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Sunday, July 13, 2003

X Marks the Top Pop Spots

By Leanne Potts
Of the Journal
    Every belief system has its shrines, places where the faithful can go to feel the presence of gods, saints and prophets who trod there in earlier times.
    Pop culture has magical sites, too, secular places fixed into our consciousness by TV shows, pop songs, movies and newspaper headlines. Places like the marina where the SS Minnow left for the fateful three-hour tour in "Gilligan's Island." Chandra Levy's Washington, D.C., apartment. The Wisconsin hillside where Stevie Ray Vaughan died in a helicopter crash.
    We go there, and we can feel what it was like to be 10 years old, sipping Kool-Aid and watching Gilligan screw up another rescue attempt, or 20 years old and pulling over to the side of the road upon hearing on the radio of Vaughan's death. We experience, for the first time, a physical connection to the flickering image, the riff of music that caused us to feel something.
    Just in time for summer road trips comes a cool new book that lists the location of about 650 pilgrimage-worthy pop culture sites across the United States. "James Dean Died Here: The Locations of America's Pop Culture Landmarks" (Santa Monica Press, $16.95, 310 pp.) is a guide to sites morbid, trashy and profound.
    Author Chris Epting, a California ad man and pop culture aficionado, spent years researching and writing the book. "I love going and standing where something happened," he said.
    Epting has assembled a treasure trove of pop landmarks, places like:
   

The exact site on the road outside Slidell, La., where Jayne Mansfield died in a car crash in 1967. (On Old Highway 90, just before the Rigolets Bridge and by a restaurant called the White Kitchen.)
   

The country clubs where "Caddyshack" was filmed. (Rolling Hills Golf and Tennis Club, Davie, Fla., was where most of the 1980 comedy was filmed, but the pool scenes were shot at the Boca Raton Hotel and Country Club in Boca Raton, Fla.)
   

The World War II-era blimp hangars in which the climax of "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" was filmed. (Hangars 5 and 6 and Building 17 of the Brookley Industrial Complex, Mobile, Ala.)
   

The restaurant parking lot where Jimmy Hoffa was last seen alive. (Machus Red Fox restaurant, 6676 Telegraph Road, Bloomfield Hills, Mich.)
   

The Brady Bunch house. (11222 Dilling St., Studio City, Calif.) The family who lives there has erected a fence to keep gawkers off the lawn, but otherwise the house is unchanged since the days of Marcia, Greg and the others.
    To decide what sites to include in the book, Epting said he spent a few weeks brainstorming pop history. "I tried to pick events that, if you stopped people on the street and asked them about it, would they have some working knowledge of it?" he said.
    Some landmarks were easy to find, because they were marked by a plaque. (Like the rural Louisiana roadside where Bonnie and Clyde died in a police ambush.) Others required Epting to dig through the location logs of old movie shoots, newspaper clippings and library archives.
    The toughest site to locate, Epting said, was the spot where Cary Grant fled an attacking crop-duster plane in the 1959 thriller "North by Northwest."
    In the movie, the climactic chase scene happened in Indiana. Epting sifted through the papers in the estate of the film's director, Alfred Hitchcock, and discovered the scene was actually filmed somewhere in California.
    "I finally found the guy who actually flew the plane," Epting said. The pilot, now in his 70s, took Epting to the exact field outside Wasco, Calif., where he had chased Grant 44 years earlier.
    Sites are organized by themes like "Americana: The Weird and the Wonderful," "Channel Surfing," "Celebrity Deaths and Infamous Celebrity Events" and "History and Tragedy." There's also an index by state.
    Not surprisingly, California is home to the most pop culture landmarks, 232. New York is a distant second with 83.
    New Mexico has five entries, and they are the ones you would expect: the Trinity Site, where the first atomic bomb was tested; the Taos jail cell-turned-art-gallery where Peter Fonda meets up with Jack Nicholson in "Easy Rider"; the UFO crash site at Roswell; the Clovis recording studio where Buddy Holly cut his hits and the place where Billy the Kid was killed.
    Epting said he wanted to include the Albuquerque McDonald's where the coffee spill happened that sparked the infamous coffee-burn lawsuit. "I couldn't find which one it was for sure, though," he said. "The case is sealed, and McDonald's wouldn't tell me."
    Mystery solved, Chris. According to a Journal story from 1994, the $2.7 million coffee spill happened at the McDonald's at 5001 Gibson SE, across the street from Lovelace Medical Center. That's where in 1992 Stella Liebeck, then 79, burned her lap; sometime later she called a lawyer and the rest is pop history.
    "It'll be in the next edition of the book," Epting said.
   

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Leanne Potts writes this column weekly for the Journal. She can be reached at lpotts@abqjournal.com.