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The Bradbury Building - a wonderful building used in many movies and TV series, but Ridley Scott transformed it with light and filming technique into something quite amazing.

J.F. Sebastian lives in the Bradbury Building. He has the coolest apartment in the coolest building. The exterior of the building looks interesting (paticularly in the film, where a matte makes it a lot taller), but the interior lobby is transformed so as to be barely recognisable. Just look at the pictures!

The Bradbury was (almost certainly, but not conclusively proven) designed by George H. Wyman and was built towards the end of the 19th century. It is an office building (in fact the oldest commercial building remaining in central LA), and is located at 304 South Broadway (South-East corner of 3rd & Broadway) in Los Angeles. To find more info and photos like the one above, look here. Apart from Blade Runner, the Bradbury has featured in many films like "Double Indemnity", "Marlowe", "D.O.A.", "Chinatown", "Wolf" and "Lethal Weapon 4" and TV shows "City of Angels", "The Outer Limits" and "Banyon". Coincidentally?, Ray Bradbury was Philip K. Dick's favorite SF author of the 1960's.

The newest photo of the Bradbury Building is by Wellthtsgud (RD), taken in January 2004. [Click photo to enlarge.]

New pictures of the interior of the Bradbury by Gnomus added January 2003.

Here are some pictures taken of the Bradbury by Gnomus in August 2001:

Click to enlarge the photos. Shot 1 is almost all of the front of the Bradbury Building. Gnomus describes Shot 2 as, "A close shot of the sign over the front door, which is not the sign seen in the film. That sign was a part of the addition, which seems to have extended all the way out to the street (when Harrison Ford arrives, you can see him stepping up on the curb)." Shot 3 is the front doors - perhaps you can transform it in your mind to where Pris was hiding when she "accidentally" met JF.

Now look at the following two pictures: The first is a shot from the film, just as Deckard arrives in his car, (same perspective as when Pris arrived earlier). The second photo is by Gnomus from close to the same perspective. What a difference!

The most obvious difference is the L.A. 2019 city - a wonderfully, beautiful matte painting by Yuricich. Sammon points out in Future Noir that the matte changes the sign on the second building from "CANADA" to just "NADA" - you can see the real sign, but the movie version is far too small to see on the vidcap. So, the street, two stories of the Bradbury and part of the second building are actually seen in the movie. The matte, some fancy lighting and filming and of course SFX added later (such as the model spinners you see flying down the street) are all part of the magic. Note how the Bradbury entrance was extended out to the street.

The above picture is of the advertising blimp floating over the Bradbury. Created using some very clever film techniques, that really is the Bradbury atrium glass roof you can see.

And just to finish this off, why not a beautiful image of the area outside JF's apartment?