Starsky And Hutch Filming Locations See Where It Was Shot

Where Starsky and Hutch Actually Rolled

Most people assume Starsky and Hutch was filmed in some generic stand-in city. It wasn't. The production used a mix of soundstage work at Warner Bros. and real Los Angeles exteriors. That distinction matters if you're trying to track down specific locations. The show's production office was based in Burbank, and they exploited the visual variety within a thirty-mile radius. That gave the series its particular sun-bleached, low-slung look. You don't get that by building a set.

Starsky And Hutch Filming Locations See Where It Was Shot

If you're trying to visit actual spots, here's where to look first. The main police station exterior you see in the opening credits is the Hall of Justice in Los Angeles — 900 Pasadena Avenue. It's still there. Not much has changed except the parking lot has been resurfaced. David Starsky's apartment was a soundstage set at Warner Bros., but the building exterior was shot at a real address. The famous red Ferrari Daytona is the second most recognizable prop in the show, and it was a real car purchased specifically for filming. Season one through three moved between several LA neighborhoods. Venice Boulevard had recurring establishing shots. Santa Monica was used for beach scenes. The hillside roads around Sunset and Mulholland appeared frequently in chase sequences. Those are public roads, so you can drive them. The cliffside views haven't been redeveloped in the same way.

One specific location people always ask about is the "Downtown" street scenes. A lot of those were filmed on the Warner Bros. backlot, not on actual downtown streets. The backlot has been reconfigured since the seventies, so some of those streets no longer exist in their original form. The Fountain Plaza area is still accessible on tours, though.

How to Find These Places Yourself

The hardest part isn't finding the list. It's matching what you see on screen to where it is today. The show ran from 1975 to 1979, and LA changes fast. A parking lot in season one might be a condo complex now. I spent about six weeks cross-referencing episode guides with Google Street View and local historical society records. The main problem is that many exterior shots don't have location credits. The production didn't care much for on-screen attribution, which makes verification annoying. My workaround was using the DVD commentary tracks and production notes where available, combined with IMDb's location pages, then verifying each spot against actual street-level imagery. That process reduced the false positives significantly. You'd be surprised how many locations get misattributed online. A building in Simi Valley gets tagged as "downtown L.A." all the time because it looks similar enough.

For the car itself, the original Ferrari was preserved by Warner Bros. after the show ended. It's appeared at various car shows over the years. If you want to see it in person, check the Warner Bros. studio store events or the Petersen Automotive Museum calendar in Los Angeles. They don't have it on permanent display, but it rotates in occasionally.

What Doesn't Work

Don't bother with fan sites that claim to have every location mapped out. Half of them copy from each other. I checked three different location databases before finding two that actually conflicted with each other. One said a particular alley was in Boyle Heights. The other placed it in East LA. I drove to both. Neither matched the episode. Turns out it was a backlot construction that looked real enough to fool you. Also, the 2004 movie version was filmed in Toronto, not Los Angeles. If you're looking for Starsky and Hutch filming locations See Where It Was Shot and you end up in Canada, that's why. Different production, different continent entirely. The original series also did some second unit work in Arizona for desert chase sequences. Those weren't always disclosed in credits. If you see sand and Joshua trees, it probably wasn't Southern California, even though the show was supposed to be set in the fictional Bay City, which was clearly modeled on a composite of LA neighborhoods.

If you're serious about this, pick an episode, freeze a frame, and work from there. Street signs, license plates, and architectural details give you enough to go on. It takes patience but it's reliable. Everything else is mostly speculation dressed up as fact.