California

California is a U.S. State within the continental United States and is located on the Western coast of the country. It is the third largest state by area and the most populous state. One of the more notable cities in California is Los Angeles, which has been featured in numerous films to date. The district known as Hollywood is considered to be the movie capital of the world where most of the American market's major film studios are located. Another major financial center in California is San Francisco - "The City by the Bay", which has become immortalized not only for it's rolling streets, but also by the iconic Golden Gate Bridge.

Stories of Los Angeles' post-war Hollywood heyday were chronicled in such films as L.A. Confidential, while other movies like Escape from L.A. examined a bleak futuristic version of the city. Stories of California set during the late 19th century, following its annexation from Mexico have been chronicled in such films as The Mark of Zorro, where masked Spaniard Don Diego Vega fought for the good of the people against the corrupt alcalde, Luis Quintero.

In the 1970s, the city of San Francisco was overrun by a parasitic spore that turned normal human beings into treacherous "pod people".

Some cities in California are known for their high crime rates, particularly Los Angeles. As an example, a crime cartel run by Marsellus Wallace in the mid-1990s was responsible for rigging boxing matches, and executing amateur associates who had failed to meet Wallace's expectations.

Points of Interest

 * Antonio Bay: Antonio Bay is a seaside fishing hamlet located in Northern California. It was founded in the year 1880, the same year that the ship the Elizabeth Dane crashed upon the rocks of the bay. One-hundred years later, the ghosts of those who died on the Elizabeth Dane returned to haunt Antonio Bay.


 * Beverly Hills: Beverly Hills is an affluent city in the western part of Los Angeles County, California. Beverly Hills and the neighboring city of West Hollywood are together entirely surrounded by the city of Los Angeles. The area's "Platinum Triangle" of wealthy neighborhoods is formed by Beverly Hills and the Los Angeles neighborhoods of Bel Air and Holmby Hills.


 * Burbank: Burbank is a city in Los Angeles County, California. Burbank is located in two distinct areas, with its downtown, civic center and key neighborhoods nestled on the slopes and foothills that rise to the Verdugo Mountains, and other areas located in flatlands at the eastern end of the San Fernando Valley, 12 miles (19 km) north of Downtown Los Angeles.


 * Drago: Drago is a small, secluded town in southern California. It is named after Draga, an isolated region in Romania. Like Draga, Drago was a communal haven for a secret society of werewolves. In 1988, Richard and Marie Adams owned a cabin in the woods called Wilderness Cottage. Marie and her friend Janice Hatch began investigating a string of strange occurrences, which centered around the nervous breakdown of a nun named Sister Ruth Brooks. Their search uncovered the Satanic werewolf coven and the two women made a final stand against the werewolves at the Bell Tower of Drago.


 * Hollywood: Hollywood is a district in Los Angeles, California, United States, situated west-northwest of Downtown Los Angeles. Due to its fame and cultural identity as the historical center of movie studios and movie stars, the word "Hollywood" is often used as a metonymy of American cinema. The nickname Tinseltown refers to the glittering, superficial nature of Hollywood and the movie industry.


 * Los Angeles: Los Angeles is the largest city in the state of California and the second largest in the United States. Often abbreviated as L.A. and nicknamed The City of Angels, Los Angeles has an estimated population of 3.96 million and spans over 498.3 square miles (1,290.6 km2) in Southern California.


 * Modesto: Modesto is the county seat of Stanislaus County, California. With a population of approximately 211,156 as of April 2009, Modesto ranks as the 16th largest city in the state of California. Modesto is located in Northern California, 92 miles east of San Francisco, 68 miles south of the state capital of Sacramento and 66 miles west of Yosemite National Park.


 * Oakland: Oakland is a major West Coast port city on San Francisco Bay in the U.S. state of California. Originally incorporated in 1852, Oakland is the county seat of Alameda County and is a central hub city for a region of the San Francisco Bay Area known as the East Bay.


 * Palm Springs: Palm Springs is a desert city suburb of Riverside and San Bernardino in Riverside County, California, approximately 37 miles east of San Bernardino, 111 miles (177 km) east of Los Angeles and 136 miles (225 km) northeast of San Diego.


 * Palo Alto: Palo Alto is a California charter city located in the northwest corner of Santa Clara County, in the San Francisco Bay Area of California, USA. The city shares its borders with East Palo Alto, Mountain View, Los Altos, Los Altos Hills, Stanford, Portola Valley, and Menlo Park.


 * Pasadena: Pasadena is a city in Los Angeles County, California, United States. Famous for hosting the annual Rose Bowl football game and the Tournament of Roses Parade, Pasadena is the home of many leading scientific and cultural institutions, including the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Pasadena City College (PCC), the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (the leading robotics and spacecraft design and manufacturing NASA center), Art Center College of Design, the Pasadena Playhouse, California School of Culinary Arts Pasadena, the Norton Simon Museum of Art and the Pacific Asia Museum.


 * San Diego: In 1978, the President of the United States sent a special task force led by Mason Dixon to San Diego to infiltrate a horde of "killer tomatoes" that had been reported terrorizing the San Diego area. San Diego was also where a genetically cloned Tyrannosaurus Rex was seen rampaging through the city streets.


 * San Francisco: San Francisco is a major American city located in the U.S. state of California. The city is named for Saint Francis of Assisi and was founded on June 29th, 1776. It is the county seat of San Francisco count and the fourth most populous city in the state. San Francisco is a port city, known for being a major cultural and financial center. One of the city's most notable landmarks is the Golden Gate Bridge, which crosses the San Francisco Bay, linking San Francisco County with Marin County.


 * San Jose: San José is the third-largest city in California and the tenth-largest in the United States. As the county seat of Santa Clara County, it is located in the southern end of the San Francisco Bay Area, a region commonly referred to as Silicon Valley. Once a small farming city, San Jose became a magnet for suburban newcomers in new housing developments between the 1950s to the present, and is now the most populous city in the United States north of Los Angeles and west of Chicago.


 * Santa Barbara: Santa Barbara is a city in Santa Barbara County, California, United States. Situated on an east-west trending section of coastline, the longest such section on the West Coast of the United States, the city lies between the steeply-rising Santa Ynez Mountains and the sea.


 * Santa Cruz: Santa Cruz is the county seat and largest city of Santa Cruz County, California in the United States of America. It is located on the northern edge of the Monterey Bay, about 72 miles south of San Francisco.


 * Santa Mira: Located in Northern California, this was the location of the corporate headquarters of the Silver Shamrock Company.


 * Santa Monica: Santa Monica is a city in western Los Angeles County, California, USA. Situated on Santa Monica Bay, it is surrounded on three sides by the city of Los Angeles — Pacific Palisades on the northwest, Brentwood on the north, West Los Angeles on the northeast, Mar Vista on the east, and Venice on the southeast.


 * Stanford: Stanford is a census-designated place (CDP) in Santa Clara County, California, United States and is the home of Stanford University. Its resident population consists of the inhabitants of on-campus housing, including graduate student villages and the "Faculty Ghetto" of single-family homes owned by their faculty inhabitants but located on leased Stanford land. A residential neighborhood adjacent to the Stanford campus, College Terrace, featuring streets named after universities and colleges, including Oxford, Harvard, Yale and Columbia, is not part of the Stanford CDP but of the city of Palo Alto.


 * Twin Forks: Twin Forks was a small town located near the village of Drago. Most of the townsfolk had migrated to Drago or were lured there by the town's werewolf community. Located in Twin Forks was a church, the Twin Forks Hotel and the Twin Forks City Hall. Janice Hatch and Tom Billings went to Twin Forks to investigate the history of Drago and a string of strange occurrences taking place in the town.


 * Venice: In 1971, crippled scientist Doctor Durae teamed up with the vampire Dracula in an effort to revive the Frankenstein Monster. Durae maintained a laboratory in Venice located beneath a horror house attraction called Doctor Durae's Creature Emporium.

Films that take place in

 * 30 Days of Night: Dark Days (2010)
 * Basic Instinct (1992)
 * Beverly Hills Cop (1984)
 * Beverly Hills Cop II (1987)
 * Beverly Hills Cop III (1994)
 * Chopping Mall (1986)
 * E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982)
 * Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982)
 * Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later (1998)
 * Hollywood Boulevard (1976)
 * Hottie & the Nottie, The (2008)
 * Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (2001) (Partially)
 * Land of the Lost (2009)
 * Not of This Earth (1988)
 * KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park (1978)
 * New Nightmare (1994)
 * Pacific Heights (1990)
 * Presidio, The (1988)
 * Pulp Fiction (1994)
 * Species (1995)
 * Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982) (partially)
 * Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986) (partially)
 * Star Trek (2009) (partially)
 * Star Trek: Into Darkness (2013) (partially)
 * Tango & Cash (1989)
 * Vacation (1983)
 * Wishmaster (1997)
 * Wishmaster 2: Evil Never Dies (1999)

Characters from
Note: The following is a list of characters known to reside in. It does not necessarily mean that they were born there.