Yes, this building figured prominently in a little modern noir film from the 1980s called Blade Runner, but the structure's sci-fi connections run deeper than the Ridley Scott film, says David Ulin. After all, the building was inspired by "the architect’s reading of a utopian novel from the 1880s that takes places in 2000." The book was published and the building was built before the name science fiction existed, says Ulin, but if the genre had been around, this book would have fit the bill for the genre. (The Bradbury also has some very cool occult associations, too.)

The link to sci-fi here is in not that the recently redone cafeteria was the setting for a fantastic novel or book, but that it was a favorite and even an official meeting place for a group of science fiction writers and enthusiasts as early as the 1930s. Clifton's was the first place where Bradbury showed his stories to people, says Ulin. Many of the club's members, such as Ray Bradbury and Robert Heinlein, went on to become some very big names in science fiction. When Clifton's reopened last year, it did so with Bradbury's favorite booth restored.

Century City's Fox Plaza stars in the original Die Hard movie. It’s not a sci-fi flick, but the action/thriller aired concerns about the present while taking place in the future, which is very sci-fi-esque. In the movie, the Fox Plaza tower is named Nakitomi Plaza. It's used as vehicle for expressing anxieties about the future. Die Hard was made "at a moment when we were worried about all this Japanese money pouring in and how [that money] was changing the skyline.”

Another structure with Blade Runner connections, the Ennis House doesn't try to look like it's from a space-age future–instead, it's the attempt of architect Frank Lloyd Wright to connect to a kind of "mythical Mayan architecture." In that way, and in the literal sense that it sort of started to slip down the hill once it was complete, the structure was always kind of a ruin from the beginning. The air of ruin over the Ennis House gives it (and the Bradbury Building) a kind of “worn futurism," says Hawthorne, making the movie unusual and memorable.

Built in the mid-1970s and designed by architect John Portman, the Westin Bonaventure is "kind of the prototype space-age building," says Ulin. Outside, the glassy structure has pedestrian walkways that connect the hotel to the area that surrounds it without having to descend to the street; inside, it's all curving concrete walkways. And lets not forget those glassy elevators that move up the outside of the building. Ulin notes that sci-fi was quick to recognize the futuristic hotel, especially dystopian ones—the Bonaventure has appeared in Interstellar, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, and 1975's Rollberball, a movie Ulin describes as being about "corporate brutality" that involves regular people playing a violent sport for the amusement of their corporate overlords. Rollerball supposedly takes place in 2017.