Los Angeles Public Library Photo Collection This set stood approximately where the Century Plaza Hotel was built in Century City. Then, according to one account, “Everyone went to lunch.” The back lot of 20th Century-Fox Studio. After a round of speeches in which Zeckendorf labeled the development “an oasis in the midst of a great city,” a bulldozer demolished the facade of a small shack on Tombstone Street. William Zeckendorf Sr., flanked by Mary Pickford and a bevy of politicians and press agents, gathered in front of a make-believe Western saloon for an old-fashioned ground- breaking. A modern “city within a city” was planned, and the groundbreaking was a star-studded event. It was decided that 176 acres of the studio’s extensive backlot would be developed by New York real estate dynamo William Zeckendorf. In 1959, Spyros Skouras, the head of the ailing Fox Studios, was looking for new ways to make money. The very neighborhood it stands in was once the backlot of 20th Century Fox. It’s not surprising that Fox Plaza was destined for celluloid glory.
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“There’s not an angle-literal or figurative-of the building that the movie doesn’t capitalize on, whether it’s the striking architecture standing tall relative to its Century City neighbors or the nooks and crannies of stairwells and elevator shafts,” says Alonso Duralde, film critic and author of Have Yourself a Movie Little Christmas. And Nakatomi tower, well that’s really Fox Plaza in Century City, the building that became a star. And the man jumping off the building isn’t named John McClane, nor is it actor Bruce Willis, it is stuntman Ken Bates. Of course, this isn’t reality, but the culminating scene in the 1988 Christmas-action Die Hard. The fire from the explosion lights up the LA skyline. Suddenly, an explosion rips open the roof, and bloodied and barefoot New York Police Department officer John McClane propels down the building in a hail of glass and debris, falling past the sleek mirrored windows. As most of Los Angeles is tucked in bed waiting for Santa, hundreds of FBI and Los Angeles Police Department officers swarm around the gleaming Nakatomi tower, a half-built example of 1980s power architecture at its finest.
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