Coleman Family House Lost in L.A. Fires After Shoot

SPOILER ALERT: This story contains minor spoilers for “Freakier Friday,” which is now in theaters.

“Freakier Friday” takes place in the same sun-kissed version of L.A. as the 2003 “Freaky Friday,” where a girl can ride her bike to the ocean for a quick pre-school surf session. But this time, director Nisha Ganatra and production designer Kay Lee (“Insecure”) wanted to also showcase another side of the city.

The sequel picks up with Lindsay Lohan returning as Anna and Jamie Lee Curtis as her mom Tess Coleman, 22 years after their first body-swap comedy. Now, Anna has a teenage daughter of her own, Harper, played by Julia Butters — and more chaos ensues when Harper’s rivalry with her new stepsister-to-be (Sophia Hammons) gets totally out of hand.

“We wanted to move east into more hip enclaves of Los Angeles, because as Anna, Lindsay Lohan’s character, has grown up and has a child of her own, as a single mother and a rock star, she would have probably naturally and organically navigated east to hipper neighborhoods,” says location manager Danny Finn.

The “Freakier Friday” characters roam around the city, riding scooters at Echo Park Lake, passing by Silver Lake’s Café Tropical, the Los Feliz theater and Jeni’s Ice Cream, getting burgers at Pete’s in Eagle Rock and driving around the Arts District and the First Street bridge downtown.

Grabbing all those locations “kind of felt like an indie movie,” Lee recalls. “Our director of photography was operating the camera and Nisha was just working off a handheld monitor, and it was a really small crew.”

Though several TV series have recently committed to shooting in L.A., “Freakier Friday” is one of just a few studio movies to shoot in the city. As production continues to spread across the globe, just three features from the major studios released in 2024 filmed a significant amount within the 30-mile zone, according to FilmLA.

“I’m obsessed with Los Angeles on film. I love L.A. movies and we don’t really have a lot of opportunities to film features in L.A. as much as we used to,” says Finn.

Finn was particularly happy to see “Halloween” star Curtis return to South Pasadena, where the iconic slasher was filmed, for the scenes set at Anna’s house. Ganatra, who grew up in the picturesque town, envisioned the film capturing a John Hughes-like vibe, according to Finn. “It was really cool to see Laurie Strode back there,” he says.

The downturn in production can play havoc with family life, as crew members crisscross the world for work. “Any project that I get to film in L.A., I am just so grateful for,” says Lee. “We have the best crews and the best resources. I feel like I’ve been lucky enough to work on shows that really show different parts of L.A. or creating an L.A. that’s right for the story. And I am sad that it’s not as busy as it was.”

“It’s going to be a team effort and it’s going to take a village to keep production here,” says Finn. “We just want to at least be on that list of one of the greatest places to film. I never bet against L.A.”

“Closing the First Street bridge for that car stunt was a couple of phone calls and a lot of emails and a couple of walkthroughs,” the location manager observes, “I don’t think there’s another city that has the infrastructure to pull off something of that magnitude with a couple of keystrokes and conversations.”

Below, Lee and Finn detail some of the most significant locations that shaped the look and feel of “Freakier Friday” — and how several places were later affected by January’s devastating fires.

The Coleman House

The traditional-style house that Anna grew up in from “Freaky Friday” was located in Pacific Palisades. “Freakier Friday” shot in the summer of 2024, and six months later, the entire neighborhood was obliterated in the Palisades fire. Across town, the film’s pickleball tournament was shot at the Altadena Town & Country Club, which was also lost in the fires.

But even before the fires, the filmmakers weren’t even sure they’d be able to return to the original house.

“It was important for Nisha and for the team to be able to have a throughline back to that — the white picket fence and the white clapboarding and just how sweet and beautiful it was. And so we wanted to keep that as the Coleman house. We wanted to create that connection,” says Lee.

But making contact wasn’t easy at first. Finn says that after the crew rang the doorbell and left notes at the house, they were perplexed when they never heard back. He eventually found the house’s phone number in the paperwork from the first film.

“So I find this landline and phone number in this 20-year-old binder, and I throw a Hail Mary and I call and an old answering machine answers. Two minutes later, a phone number called, different phone number, same area code. And she said ‘Hi, it’s me.’ It was the same homeowner. Her children, who were kids at the time, were now grown and had kids of their own, and they flew in to see the production,” he recalls. (The homeowner, an artist, had been painting upstairs with headphones and hadn’t heard the doorbell or noticed the flyers.)

“So it was the only location from the original film that we went back to,” Finn says, “On what was supposed to be our last day of production, most of the principal cast worked at that location, so it was a cool way to wrap. It’s so tragic that we lost that house. That entire block is gone.”

The Record Parlor

Curtis and Lohan go to visit Lohan’s old flame from the first movie, Chad Michael Murray, at his funky record shop in Hollywood’s Vinyl District. But the team restyled the store to give it some extra texture.

“She has an old friend that owns a record store in Hollywood, and in the movie it’s called the Record Parlor. And in real life it is the Record Parlor and it’s a great vinyl shop on Selma,” Finn says.

Lee explains, “When you walk in, it’s very much like a collector’s space and there are tons and tons of records there, and it’s really hard to see the space in itself. But I felt like I could really see the possibility. We stripped a lot of the merchandise out and added the bar. It was probably heart-attack-inducing to the owner. With Jamie Lee’s action, hiding with the records, I just thought it was so much fun.”

The Line Hotel, Openaire restaurant and Break Room 86

The Line Hotel in Koreatown provided two important settings for “Freakier Friday.” The wedding rehearsal dinner was shot at Openaire, the lush, greenhouse-inspired rooftop space that became Lilly’s father’s restaurant. And Ella’s rocking bachelorette party was fittingly held at the hotel’s Break Room 86, the retro-themed club that patrons enter through a vending machine near the loading dock. The club’s wall of video monitors inspired Lee to build an array of TV screens that play scenes from Anna’s life during the party. Meanwhile, the pivotal fortune teller hangs out in a celestial-themed area decorated with disco balls.

“The Line Hotel is really great to work with, they’ve always been very friendly with shooting and filming,” says Lee. The nightclub scene felt like, “This is an extension of Anna’s character and who her bandmates and friends are, really like her past,” Lee explains.

The Wiltern Theater

Anyone who has seen the 2003 (or 1976) versions knows that at some point, the characters who have body-swapped will need to eventually reinhabit their own bodies. That finally happens at a concert for Anna’s client, the popular musician Ella – which features an encore performance from Anna’s old band Pink Slip. Lee explains that Ella’s silvery star-bedecked stage costume, the stage decorations and lighting all call back to the booth of Madame Jen, the bachelorette party’s fortune teller, who was responsible for causing the quadruple swap.

“We’re linking a little bit of celestial symbolism, adding stars and the passage of the moon. ‘Freaky Friday’ happened on a full moon. We’re trying to actually pull elements from Madame Jen’s and link it to the final concert when they switched back again. It’s subtle, but the disco ball was there and there’s a big pile of disco balls on the floor, emitting light,” says Lee.

The concert at the historic art deco theater was a massive undertaking, with as many background actors as would normally fill the theater at a real performance. The scene was so expansive it required a different type of filming permit for a mass event. “It was really shot like a concert film, hundreds and hundreds of people,” says Finn.

Ultimately, “Freakier Friday” became a showcase for shooting in L.A. Director Ganatra “really wanted to open it up and make it an embrace, like ‘I Heart LA,’ but in a different way than maybe you would normally see,” says Lee.