Los Angeles is an industry town—the “city of stars,” per the hit track from this year’s La La Land. Film saturates the West Coast megalopolis, so much so that the folks at Dorothy Studio created a map that renames the city’s streets, landmarks, and locations after famous films.
In this fictional version of LA, you can’t drive up Hyperion Ave., but you can cruise along Mad Max: Fury Road. To find your way to the beach, Santa Monica Blvd. will do you no good, but you can fly down Pineapple Express. In honor of this year’s recent Academy Awards, the updated print now includes locales like La La Land, Manchester by the Sea, and Hacksaw Ridge. All told, “Film Map: The History of Popular Film Set To the Art of Cartography” ($31) comprises more than 900 movie titles.
Just don’t use it to find your way around. “It definitely won’t get you from A to B,” says James Quail, who designed the map. Cramming in that many movie references has a way of distorting geography, and there’s more than a few entirely fictional additions (e.g. the airport next to Reservoir Dogs, née Silverlake Reservoir.) But the map does look the part. Quail modeled it after vintage street maps that he picked up on eBay, and labeled it with the same care and precision of an actual cartographer.
The result is a map that grabs your attention and holds it fast. This is Dorothy Studio’s go-to trick; the London designers’ other creations include a captivating map of alt-music history (overlaid atop a circuit board diagram), and a Mercator projection map that swaps out famous song titles for geographic place names. Each data-viz renders its subject matter in painstaking detail, inviting you to get lost in its intricacies. The same goes for its new map of LA, where everyone gets lost all the time anyway.