Almost Famous|Hollywood Palladium — Cleveland, Rebuilt on Sunset Boulevard

Stillwater's Cleveland show is the film's first real concert: the band finally sounding like a band, and afterwards Penny Lane alone on the emptied floor, dancing through the litter the crowd left behind. The Cleveland Arena the scene names was torn down in 1977. So the production built Cleveland inside the Hollywood Palladium instead.

The Palladium opened on Halloween night in 1940 at 6215 Sunset Boulevard, with Tommy Dorsey's orchestra and a young Frank Sinatra out front. Streamline Moderne on the outside — a long curved white facade under a rippling neon sign. Inside, a room with no fixed seats and a sprung maple floor big enough for several thousand dancers. That open floor is the reason it works on film. It can be a 1940s ballroom, a 1973 arena, or itself, depending entirely on what you hang above it.

Penny's dance is the shot that needs the room most. She has just been traded away for fifty dollars and a case of beer, and the film hands her an enormous empty space to be abandoned in.

The Palladium still books shows most weeks of the year, and the floor is still the floor. If you go, stay put after the encore instead of moving with the crowd. The house lights come up on a room of trampled cups and dropped setlists, and for about ninety seconds it looks exactly like the end of that scene.