Los Angeles International Airport - in Popular Culture

In Popular Culture

Because LAX is the largest regional airport for Hollywood and the rest of the entertainment industry, it has been featured (as itself or as a stand-in airport) in a number of films, television programs, video games and music including:

• In the game Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters Melee LAX is a playable stage. It is also destroyable either deliberately for points or incidentally as monsters fight each other.
• In the opening credit sequence to 1967's The Graduate, Dustin Hoffman's character is filmed passing wearily through an LAX concourse connection tunnel to "The Sound of Silence" by Simon & Garfunkel. In the 1997 film Jackie Brown, Pam Grier walks past the same spot to soaring soul music by Bobby Womack.
• "L.A. International Airport", a song written by Leanne Scott and first recorded by David Frizzell in 1970, was covered in 1971 by Susan Raye and this version reached #9 on the Billboard Country Singles chart (and #54 on the Hot 100 singles chart). The song was re-recorded with updated lyrics in 2003 by Shirley Myers for the 75th anniversary of LAX.
• The 1980 Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker comedy Airplane! begins at LAX. Additionally, a twist on the iconic public announcement regarding the "white zone" is parodied in the film's opening scene.
• The 1985 film To Live and Die in L.A. featured a stunt in a terminal at LAX of Petersen running along the top of the dividers between the terminal's moving sidewalk.
• The 1997 film Liar Liar starring Jim Carrey features a climatic scene where Fletcher Reede (Carrey) struggles to keep his son. He hurries to LAX, but his son's plane has already left the terminal. Desperate, he hijacks a mobile stairway and pursues the plane onto the runway.
• The 1997 Michael Crichton novel Airframe starts with a fictional airline from Hong Kong to Denver making an emergency landing at LAX.
• The 2004 comedy Soul Plane features the NWA's first flight from Los Angeles International Airport.
• The 2005 television series LAX starring Heather Locklear was a fictionalized drama of several operation managers working at LAX. Though most of the series was filmed at the nearby Ontario International Airport, LAX was used in several establishing shots.
• The 2005 PlayStation 2 video game, L.A. Rush by Midway Games, features LAX.
• Susan Raye, who has been retired from the music industry since 1986, made a rare public appearance to sing her classic hit at a concert at the celebration and to be on hand when a proclamation was issued to make the song the official song of LAX.
• Los Angeles Rapper Game had a 2008 album titled LAX.
• In the final season premiere of Lost, notably titled LA X, the alternate timeline sequences are mostly set in LAX, which was the intended destination of Oceanic Airlines Flight 815.
• In the second Splinter Cell game, Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow, the last mission takes place in LAX where Sam Fisher infiltrates LAX via the parking garage, takes out terrorists disguised as LAX employees and rogue CIA agent Norman Soth, and disarms the ND133.
• The 2009 Miley Cyrus single Party in the U.S.A. begins with the lyrics "Hopped off the plane at LAX." The location is used in the song to articulate the differences between California and the singer's home in Tennessee.
• On September 21, 2012, Space Shuttle Endeavour landed at LAX after its ferry flight from Kennedy Space Center. The shuttle was held in a hangar provided by United Airlines until it began its journey to the California Science Center on October 11, 2012.