On this Good Friday morning, 126th Street just off Normandie is fairly quiet.
Trash bins line the curb, and the occasional dog can be heard barking. The only action for the time being is some savory-smelling barbecue smoke wafting onto the street from a nearby backyard.
But just before 11 o’clock, one house comes to life. The garage door of 1418 W 126th Street opens, and a woman places two chairs—one white folding and one that you might find at a dining room table—on the brick porch. A worn egg crate is set on its side, and a boom box is placed on top of it. A blue Cranbrook cruiser bike is laid on the steps leading up to the porch.
The metamorphosis of this seemingly average home isn’t yet complete until a large blowup print of actors Ice Cube and Chris Tucker—both of them with a look of utter shock upon their faces, their torsos angled in unison to one side—is placed on a white bench. The photograph leans against the same window that is seen in the iconic film image.
While some are in church on this Good Friday, others have made a pilgrimage to this living, breathing shrine of L.A. filmmaking.
Thirty years after the release of the hit cult comedy Friday, Monica from Dallas says the house was her first stop after arriving at LAX.
“We love Ice Cube, we love Smokey [Tucker]. We just watch the movie all the time, so it was a must,” Monica tells L.A. TACO. “It’s definitely a life experience coming here.”
She equates the importance of the Friday house to the world-famous tourist destinations she will be visiting on her first trip to L.A., such as the Hollywood Walk of Fame and the Santa Monica Pier.
After Monica leaves, a couple of cars stop in front of the house. The windows roll down, and a few photos are taken from the street.
Then a white SUV parks nearby. Derrick, Jazz, and Rozayy from Galveston walk up to the house, Derrick with a DSLR camera in hand. Jazz and Rozayy are playing it cool, but it’s clear they’re anticipating the chance to experience movie immortality by sitting on the same porch where Tucker and Ice Cube sat.
Jazz says of standing at the location, “It’s like a childhood memory.”
“It feels kind of surreal,” adds Rozayy. “I’m here where they was trippin’ in the street and stuff. I’m honored to be here right now. It’s a legendary movie. Everybody loves Friday. Who don’t? And we’re here on a Friday.”
Derrick then interjects, “I think I better stay off Stanley’s grass,” referencing the house next door that was home to the movie’s uptight neighbor (Ronn Riser) who obsesses over his perfectly manicured lawn.
Friday’s production designer, Bruce Bellamy, met up with L.A. TACO on the block the same morning. He had no idea that the location used by the production thirty years ago had become a tourist destination.
“They should put a mechanical arm up and a guard and charge admission to the block,” Bellamy quips. “It just shows how great the original film was. When I read the script, I thought it was a really good script. I didn’t realize it would be that big. It’s huge.”
Friday is the story of a single day on this particular block in West Athens. Craig’s (Ice Cube) dad is hounding him about fulfilling his responsibilities around the house. Having just been fired from his job - on his day off - he’s also been tasked by his dad to look for a new J-O-B. On top of that, Craig’s annoyed that there’s no milk in the refrigerator; he’s been accused of cheating on his girlfriend; he’s fed up with the neighborhood kid who’s been knocking over his trash cans; he’s frustrated that his sister won’t hook him up with her friend.
With the perceived notion that he’s got nowhere to go and nothing to do, Craig spends most of Friday on the front porch of his family’s South L.A. home with Smokey (Tucker), his fast-talking, weed-dependent friend. Smokey unwittingly involves Craig in a potentially fatal predicament with the drug dealer for whom Smokey works.
The film is a sort of hood Rear Window (1954) in that the main character, who is facing his own setbacks, has the luxury of surveying his neighborhood from a fixed perch until trouble comes looking for him.
Friday was released on April 26, 1995, and grossed over $27 million domestically on an estimated budget of $3.5 million. It spawned two sequels, and it was recently announced that a deal’s been struck for the long-anticipated fourth and final film in the series, Last Friday, to come to fruition.
But it has been, and will forever be the original film that leaves an indelible mark on audiences, because at the heart of the inimitable comedy is a story about growing up and accepting responsibility, a theme that is explored head-on in an unexpected tonal shift in the film’s climax.
Friday is also a filmic assemblage of a handful of brilliant actors and comedians who’ve passed on including the incomparable John Witherspoon and Bernie Mac, who played Craig’s dad Willie Jones and Pastor Clever, respectively; the hysterical Anthony ‘AJ’ Johnson, who played Ezal, the hyper-animated neighborhood bum; and the hulking Tommy ‘Tiny’ Lister, who played Deebo, the formidable street bully.
Bellamy, who had not been back to the location since they made the movie, says he thought about Lister when pulling onto the block.
“There’s hardly anyone in the film industry that didn’t work with him at some point because he was everywhere. He was so ubiquitous,” says Bellamy. “And although he generally played a villain, he was a very nice man. He was a sweetheart of a guy.”
Prior to working on Friday, Bellamy art directed another seminal L.A. feature film debut: Boyz n the Hood (1991). John Singleton’s hard-hitting look at life on a South L.A. block was a work of uncompromising personal vision much like Friday was for first-time feature director F. Gary Gray.
“For both of those directors it was their first big thing, something they had been basically sailing towards their entire lives,” says Bellamy.
Gray was a prolific music video director at the time, having made among others Ice Cube’s “It Was a Good Day” (1993), Cypress Hill’s “I Ain’t Goin’ Out Like That” (1993), Mary J. Blige’s “You Don’t Have To Worry,” and Coolio’s “Fantastic Voyage” (1994). Bellamy again worked with Gray on the video for Dr. Dre’s “Keep Their Heads Ringin’” (1995), a song featured on the Friday soundtrack.
After Friday, Gray continued his work in music videos while simultaneously rising on a trajectory through Hollywood by way of films including Set It Off (1996), The Negotiator (1998), The Italian Job (2003), Straight Outta Compton (2015) and The Fate of the Furious (2017).
Gray, who could not be reached for comment, grew up off of W 126th Street and Normandie, and Bellamy says it was the director who pointed him towards the neighborhood. He recalls scouting six different streets in one day, but the production ultimately ended up on the same block where the director was raised.
‘I’m pretty sure that F. Gary Gray just wanted to, quote-unquote, come home,” says Bellamy. “Finding this location was a combination of nostalgia and luck.”
The personal element was clear.
Logistically, 126th Street between Normandie and Halldale worked well because, Bellamy says, “It’s near a major street that’s not a big major street; there’s not a lot of tree cover, so it’s easier to shoot; the neighbors were cooperative for the most part; and the houses we needed were in close proximity to each other.”
Gray and Friday, star and co-screenwriter Ice Cube, grew up just a few minutes drive from one another. Bellamy, however, was raised in Detroit and came to L.A. in 1981, but he equally understood some of the characters and their idiosyncrasies.
“In this story and my real life, in an enclosed environment, there’s one annoying person that goes around begging or borrowing or just stealing. That happens a lot. And maybe there’s the guy next door who wants to keep his lawn really nice as opposed to everybody else,” says Bellamy. “There’s all these little ecosystems.”
Bellamy could also relate to the experience of having his bike stolen by someone in the neighborhood.
Except for a shot of Craig and Smokey driving along Normandie in Smokey’s 1976 Ford Pinto, and a corner store scene filmed at 135th Street and Budlong Avenue, the film takes place entirely on W 126th Street.
From the opening crane shot of the block, the film is a visual feast with a saturated color palette that evokes the personalities and eccentricities that populate the neighborhood.
“I think we wanted kind of a comic book going on, because it’s a comedy,” says Bellamy.
The film’s color design is palpable.
Miss Parker’s (Kathleen Bradley) and Stanley’s muted-blue house exteriors complement the amber hues covering the sun-drenched sidewalks. Big Worm’s (Faizon Love) pastel-striped ice cream truck looks like a delectable dessert on wheels.
However, nowhere else on the block does color work in the same visual or practical terms as Craig’s house, which was painted terracotta with a teal trim specifically for the movie.
“Back then it was on film, and sometimes if you have too much white, it makes it difficult to light Black skin,” says Bellamy. “So, if you have a darker color that can absorb some of [the light], not only is it more fun, but it also helps the DP.”
Aesthetically, Craig’s house stands out from every other house on the block.
Various factors led to choosing the actual hero house.
“I think it was a combination of availability, practicality and who’s willing to bend a little bit, because we did have to put lights - especially for the night scenes - inside these houses,” says Bellamy. “Also, permission of the other houses in proximity, because although we paid all the houses, not everybody wants you in their house, or in front of their house either.”
Bellamy remembers the neighbors being totally supportive of the project and having a good time while it was happening.
“I think it was a big party. A film production brings a certain amount of life and heartbeats to an area,” says Bellamy. “I don’t know how many people on this block, or in this neighborhood actually knew each other, knew each other’s names, but it did bring people out during the production, shaking hands and talking.”
One lifelong resident of the neighborhood remembers that being the case as well.
Dagz sits behind a few folding tables of “Friday House” merchandise set up in the driveway of Craig’s house. He doesn’t actually live in the house; he lives a block over. Dagz comes off as the unofficial neighborhood ambassador - the person who knows everything that’s happening on the block.
“It was welcoming,” Dagz recalls of the production. “Because F. Gary Gray grew up over here, he knew all the neighbors. It was a big thing. It was like a celebration. It was like a block party for about two-and-a-half weeks. People wasn’t in their trailers. Everybody was all hanging out, joking, bagging on each other the whole time. Drinking 8 Balls, smoking chronic, having a ball!”
The end credits of the film include a thank you to the residents of 126th Street between Normandie and Halldale. Bellamy is sure that the nod was Gray’s doing.
Dagz adds, “At the time, what was going on, it was a lot of gang activity, crack epidemic. It was a lot going on, on this block right here. So, by doing the filming, all that kind of had to like shut down. Well, it didn’t really shut down, but there was so much going on that it was like a ceasefire type of situation.”
Dagz points out the house across the street from Craig’s house, 1419 W 126th Street, and says that the director was raised there. The house was later used in the film for a flashback scene that sees Deebo knockout Craig’s former co-worker, Red (Friday co-writer DJ Pooh), over a “borrowed” beach cruiser.
Today, a different family lives in the Friday house.
Dagz says there wasn’t a plan to set up the location as the film attraction you see today. It happened because people kept coming.
“The shit went viral - the Internet, Tik Tok - about three years ago. People started pulling up to the house thinking it was a tourist house. We’re eating dinner, people are looking through the kitchen window,” Dagz says.
But unlike the Cimarron Street house interiors that appear in Boyz n the Hood, Bellamy tells L.A. TACO that all of the house interiors for Friday were built at the historic 1913 Occidental Studios in Westlake, which was used by early Hollywood luminaries including Mary Pickford and Cecil B. DeMille.
Ultimately, they couldn’t stop people from coming, says Dagz, so it was decided to start charging for photos on the porch. Today, a porch photo will set you back $20, but for that $20 it doesn’t seem to matter how many people are in the photo or how many photos you take, within reason. You can pose as yourself or grab a head cutout of any number of Friday characters to hold in front of your face.
When it started, just a few souvenir t-shirts were made available for sale. Today you can select from a variety of shirts, hats and ski masks with “The Friday House” logo either printed or embroidered on them.
The location has its own Instagram account, and it’s pinpointed on Google Maps as “The Friday House”.
“As soon as people hit LAX, they type in the closest place that’s a tourist attraction. The house pops up, so it just took on a nature of its own,” says Dagz. “People come from all around the world to see this house. This is like a unique house globally. Some people come internationally, Europe, Australia. They know the movie word-for-word. It trips me out.”
The neighborhood has changed thirty years on, and it seems as though a large part of that is due to the worldwide popularity of the movie. Considering Craig’s opening voice-over dialogue—“For most people, Friday is just a day before the weekend. But after this Friday, the neighborhood would never be the same.” - it seems like life on the block has imitated art.
“To come full circle and have the community and the street evolve to what it is today is a beautiful thing,” says Dagz. “It’s not gang-infested. People ain’t selling dope. It ain’t been no drive-bys. Everything’s been cool and cordial.”
He adds, “The house is like the only spot where a lot of people come without their ‘mask’, without their ego and all that shit. People come with good energy, so it reciprocates.”
On this Good Friday, just before he welcomes a couple of fans from Detroit, Dagz tells L.A. TACO, “It’s been a blessing.”
Follow Jared on Instagram at @jaredcowan.
