Almost Famous|The Hollywood Roosevelt — A Motor Lodge With a Hockney Under the Water

The band's long, souring afternoon by the pool — the hotel the film places in Tempe, everyone lying around while the group quietly comes apart — was shot at the Hollywood Roosevelt, 7000 Hollywood Boulevard. A grand 1920s hotel is asked to play an anonymous motor lodge, and it works because Cameron Crowe frames it tight: deck chairs, tiled edge, a few bodies in the sun and nothing else in view.

The Roosevelt opened in 1927 and hosted the first Academy Awards banquet in its Blossom Room two years later. The Spanish Colonial Revival lobby, with its wrought-iron balconies and painted beams, is a room you can walk into straight off the boulevard. Behind it is the Tropicana pool, and on the bottom of that pool is a mural David Hockney painted in 1988 — loose blue brushstrokes that bend and travel whenever the surface moves. It was restored in 2019 after decades of chlorine.

So the pool standing in for a nowhere motel in Arizona has a Hockney beneath it. That contradiction is thoroughly Los Angeles, and it is this film's actual subject: glamour and boredom sharing the same square of wet concrete.

The lobby and bars are open to non-guests; the pool deck is not. Walk through the lobby in the afternoon, when the light drops in from the courtyard, and look at the tile floor before you look at anything else.