It’s February and you know what that means! Love is in the air! It is officially the season for candy hearts, long-stemmed roses, boxed chocolates and romantic comedies – or “anti-romantic comedies,” as the beloved film “500 Days of Summer” has been described. Though certainly not your typical genre offering, the 2009 movie, which is currently streaming on both Amazon Prime and Hulu, quickly became a critical darling and audience favorite and remains so today, more than a decade after its debut.
As narrator Richard McGonagle warns at the flick’s outset, “You should know upfront, this is not a love story.” Instead, “500 Days of Summer” chronicles the failed 500-day relationship between twenty-something co-workers Summer (Zooey Deschanel) and Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), covering the good, the bad and all the trips to IKEA in between.
The indie hit was penned by screenwriters Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber, who had always hoped to write a rom-com together. As Neustadter told Entertainment Weekly, things didn’t come together until he found himself brokenhearted following the ending of a relationship. He explained, “I was home, sort of reeling from that breakup. I did what I usually do in those situations, which is I just sort of drowned myself in music and in movies — exactly what the character does in the movie. I had rented this movie called ’32 Short Films About Glenn Gould.’ It’s this weird Canadian movie that I actually still have never seen, but I had the DVD on my DVD player, and I was looking at it and I realized: That’s a cool way to tell a relationship story, like a bunch of short films, and you can kind of tell them out of order, you can juxtapose them any way you wanted. I quickly sort of compiled this email to Weber saying, ‘I think I figured out our rom-com.’” The rest is well-watched history!
Not only did the movie serve as a love letter to what Neustadter describes as “this genre that at the time was no longer what it once was,” but to Los Angeles, as well, attracting locals and tourists alike to the city’s many fabulous landmarks perhaps more than any other film in recent history!
Sadly, “500 Day’s” most famous location, the bench that plays Tom’s favorite spot in L.A., is situated inside the now-defunct Angels Knoll park which closed to the public in 2013 and is currently slated for a massive redevelopment project. As director Mark Webb bemoaned to The Hollywood Reporter, “I don’t know enough about civic agencies, and God knows budgets are difficult things to manage — and, let’s be honest, maybe there are better things to spend money on. But you know what? I’ll miss my bench.”
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Image Credit: Doug Kerr Fans shouldn’t lament too much, though, as there are several spots from the film that remain intact and accessible, including Redwood Bar & Grill, where Tom and Summer karaoke on Day 28, Grand Park, the site of the “You Make My Dreams (Come True)” dance sequence, the Fine Arts Building, which Tom points out to Summer while on a tour of spectacular downtown L.A. structures, and Point Fermin Lighthouse, where the two attend a wedding towards the end of the movie.
The latter, located at 807 W. Paseo Del Mar in San Pedro, currently serves as a museum and special events venue. Situated on a 0.61-acre parcel overlooking the Pacific Ocean in Point Fermin Park, it is easily one of the movie’s – and the city’s – most picturesque spots.
The Point Fermin moniker comes courtesy of British explorer George Vancouver who in 1793 dubbed the cliffside promontory in honor of then-father-president of the California missions, Fermín de Francisco Lasuén de Arasqueta. It would be another 80 years before construction on the lighthouse that now stands sentry there began.
Designed by U.S. Lighthouse Board draftsman Paul J. Pelz in the Stick style, the Point Fermin Lighthouse was completed in December 1874 at a cost of $20,000. Furnished out of redwood and Douglas fir, the structure consists of a rectangular two-story residence capped by a three-story tower that extends from the second level and rises 59 feet into the air. It is actually one of six similar sites designed by Pelz around the same time, though only two others remain standing today, East Brothers Light Station in the town of Richmond in Northern California, which now serves as a bed and breakfast, and Hereford Inlet Lighthouse in North Wildwood, New Jersey.
Point Fermin Lighthouse guided ships in and out of the bustling Los Angeles Harbor until late 1941. The structure’s final lighting took place on December 9 of that year, following the attack on Pearl Harbor, after which it went dark in an attempt to ward off similar enemy raids, never to be lit again. The Navy took over the location shortly thereafter, utilizing it as a watchtower throughout the end of World War II. Several modifications were made to repurpose the site to that end, including removing the structure’s Fresnel lens and replacing the lantern room with a rather unattractive lookout space that became known as the “chicken coop” due to its boxy shape.
Following the war, the lighthouse quickly proved obsolete thanks to “radar and direction finders,” which as explained by SanPedro.com, “took over sentry and signaling duties.” As such, the city of Los Angeles instead began using the structure as housing for National Park Service employees.
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Image Credit: Ron Reiring Despite its undeniable history and charm, the lighthouse began facing demolition plans in the late 1960s. Thankfully, William Olesen and John Olguin, two local citizens with a soft spot for the structure, stepped in and saved it, establishing the Point Fermin Lighthouse Committee which ultimately secured its listing on the National Register of Historic Places. The group also commissioned a large-scale restoration to return the structure to its former glory, during which the much-hated chicken coop was dismantled and replaced with a re-creation of the original tower. The project was completed just in time for the lighthouse’s centennial celebration, which took place on November 2, 1974.
The site underwent another renovation in 2002, this time to the tune of $2.6 million. The two-year rehab updated the lighthouse’s exterior paint, electrical system, plumbing and interior furnishings. Upon its completion, the location was opened as a museum and today is considered the “crown jewel of Point Fermin Park.” One element missing from both restorations, though? The original fourth-order Fresnel lens.
Olesen and Olguin had searched for it extensively prior to the centennial celebration and eventually pinpointed what they believed was the correct lens on display in the office of Malibu realtor Louis Busch, though their hunch proved difficult to verify.
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Image Credit: PBS Enter Joanna Nevesny from the Coast Guard Auxiliary, who made it her mission to settle the matter once and for all. As the Lighthouse Friends website explains, “Armed with a historic 1912 photograph of the Point Fermin lens along with a digital picture of the one on display in Busch’s office, Nevesny and Jim Woodward, a Fresnel lens expert, set out to positively identify the lens. As the lens had been crafted by hand, the slots in the screw heads ended up in somewhat random positions. Woodward found that ‘every screw slot was exactly the same’ in the two photographs. ‘It was like the fingerprint, or DNA, of the lens. There is no other lens on the entire planet that has their screw slots in this same arrangement,’ stated Woodward. Presented with the evidence, Busch was convinced his lens was indeed from Point Fermin Lighthouse and consented to allow it to return home.” The piece was relocated to San Pedro in late 2006, a painstaking process that was documented by Huell Howser for an episode of his television series “Visiting . . . ”, and today sits proudly on display on the museum’s ground floor.
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Image Credit: 20th Century Fox -
Image Credit: Doug Kerr The lighthouse’s charming Victorian architecture and picturesque seaside location have made it a shoo-in for roles on both the big and small screens. It is there that Tom and Summer attend the wedding of their co-worker Millie (Patricia Belcher) on Day 402 of “500 Days of Summer.” Having been dumped several months prior, a miserable Tom seizes upon the romantic setting in an attempt to rekindle things with Summer. His plan seems to work, too, as the two dance the night away under the stars, though his hopes are quickly dashed just a few days later when he discovers she is engaged to another while at a rooftop party.
Interestingly, the wedding scene and events surrounding it were later additions to the film, included only after Searchlight Pictures acquired the rights to the story. Entertainment Weekly explains, “The studio gave the writers a note (their only note, for the record) that the script needed a fakeout — one last glimmer of hope that might trick the audience into thinking Summer and Tom will get back together. So they added the train ride, the wedding, and the rooftop party that brings it all tumbling down.” It was a valid note – the storyline would have certainly been lacking without the segments.
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Image Credit: Paramount Other productions to feature Point Fermin Lighthouse include “MacGyver.” In the season one episode titled “Flame’s End,” the grounds surrounding the structure masquarade as the cemetery where the funeral of MacGyver’s (Richard Dean Anderson) ex-girlfriend, Amy Austin (Tannis G. Montgomery), is held.
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Image Credit: Paramount The lighthouse also pops up the very next season as a different location entirely, this time as a private home belonging to Carol Varnay (Nana Visitor) in the episode titled “D.O.A.: Macgyver.” Though the storyline involves the titular secret agent suffering from a debilitating bout of amnesia that not even a roll of duct tape can fix, it doesn’t really explain how he fails to recognize the place from the year prior!
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Image Credit: NBCUniversal The lighthouse serves as the residence of Stormin’ Norman (M. Emmet Walsh) and his grandson, Marky (Taliesin Jaffe), in the season two episode of “Amazing Stories” titled “Magic Saturday.”
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Image Credit: Roxie Releasing Vanessa Lutz (Reese Witherspoon) and Bob Wolverton (Kiefer Sutherland) take a nighttime stroll there in the 1996 crime drama “Freeway,” though very little of the lighthouse can actually be seen in the segment.
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Image Credit: Paramount In a decidedly unromantic scene, Dr. Peter Burns (Jack Wagner) considers murdering his girlfriend, Taylor McBride (Lisa Rinna), by pushing her off the top of Point Fermin Lighthouse into the ocean below in the season five episode of “Melrose Place” titled “Who’s Afraid of Amanda Woodward?”
And the site has yet another claim to fame! According to “Hollywood Escapes: The Moviegoer’s Guide to Exploring Southern California’s Great Outdoors,” “Because the lighthouse is located on the eastern edge of the Palos Verdes peninsula at L.A.’s southernmost tip, this is one of the few places in L.A. from where you can see the sun rising over the ocean.” Sounds like the perfect spot to spend Valentine’s Day morning!