie:
