Shot in Century City: Scenes from 'The Green Hornet'

On Sept. 5, 2009, Seth Rogen and Cameron Diaz created quite a stir on Century Park East, where, before a KTLA News truck and a bevy of "journalists" and "paparazzi," Rogen was shot in the left shoulder outside of the Century Plaza Towers in broad daylight.

Don't worry ... the outdoor "news conference," of course, was all part of a movie shoot, and the film in question was The Green Hornet, a big-budget superhero movie released on Jan. 14.

In Michel Gondry's The Green Hornet, Rogen portrays playboy Britt Reid, the scion of a newspaper magnate (Tom Wilkinson) who inherits The Daily Sentinel after his father is murdered and uses the paper to embellish his own legend as the costumed vigilante the Green Hornet. Based on a screenplay co-authored by Rogen, the self-deprecating action-comedy co-starred Jay Chou as the Hornet's sidekick Kato, Diaz as reluctant love interest and research assistant Lenore Case, and Christoph Waltz and James Franco as the bad guys.

In the film, Century City doubles as the home of The Daily Sentinel, and in addition to the news conference scene, a go-for-broke climax leaves the Green Hornet and Kato dangling over Century City's twin towers. While Green Hornet was filmed all over Los Angeles, the inclusion of the Century City locales is particularly sly, a wink at the character's radio and comic book roots, where the Green Hornet served as the vigilante protector of a generic metropolis also called Century City.

All of the recent hype has been regarding another "green" superhero in a domino mask, DC Comics' Green Lantern, and that movie's failure to light up the box office this summer.

The journey to the release of Green Hornet was rocky. The movie's development goes as far back as the early 1990s, when the film was eyed as a vehicle for George Clooney (who instead played the Caped Crusader in one of the sequels to Tim Burton's 1989 blockbuster Batman). Gondry completed the movie this year after several false starts that date all the way back to 1997, when The Green Hornet was supposed to be his first film. (Instead, he made his debut with 2001's Human Nature and shot the cult favorite Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and The Science of Sleep before it.)

Between 2004 and 2006, Chasing Amy director Kevin Smith actively developed the property and worked on a Green Hornet screenplay intended for Jake Gyllenhaal, but Smith backed out of making the movie and wound up scripting the ongoing comic book Green Hornet for Dynamite instead.

The current version of the film came together with Gondry and Rogen. However, Stephen Chow of Kung Fu Hustle fame, was originally supposed to follow in the shoes of legendary martial arts icon Bruce Lee as Kato. Chow dropped out over creative differences in 2009, when Taiwanese actor and pop singer Chou replaced him.