Century City & the LA Country Club
A city built on a dead movie studio's backlot — twin towers by the architect of the World Trade Center, and Die Hard's Nakatomi Plaza.
Key facts
- Century City stands on the former 20th Century Fox backlot. In 1961, strained by the ballooning cost of the epic film Cleopatra (released 1963), Fox sold ~180 acres of its backlot to developer William Zeckendorf and Alcoa for about $54 million; the district rose on that land.
- The triangular Century Plaza Towers (two 44-story, ~571-ft towers, completed 1975) were designed by Minoru Yamasaki — the same architect who designed the original World Trade Center in New York.
- Fox Plaza (2121 Avenue of the Stars, a 34-story tower completed 1987) played "Nakatomi Plaza" in Die Hard (1988).
- The Los Angeles Country Club — the ~325-acre green between Century City and Beverly Hills — has been called "the most expensive piece of undeveloped, privately owned land in the United States," valued in the billions.
Narration transcript
That cluster of towers to your east, beyond the enormous green lawn, is Century City — and the whole place is built on a Hollywood catastrophe. Back around 1960, the studio 20th Century Fox was hemorrhaging money on one film: Cleopatra, the Elizabeth Taylor epic that ran so wildly over budget it nearly sank the studio. To survive, Fox sold off its back lot — the fake streets where the movies were shot — about a hundred and eighty acres of it. Developers paved the dream factory and built a brand-new downtown on top.
Look for the two tall triangular towers: those are the Century Plaza Towers, and they were designed by Minoru Yamasaki — the very same architect who designed the original World Trade Center in New York. Nearby stands Fox Plaza, which movie fans will know by another name entirely: that's Nakatomi Plaza, the tower Bruce Willis crawls around in Die Hard.
And that vast green in front of it all? That's the Los Angeles Country Club — a private golf course so large and so perfectly placed that it's been called the most valuable piece of undeveloped land in the entire country. Billions of dollars, kept as grass, in the middle of the Westside.