The Number

The real estate, insurance and entertainment industries collide in Billy Wilder’s movie “Double Indemnity,” which turns 75 in 2019. Nominated for seven Academy Awards, the 1944 movie established Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck as A-list actors while igniting Hollywood’s obsession with film noir. Yet like the twists and turns in Wilder’s film, the Valley locations identified in the movie are full of misdirection and deceit. In “Double Indemnity,” MacMurray’s Walter Neff, an insurance salesman for the fictional Pacific All-Risk Insurance Co., gets romantically involved with Stanwyck’s married Phyllis Dietrichson. Soon, they plot to kill her husband and frame it as suicide to cash in on the insurance policy. The Dietrichsons’ villa-style hillside home (as Neff described it, “One of those California Spanish houses everyone was nuts about 10 or 15 years ago … ”) is not in Glendale off Los Feliz Boulevard, but on Quebec Street in Beachwood Canyon. When Neff boards a train posing as Dietrichson’s husband, the crucial plot twist supposedly unfolds at Glendale Transportation Station. But Wilder shot those scenes at what is now Downtown Burbank Metrolink Station at 201 N. Front St. The Burbank station today hosts commuter trains from Santa Clarita and Moorpark. However, don’t visit expecting to experience any “Double” vision. In 1991, after a third of the depot was consumed by fire, the main building — intended as the centerpiece of a new commuter rail complex—was demolished. Alas, it succumbed to the same doomed fate as Neff and Dietrichson’s romance. The movie’s budget totaled $980,000, according to one Wilder biography. Nowadays, the average network TV ad costs about $354,000 to make, according to the Advertising Agency Association of America.