Oscar Travel: From Malibu to Iwo Jima

Travel Blog • Michael Yessis • 02.22.07 | 8:35 AM ET

Harry Medved and Bruce Akiyama don’t seem to be interested in the creepy type of Oscar tourism. In advance of this weekend’s Academy Awards, the duo put together a travel story for MSN highlighting U.S. destinations where five Oscar-nominated movies were filmed, including “Little Miss Sunshine” and “Letters From Iwo Jima.” The latter flick was filmed at the same California beach where “Gidget” and “Point Break” were filmed: Leo Carrillo State Beach. Just how convincing was the California beach as a stand-in for Iwo Jima? Medved and Akiyama wanted to find that out, so in their second Oscar travel tie-in of the week they launched a poll at Fandango to determine which American city best portrayed another location in this year’s Oscar-nominated films.

The choices:

* Malibu as Iwo Jima in “Letters From Iwo Jima”
* Brooklyn as Boston in “The Departed”
* Dallas as Atlanta in “Borat”
* Downtown Los Angeles as Detroit in “Dreamgirls”
* Downtown Los Angeles as Victorian London in “The Prestige”
* Ventura as Redondo Beach in “Little Miss Sunshine”

As of this posting, Brooklyn as Boston was running first, followed by Malibu as Iwo Jima.

Since Medved and Akiyama seem to have a love of travel and movies—they’re also the co-authors of a new travel guide to movie locations, Hollywood Escapes—so I dropped Medved an e-mail with a few questions on the subject.

World Hum: Who did you vote for in your poll?

I voted for Malibu’s Leo Carrillo State Beach, of course. I love the fact that Clint Eastwood, who is also a California State Park commissioner, shot his intimate war picture at a beach whose name honors another actor-state park commissioner. It’s virtually unrecognizable in the movie because of the black sand that they trucked in from the Mojave Desert. And it’s a testament to the vision of the film’s location manager Steve Beimler (and the film’s late production designer Henry Bumstead) who convinced Eastwood and the crew that Iwo Jima could be duplicated in Southern California.

Several chapters in “Hollywood Escapes” cover movies shot in and around Malibu. What is it about Malibu that makes it such a draw for travelers and filmmakers?

There’s a variety of seaside landscapes along the Malibu coast from rocky shorelines to endless white sand beaches. You can find every kind of big-screen beach scenery there, from the picturesque sea stacks at El Matador State Beach (doubling as the Carolina Coast in “The Notebook” with Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams) to the romantic Cape Cod feel of Paradise Cove and its rickety pier (which strangely plays Lake Michigan in “American Pie 2” with Jason Biggs and Shannon Elizabeth) to Point Dume’s monumental rock face along the water (site of the Statue of Liberty climax in the original “Planet of the Apes” and Dr. Evil’s Volcano Island visited by Mike Myers and Heather Graham in “Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me”).

Having Malibu stand in for Iwo Jima seems an odd choice on the face of it. Are there any other odd location stand-ins that you know about in the history of movies?

Some of my favorites are:

* Italy’s Gran Sasso (near the city of L’Aquila) for Route 66 in 1977’s “Hitchhike”
* Santa Monica’s Main Street for NYC’s Columbus Avenue for the Travolta-Newton-John reteaming “Two of a Kind”
* San Diego County’s Hotel del Coronado as a Florida resort in “Some Like it Hot” (the promontory of Point Loma in the distance is the giveaway that it ain’t the Florida coast)
* Pasadena’s Mt. Wilson Road as a South American roadway in “Now Voyager”

Which one of the nominated places do you care to travel to most?

I’d love to revisit “The Departed”‘s exterior locations in Boston—now that there’s even a “Departed” tour of the city. I’m especially curious to see Boston’s Chinatown as I heard it’s been revitalized—plus the area near The Chart House restaurant where Jack Nicholson encounters Mark Walhberg and Martin Sheen—but I’m not sure I’d want to head to some of the darker Southie locations, however. I’d also enjoy finding the luncheonette and other Brooklyn locations where most of “The Departed”‘s interiors were shot.

Thanks, Harry.