Fox Plaza (Los Angeles)


Fox Plaza is a 34-story, skyscraper in Century City, Los Angeles, California. It is owned by the Orange County-based Irvine Company.

History

Completed in 1987, the building's architects were Scott Johnson, Bill Fain, and William L. Pereira. Fox Plaza is the last building that William Pereira worked on before his death in 1985 and he did not live long enough to see it open.
Former US President Ronald Reagan had his offices on the 34th floor of the building for several years after leaving public office. The 34th floor is now occupied by 20th Century Studios.

Filming location

In a 2018 tour for Variety, the chief engineer of the building noted how the Fox Plaza has a large number of redundancies in its design, and he speculates that it's because it was intended as a filming location.
The building has been featured in at least four major motion pictures released by Fox. In the film Die Hard it was portrayed as the fictional Nakatomi Plaza, a building owned by a fictional Japanese conglomerate. The film entails the building being taken by renegade terrorists intending to steal bearer bonds in the company vault and destroy the building, with the waylaid New York City Police Department officer John McClane working to foil them. Almost the entire film was shot in the plaza, aside from a few scenes showing a Christmas party. The damaged version of the tower was made via a scale model special effect.
The plaza and a neighboring building are the main setting for the rock & roll comedy Airheads. Fox Plaza was also one of the buildings brought down at the end of Fight Club. The building is also used for the corporate offices of Chimera Gas in the surrealistic road movie Motorama and is also portrayed as the headquarters for Spencer Publications on the soap opera The Bold and the Beautiful. The building plays an important role in the Brooklyn Nine-Nine episode "99," in which detective Jake Peralta insists on visiting the building due to its role in Die Hard and causes his squad to miss their return flight to New York City.
The exterior of the building was used in the 1987 Charlie Sheen film No Man's Land, in the 2001 episode of The X-Files, "Essence", and in the 1989 film Lethal Weapon 2.