The San Fernando Valley (Magnolia) Magnolia
Magnolia is set entirely in the San Fernando Valley -- Burbank, North Hollywood, Van Nuys, Reseda, Valley Village -- the suburban sprawl north of Los Angeles where Paul Thomas Anderson grew up. Anderson has called the Valley his creative home; four of his first five films are set there. Magnolia was his attempt to make the definitive San Fernando Valley film.
Anderson grew up in the Valley and has never stopped filming there
Anderson's relationship to the Valley is not nostalgic; it is possessive. He set Hard Eight, Boogie Nights, Magnolia, and Punch-Drunk Love in or around the Valley. He returned to it for Licorice Pizza (2021).
"I like the way it looks. I like the way it tastes and smells. I don't know beyond I love it." — Paul Thomas Anderson, Golden State (interview)
Mark Olsen at Grantland mapped Anderson's Valley filmography and identified how the director's repeated use of the same geography creates a cumulative fictional world -- the same boulevards and strip malls appearing across films, building a landscape that exists somewhere between documentary and myth. (grantland)
The film uses real Valley locations as character
Magnolia was shot on location across the Valley. Key locations include:
- Foxfire Room (12516 Magnolia Blvd, Valley Village) -- the bar where Donnie Smith drinks and fixates on the bartender with braces
- La Popular Appliances (7222 Reseda Blvd, Reseda) -- standing in for Solomon Solomon's electronics store, where Donnie breaks in and where the frog rain hits Reseda Boulevard
- Valley Plaza (12121 Victory Blvd, North Hollywood) -- the area where road scenes were filmed after the "Wise Up" sequence
- Parthenia Court Apartments (15150 Parthenia Street, North Hills) -- where Jim Kurring investigates a disturbance and finds a dead body
- NBC Studios (3000 W Alameda Avenue, Burbank) -- used for the What Do Kids Know? studio sequences
(sanfernandovalleyblog, movie-locations, giggster)
The film also briefly leaves the Valley -- Reno, Nevada appears in the prologue's casino scene, and Big Bear Lake, California appears in the scuba-diver sequence.
The Valley functions as a character in the film
The Valley in Magnolia is not scenic. It is flat, commercial, unglamorous -- strip malls, apartment complexes, parking lots. Anderson uses this ordinariness to ground the film's emotional extremity. The characters' desperation plays against a landscape that is indifferent to it: Donnie weeps at a bar on Magnolia Boulevard; Linda screams at a pharmacy in a strip mall; Jim drives his patrol car through residential streets narrating his prayers.
The frog rain transforms the Valley from indifferent backdrop to active participant. Frogs hit Magnolia Boulevard, Reseda Boulevard, and every other location the film has established. The Valley becomes the stage for a biblical plague, which is Anderson's ultimate gesture of loving exaggeration: taking the most ordinary American landscape and subjecting it to the most extraordinary event.
Anderson's Valley is distinct from Hollywood's Valley
Most films that use the Valley treat it as a punchline -- the unhip side of the hill, the place where the San Fernando Valley girl lives. Anderson treats it as the center of the world. His Valley is populated by people whose suffering is as real as anyone's on the Westside, whose stories deserve the same epic treatment. The 188-minute runtime is itself a statement about the Valley's worthiness: Anderson is saying these people and this place deserve three hours.