It wasn’t long ago that Long Beach, Calif., was little more than a sleepy Navy town, a place you’d pass through on the way to somewhere else.
But these days, Long Beach has come into its own. California’s fifth-largest city is making an aggressive bid for tourists and conventions, and has plenty to offer.
There are new cultural attractions such as the astonishing Aquarium of the Pacific and the recently expanded Museum of Latin American Art.
There’s also a funky neighborhood full of coffee shops and vintage clothing stores on East Fourth Street that’s earned the nickname “Retro Row,” featuring an eclectic mix of cultures and storefronts that attracts folks from all over the Los Angeles area. At last, Long Beach isn’t the place you pass through on the way to somewhere else—it’s become a destination in its own right.
Tucked in a picturesque harbor on the Pacific Ocean, Long Beach is small enough for meeting planners to get a handle on, but offers the variety and resources of a much larger city. The Long Beach Convention & Entertainment Center offers more than 400,000 square feet of meeting and exhibit space, plus a recently installed wireless system.
One of the most interesting aspects of Long Beach is how much of a movie star it’s become. Because of its proximity to Los Angeles—20 miles to the south—Long Beach is regularly featured in movies, television shows and commercials. Long Beach, you see, has a key advantage: Due to union rules, it’s cheaper to film in locations that are within a 30-mile radius of Hollywood, so it fits snugly into the zone, and has become a favorite of location scouts.
Long Beach’s glittering seafront stands in for Miami on TV series such as CSI: Miami and Dexter, and has played the role of neighboring Orange County on The O.C. Its high schools are popular film locations, too; Long Beach Polytechnic High School has been the high school in dozens of films, including American Pie. (The “American Pie House” is located nearby on Cedar Drive.)
Long Beach’s film roots run deep, all the way back to the silent era. Balboa Studios, one of the first movie studios ever built, was located on sixth Street in Long Beach, and silent movie stars like Fatty Arbuckle called Long Beach home in the 1920s.
Nowadays, scores of awesome car chase scenes and spectacular crashes are filmed on the long stretches of dockland road by the Long Beach harbor. Long Beach was the sunny California beach town featured in films such as Gone in Sixty Seconds, Speed and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. (Weirdly, the Long Beach house that served as Ferris Bueller’s home was also seen in the 2002 Hannibal Lecter thriller Red Dragon, where police find a family brutally slaughtered by a serial killer.) In the last year alone, Long Beach has been the location for national TV commercials for American Express, AT&T, Mitsubishi, and Volkswagen.
All of that business keeps Tasha Day busy. She’s Film Coordinator for the city of Long Beach, the person in charge of working with producers, directors and location scouts.
“I think Long Beach is popular as a film location because it has so many different looks,” Day says. “We’ve been everything from Miami to Maine. We were Boston in Ally McBeal. We’ve been Virginia Beach a few times. And Florida—we’ve been Florida a lot of times.
“We issue 800 permits a year for film, TV and commercial shots in Long Beach,” Day continues. “There’s just so much to choose from here.”
All of that media work is proof of Long Beach’s diversity—the town can change from a funky retro neighborhood to a gritty dockyard to a drop-dead gorgeous seascape in the blink of a camera’s eye. It’s also an indication that Long Beach has, in its own way, arrived.
