Frank Lloyd Wright’s iconic California architecture, as Hollywood filmed it

Most folks know Frank Lloyd Wright as America’s most influential architect . What’s lesser known is he loved the movies, and Hollywood loved him.

“Wright was a big fan of the movies. He really admired Walt Disney, and even gave his staff advice on designing some of their most famous films in the 1930s and ’40s,” says Mark Anthony Wilson, an art historian and professor living in Berkeley. “And Hitchcock admired Wright, although they never communicated directly.”

At least 20 feature-length movies have used Wright’s buildings as set pieces in California alone. The earliest was 1933’s “Female,” a Warner Bros. production partly shot at a Wright house in the Hollywood Hills, and the latest is “DreamQuil,” a yet-released thriller with John C. Reilly and Elizabeth Banks that uses the Marin Cou